Category Archives: Molecular Medicine

This story appeared in the July/August 2020 issue as "A Dog's Life."Subscribe to Discovermagazine for more stories like this.

Matt Kaeberleins search for the secret to a long life began, in part, with 560 unique strains of bakers yeast.

He noticed that some of the strains with the greatest longevity tended to divide in slow motion. And he found that this slowdown, which takes place in the molecular mechanisms controlling cell division, could be tinkered with artificially by feeding the yeast a drug called rapamycin.

As he began publishing his results in 2006, other researchers were finding that the drug most commonly used to prevent rejection of organ transplants in humans had a similar anti-aging effect in worms and flies. Several years later, a landmark paper in Nature showed that rapamycin could increase the lifespan of middle-aged mice by 9 to 14 percent.

Veterinarian Kate Creevy (with Poet and Bandana) is one of the co-leaders of the Dog Aging Project. To participate, dogs visit the clinic regularly for checkups. (Credit: Texas A&M University College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences)

By then a professor of pathology at the University of Washington medical school,Kaeberlein found these results both tantalizing and frustrating. There would appear to be molecular processes that are shared in the aging process cross lots of different organisms, he says. That means, in theory, a chemical like rapamycin should therefore also prolong the lives of people. But itd be hard to confirm: Humans live such a long time that it would take at least a generation to find out. What he required was a test subject that approximated humans biologically, but with a much shorter lifespan.

An intriguing solution came up in 2011 in a conversation with biologist Daniel Promislow, who would soon become a new colleague and, like Kaeberlein, was a dog owner. Considering that canines have an average life expectancy of about a decade, everyday exposure to a human living environment and natural susceptibility to many of the same frailties as humans from heart disease to cancer Promislow, who was already working toward starting aging studies in dogs, commented that pooches might just be a pathologists best friend. And pathologists could return the favor by helping to extend pets lifespans, a treat for anyonewho has a dog.

Veterinarian Kate Creevy and Rudy during a regular checkup. (Credit: Amber J. Keyser)

Kaeberlein decided to join in. Launching the Dog Aging Project late last year, with $23 million in funding from the National Institute on Aging, he, Promislow and their colleagues got 80,000 responses to their call for canine volunteers.

By then, their ambitions had expanded considerably. For most of his career, Promislow had wondered why larger dogs live shorter lives. It got me interested in thinking about dogs as a model for aging, he says. Looking at the relationship between dog size and lifespan might be a way to find genes associated with diseases of aging and longevity.

To address this question, Promislow plans to observe dogs over their lifetimes. For the next decade, hell collect genetic profiles, owner surveys and data from veterinary checkups.

According to Kate Creevy, a Texas A&M University veterinarian who co-leads the Dog Aging Project with Promislow and Kaeberlein, one of the biggest challenges will be to establish criteria to measure canine aging objectively, because nobody until now has set out to practice canine gerontology. We need something more specific than for me to walk into an exam room and say, Gosh, your dog looks really good, says Creevy.

Creevy and her colleagues are developing metrics that will encompass both physical and mental health, positioning them to investigate the genetics and environments of fast and slow agers, and to see whether similar systemic breakdowns make different breeds of dog susceptible to different diseases.

Daniel Promislow with Frisbee. (Credit: Tammi Kaeberlein)

Kaeberleins contribution to the Dog Aging Project directly complements the longitudinal study headed by Promislow and Creevy. His working hypothesis is that rapamycin targets pathways that contribute to a variety of aging-related diseases, he explains. If rapamycin delays the onset of cancer in golden retrievers and heart disease in Doberman pinschers, he says hell have evidence that there is a molecular biology of aging common to all canines and possibly other mammals.

He has reason to be optimistic. He recently conducted a 10-week study on a couple of dozen middle-aged dogs, testing for side effects of rapamycin. In that brief period, he saw evidence of more youthful heart activity and more affectionate behavior, which might be interpretable as improved cognition.

In an upcoming study, Kaeberlein will give rapamycin or a placebo to 500 middle-aged dogs for three years. Given their maturity, a couple of hundred will probably die in that period. By comparing the lifespan of dogs on the drug with those chowing on placebos, Kaeberlein will be able to determine whether his treatment really works.

He acknowledges the personal disappointments ahead for some participants, but believes the distress will be outweighed by the potential of prolonged life for dogs and humans alike. To a dog person like Kaeberlein, these extra years are a lot more enticing than spending some additional quality time with some long-lived bakers yeast.

The rest is here:
The Drug That Could One Day Help People and Dogs Live Longer - Discover Magazine

Computational analysis of large datasets is becoming increasingly important in many areas of scientific research. This is particularly true in molecular biology, where we study the molecular underpinnings of life. Here, research is broadly classified as wet-lab or dry-lab depending on its nature.

A wet-lab is a traditional experimental laboratory in which scientific research is carried out using chemicals and biological samples (including patient material). These substances or materials require special handling by trained professionals, using sensitive equipment. Such experiments allow us to study some phenomenon, to try and understand or explain what we observe.

A dry-lab is a laboratory where real-world phenomena are studied and analysed using computational, statistical and mathematical techniques. Scientists here build computer models to simulate the occurrence under investigation. The data used to construct these models is usually sourced from wet-lab experiments.

Researchers in wet and dry-labs work in unison to further scientific discovery. For example, computational scientists in a dry-lab identify a handful of promising drugs from a database of millions of molecules. These selected molecules are then physically tested in a wet-lab and the computational results are confirmed or refuted. Molecules which are confirmed with a wet-lab experiment are used to refine further computational searches. More targeted lists of potential drugs for experimental verification are generated in an iterative, cyclic process.

Despite the recent drive to push experiments from in vivo (in living organisms), to in vitro (in a test tube), to in silico (in a silicon chip or computer) to reduce time and cost, it is not possible to conduct proper scientific research without integrating wet and dry approaches.

Researchers in wet-labs and dry-labs have different backgrounds and training. Dry-lab scientists generally have a background in mathematics and computer programming. Wet-lab researchers typically have backgrounds in more traditional sciences and laboratory techniques.

Nowadays, the interdisciplinary nature of modern research requires a researcher to have skills in both areas. Students are particularly encouraged to train in both wet- and dry-lab techniques to gain a feeling and understanding of what interests them most.

Jean Paul Ebejer is a computational scientist who specialises in bioinformatics and computer-aided drug design. Byron Baron is a wet-lab scientist who specialises in protein science. They are both lecturers in dry and wet-lab techniques at the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Biobanking at the University of Malta.

Tiny insects called aphids are essentially born pregnant, says Ed Spevak, curator of invertebrates at the St Louis Zoo. Aphids reproduce asexually, producing miniature replicas of themselves, Spevak adds. When that happens, a newly-hatched female has eggs already growing inside of her. Aphids will also use sexual reproduction when their environment say, the weather becomes unpredictable. This ensures offspring are more genetically diverse, and thus healthier and more resilient.

A team of scientists studying the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic, found that it was especially well-suited to jump from animals to humans by shapeshifting as it gained the ability to infect human cells. Conducting a genetic analysis, researchers from Duke University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of Texas at El Paso and New York University confirmed that the closest relative of the virus was a coronavirus that infects bats. But that viruss ability to infect humans was gained through exchanging a critical gene fragment from a coronavirus that infects a scaly mammal called a pangolin, which made it possible for the virus to infect humans.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200529161221.htm

For more soundbites, listen to Radio Mocha every Saturday at 7.30pm on Radju Malta and the following Monday at 9pm on Radju Malta 2 https://www.fb.com/RadioMochaMalta/

According to Guinness, Guinness is not black but dark red.

The scientific name for the Plains bison is Bison bison bison.

The WHO estimates that one million healthy life years are lost in Western Europe every year due to noise pollution.

Europes highest railway station is underground (it is found in the Swiss Alps).

Nihonium, number 113 in the periodic table, was created in the lab by firing atoms into each other. The team were successful just three times in over four trillion attempts.

For more trivia, visit http://www.um.edu.mt/think

Independent journalism costs money. Support Times of Malta for the price of a coffee.

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Dry- and wet-lab research: two sides of the same coin - Times of Malta

NEW YORK- While some potential vaccines have emerged in the global race to find a way to stop the spread of COVID-19, many scientists and researchers believe antibody-based therapies hold great promise for treating people already infected with the disease.

How do antibody therapies work?

These therapies use antibodies generated by infected humans or animals to fight off the disease inpatients.

COVID-19:Health dept awaiting 'promising'antibodytests

They date back to the late 19th centurywhen researchers used a serum derived from theblood of infected animals to treat diphtheria.

For COVID-19 treatment, researchers are studying the use of convalescent plasma and othertreatments made with blood from recently recovered patients.

More recently, scientists have developed treatments called monoclonal antibodies -- antibodies thatcan be isolated and manufactured in large quantities to treat diseases like Ebola or cancer.

Companies, like Eli Lilly and Co and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in the United States, are trying touse this approach to develop their treatments.

Unlike convalescent plasma, manufacturers do not need a steady supply of antibody-rich blood toproduce monoclonal antibodies, so this approach could be easier to scale up.

How are they different from vaccines?

In general, the goal of a vaccine is to generate an immune response that can prevent someone fromgetting ill with a disease, whereas antibody-derived products are generally designed to treat disease.And while some drugmakers have suggested antibody treatments can be used prophylactically -

Regeneron's Chief Scientific Officer George Yancopoulos has said their treatment could be a bridgeto a vaccine - it could be expensive.

COVID-19:Survivors donate blood for testing

"You might go into nursing homes or the military and use it because antibodies have a pretty long half-life," said Dr. Betty Diamond, Director of Molecular Medicine at the Feinstein Institutes for MedicalResearch.

"You might decide that you are going to use this as a prevention in this very high risk group, but youwouldn't do that for the whole country."

The amount of protein in antibody drugs makes the treatment more expensive than vaccines ingeneral, Feng Hui, chief operating officer at Shanghai Junshi Biosciences, said.

Antibody drugs contain hundreds, or even over a thousand times more protein than found in a vaccineshot.

Who is developing antibody therapies for COVID-19?

Eli Lilly is collaborating with Junshi and Canadian biotech firm AbCellera Biologics to develop differentantibody treatments, both of which have started early-stage testing in humans.

Regeneron plans to start clinical studies later this month to test its antibody cocktail treatment, whichwas derived from antibodies from genetically-modified mice.

It aims to have hundreds of thousands of preventative doses available "by the end of the summer or the fall."

The CoVIg-19 Plasma Alliance, which includes Japan's Takeda Pharmaceuticals and CSL Behring, isworking on hyperimmune globulin therapy derived from convalescent plasma, which could offer astandardized dose of antibodies and doesn't need to be limited to patients with matching blood types.

The Antibody Therapy Against Coronavirus (ATAC) project, funded by the European Commission andled by Sweden's Karolinska research institute, is looking at a similar approach as well as monoclonalantibodies.

Under the project, monoclonal antibodies extracted from convalescent plasma are now being tested on human volunteers in Germany and on animals in Switzerland.

Britain's GlaxoSmithKline is working with Vir Biotechnology Inc to develop potential antibody treatments which select the best antibodies out of the plasma.

AbbVie has also announced a collaboration to develop antibody therapies.

Singapore's state research body A*Star is working with Japan's Chugai Pharmabody Research on anantibody for clinical use.

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EXPLAINER: What are antibody therapies? - eNCA

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COVID-19 has jolted the global discourse on public health into a rapid redo. To be or not to be is no longer a question or topic of debate for digital health. Embracing digital technology and data science for global health is the only way to reverse the pandemic in the short-term, and to make health systems combat-ready for the future ones.

Whether at the national or the global level, the game plan of each country will necessarily include technology-enabled defence and offence strategies to strengthen health systems. The paradigm of preparedness against future health threats will transform digital health; simultaneously, it shall also change the professional profile, skillset and toolbox of frontline health soldiers.

As governments across the world invest in expanding digital and mobile connectivity for integrating technology with health systems, an equally pressing question needs concurrent intervention. Is todays healthcare workforce prepared to deliver a digital future? The answer is a straight no on both dimensions of service preparedness, i.e., capacity and capability.

On global capacity, the total demand for health workers has always outpaced supply, with shortages varying between manageable to stark levels based on a countrys socio-economic status. With COVID-19 proving to be a brutal blow to the best-prepared health systems, health workforce capacity building has become a priority world over. An estimate by the World Health Organisation projects the global aggregate demand for 80.2 million health workers across 165 countries by 2030, whereas the current number is around 48 million.

Trained healthcare personnel, however, cannot be increased in a matter of months. It is a long-drawn process, which must begin soon enough to cover the shortage of millions of health workers. With economies slipping in a downward spiral, there is an added impetus to act quickly. It is well-established that investing in the health sector accelerates employment generation, especially for women and youth. There lies an opportunity to build the capability set of new entrants in health services based on future needs of health eco-systems. In years to come, the delivery and consumption of health will be more technology-driven than ever before. The profile of health workforce of each country must be aligned with the digital health priorities it sets for itself. While the exact construct will differ by country, the broad direction will be a combination of the principles outlined below.

For todays health workers, digitalisation of health systems and implementation of the connected care blueprint in a localised manner will shape new ways of doing their jobs. It will be in a hybrid format, comprising physical and digital care of patients in varied proportions to maximise health outcomes.

Technology integration within clinical services and products will also create new types of jobs to invent and handle public goods or medical products of future (new-age therapeutics, diagnostics and preventive health aides) using a combination of biology and computer science. They will fall at the intersection of medicine, genomics and engineering, using Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine learning (ML), robotics, predictive analytics, and more.

It calls for urgent and parallel action by governments to kick-off upskilling and mindset rewiring of professionals in the medical and biopharma domains to adopt digital tools in their practice. The recent use case of telemedicine to deliver virtual care (force-started by COVID-19) is a glimpse into the future of model patient and physician behaviour on technology adoption. Yet, it is not fully reflective of the scale at which evolving trends in healthtech will define the speed and nature of skillset transformation for health workers in primary and tertiary care settings.

To drive the upskilling exercise, it is also critical to gauge the aptitude and willingness of todays health workers to use technology in clinical decision-making.

Pre-covid times have seen stinging debates within the medical community and health policymakers on whether technology will strip healthcare off its essential nature of being high-touch for effective patient care. Questions have been raised if AI tools will depersonalise medicine; if standard of care will dilute, or patient-centricity will be lost if AI/ML algorithms were to read radiology scans and vital signs to present clinical diagnosis or to predict disease prognosis. Legitimate doubts and ethical concerns on patients rights and data privacy have been brought forward. Most importantly, fair scepticism has been raised on safety and trustworthiness of algorithms due to inherent socio-ethnic biases and lack of situational context.

As a result, the digital health discourse has so far seen three types of participants: the Evangelists, who strongly believe that healthtech will catapult countries to meet sustainable development goals; the Cynics, who have raised many of the above questions; and the Opposers, who view technology as a threat to their careers or as an unwanted intrusion in the age-old, sacred practice of medicine.

Post covid, the narrative has stepped up considerably to gain the attention of the healthcare community around the world. The goings-on have led many Cynics and Opposers to shift their position into the solution-seeking quadrant, to coalesce into a new category of Constructive Critics. Together, the Evangelists and the Constructive Critics will form a powerful community to extract the most-balanced and effective benefits of digital and AI/ML technology in healthcare delivery, without diluting patient-centricity, data security and privacy rights. They will also be the change catalysts, who will lay down the foundation and constructs of the new system to work as inter-disciplinary teams, and to train and arm the workforce of today with digital skills.

As a long-term goal, cultivating aptitude and imparting new skills to create a digital-savvy health workforce of the future calls for considerable reform in the medical education system. This will need a redesign of curricula, training methods and skill evaluation techniques. In addition, student selection criteria and aptitude tests for clinical careers will have to be revamped.

Institutional frameworks of medical and nursing schools will have to create flexible claw-ins with technical education institutes to co-develop matrixed pedagogy programmes. For example, a medical science, nursing, or paramedical student would necessarily have to take credit courses in computer science, bio-engineering, mathematics or allied disciplines. Similarly, it will be essential for engineering and mathematics students to partake selective medical courses, to gain insights and orientation on experiences and challenges of patients and health workers in clinical settings to conceive future digital products for the healthcare and life sciences sectors. Selection and training for primary health workers will also incorporate digital literacy as an essential requirement.

Few countries such as the UK and Australia had begun deliberation on their workforce strategy to enable digital health last year. For example, in 2019, the National Health Service, UK identified genomics, telemedicine and AI-based technologies as thrust areas to plan training and education of their future workforce.

To sum-up, the future will have inter-professional teams working in collaboration to co-create and monitor learning systems behind clinical decision making digital tools. Frontrunners for these roles will be the ones with a combination skillset in technology and clinical sciences or techlinical. All health workers will be digital-savvy to deploy these tools in care settings to improve patient outcomes. The combined effect of both will increase efficiency and effectiveness of delivery at a systemic level. As predicted by digital health evangelist, Dr.Eric Topol (Professor of Molecular Medicine, Scripps Research Translational Institute), use of AI and technology-aides in medicine will create time and space to deliver real healing to the patients.

See more here:
Health Workforce of the Digital Future: Techlinical Cross-products - Observer Research Foundation

Artistic illustration of the light compressed below the silver nanocubes randomly placed over the graphene-based heterostructure. Credit: Matteo Ceccanti

Miniaturization has enabled so many unfathomable dreams. Shrinking down electronic circuits has allowed us to access technology like smartphones, health watches, medical probes, nano-satellites, unthinkable a couple decades ago. Just imagine that in the course of 60 years, the transistor has gone from being the size of your hand palm to 14 nanometers in dimension, 1000 times smaller than the diameter of a hair.

Miniaturization has pushed technology to a new era of optical circuitry. But, in parallel, it has also triggered new challenges and obstacles to overcome, for example, on how to deal with controlling and guiding light at the nanometer scale. New techniques have been on the rise searching for ways to confine light into extremely tiny spaces, millions of times smaller than current ones. Researchers had earlier on found that metals can compress light below the wavelength-scale (diffraction limit).

In that aspect, Graphene a material composed from a single layer of carbon atoms, with exceptional optical and electrical properties, is capable of guiding light in the form of plasmons, which are oscillations of electrons that are strongly interacting with light. These graphene plasmons have a natural ability to confine light to very small spaces. However, until now it was only possible to confine these plasmons in one direction, while the actual ability of light to interact with small particles, like atoms and molecules, resides in the volume that it can be compressed into. This type of confinement, in all three dimensions, is commonly regarded as an optical cavity.

In a recent study published in Science, ICFO researchers Itai Epstein, David Alcaraz, Varum-Varma Pusapati, Avinash Kumar, Tymofiy Khodkow, led by ICREA Prof. at ICFO Frank Koppens, in collaboration with researchers from MIT, Duke University, Universit Paris-Saclay, and Universidad do Minho, have succeeded to build a new type of cavity for graphene plasmons, by integrating metallic cubes of nanometer sizes over a graphene sheet. Their approach enabled to realize the smallest optical cavity ever built for infrared light, which is based on these plasmons.

In their experiment, they used silver nanocubes of 50 nanometers in size, which were sprinkled randomly on top of the graphene sheet, with no specific pattern or orientation. This allowed each nanocube, together with graphene, to act as a single cavity. Then they sent infrared light through the device and observed how the plasmons propagated into the space between the metal nanocube and the graphene, being compressed only to that very small volume.

As Itai Epstein, first author of the study, comments, the main obstacle that we encountered in this experiment resided in the fact that the wavelength of light in the infrared range is very large and the cubes are very small, about 200 times smaller, so it is extremely difficult to make them interact with each other.

In order to overcome this, they used a special phenomenon when the graphene plasmons interacted with the nanocubes, they were able to generate a special resonance, called a magnetic resonance. As Epstein clarifies, A unique property of the magnetic resonance is that it can act as a type of antenna that bridges the difference between the small dimensions of the nanocube and the large scale of the light. Thus, the generated resonance maintained the plasmons moving between the cube and graphene in a very small volume, which is ten billion times smaller than the volume of regular infrared light, something never achieved before in optical confinement. Even more so, they were able to see that the single graphene-cube cavity, when interacting with the light, acted as a new type of nano-antenna that is able to scatter the infrared light very efficiently.

The results of the study are extremely promising for the field of molecular and biological sensing, important for medicine, biotechnology, food inspection or even security, since this approach is capable of intensifying the optical field considerably and thus detect molecular materials, which usually respond to infrared light.

As Prof. Koppens states such achievement is of great importance because it allows us to tune the volume of the plasmon mode to drive their interaction with small particles, like molecules or atoms, and be able to detect and study them. We know that the infrared and Terahertz ranges of the optical spectrum provide valuable information about vibrational resonances of molecules, opening the possibility to interact and detect molecular materials as well as use this as a promising sensing technology.

Reference: Far-field Excitation of Single Graphene Plasmon Cavities with Ultra-compressed Mode-volumes by Itai Epstein, David Alcaraz, Zhiqin Huang, Varun-Varma Pusapati, Jean-Paul Hugonin, Avinash Kumar, Xander M. Deputy, Tymofiy Khodkov, Tatiana G. Rappoport, Jin-Yong Hong, Nuno M. R. Peres, Jing Kong, David R. Smith and Frank H. L. Koppens, 12 June 2020, Science.DOI: 10.1126/science.abb1570

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Unfathomable Miniaturization: Smallest Cavity for Light Realized by Graphene Plasmons - SciTechDaily

ReutersJun 11, 2020 11:34:10 IST

While some potential vaccines have emerged in the global race to find a way to stop the spread of COVID-19, many scientists and researchers believe antibody-based therapies hold great promise for treating people already infected with the disease.

These therapies use antibodies generated by infected humans or animals to fight off the disease in patients. They date back to the late 19th century when researchers used a serum derived from the blood of infected animals to treat diphtheria.

Researchers are studying the use of convalescent plasma and other treatments made with blood from recently recovered patients in order to help treat patients.

For COVID-19 treatment, researchers are studying the use of convalescent plasma and other treatments made with blood from recently recovered patients.

More recently, scientists have developed treatments called monoclonal antibodies antibodies that can be isolated and manufactured in large quantities to treat diseases like Ebola or cancer. Companies, like Eli Lilly and Co (LLY.N) and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals (REGN.O) in the United States, are trying to use this approach to develop their treatments.

Unlike convalescent plasma, manufacturers do not need a steady supply of antibody-rich blood to produce monoclonal antibodies, so this approach could be easier to scale up.

In general, the goal of a vaccine is to generate an immune response that can prevent someone from getting ill with a disease, whereas antibody-derived products are generally designed to treat disease.

And while some drugmakers have suggested antibody treatments can be used prophylactically - Regenerons Chief Scientific Officer George Yancopoulos has said their treatment could be a bridge to a vaccine - it could be expensive.

You might go into nursing homes or the military and use it because antibodies have a pretty long half-life, said Dr Betty Diamond, Director of Molecular Medicine at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research.

You might decide that you are going to use this as prevention in this very high-risk group, but you wouldnt do that for the whole country.

The amount of protein in antibody drugs makes the treatment more expensive than vaccines in general, Feng Hui, chief operating officer at Shanghai Junshi Biosciences (1877.HK), said.

Designing antibody drugs to treat or protect high-risk people, including those with weak immune systems, could require hundreds, or even over a thousand times more protein than found in a vaccine shot, according to Junshi.

Eli Lilly is collaborating with Junshi and Canadian biotech firm AbCellera Biologics to develop different antibody treatments, both of which have started early-stage testing in humans.

Regeneron plans to start clinical studies later this month to test its antibody cocktail treatment, which was derived from antibodies from genetically-modified mice. It aims to have hundreds of thousands of preventative doses available by the end of the summer or the fall.

The CoVIg-19 Plasma Alliance, which includes Japans Takeda Pharmaceuticals and CSL Behring, is working on hyperimmune globulin therapy derived from convalescent plasma, which could offer a standardized dose of antibodies and doesnt need to be limited to patients with matching blood types.

The Antibody Therapy Against Coronavirus (ATAC) project, funded by the European Commission and led by Swedens Karolinska research institute, is looking at a similar approach as well as monoclonal antibodies. Under the project, monoclonal antibodies extracted from convalescent plasma are now being tested on human volunteers in Germany and on animals in Switzerland.

Britains GlaxoSmithKline is working with Vir Biotechnology Inc (VIR.O) to develop potential antibody treatments which select the best antibodies out of the plasma.

AbbVie has also announced a collaboration to develop antibody therapies.

Singapores state research body A*Star is working with Japans Chugai Pharmabody Research on an antibody for clinical use.

Find latest and upcoming tech gadgets online on Tech2 Gadgets. Get technology news, gadgets reviews & ratings. Popular gadgets including laptop, tablet and mobile specifications, features, prices, comparison.

Read more here:
Coronavirus Outbreak: What is antibody therapy, how does it work, who is developing them? - Firstpost

Job number ACAD104563Division/School School of Cellular and Molecular MedicineContract type Open EndedWorking pattern Full timeSalary 33,797 - 38,017 per annumClosing date for applications 02-Jul-2020

We wish to recruit a Research Associate to be part of a multidisciplinary team investigating and evaluating new approaches to detect Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection in resource-limited settings.

The post is funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and will be held jointly between the Schools of Physics and Cellular and Molecular Medicine (CMM) and is a collaboration with the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI). The post is available for 18 months with potential funding from the 1st August 2020.

The key duties for the postholder will be to generate and characterise a series of modified superparamagnetic nanoparticles (SPIONs) based upon ferritins, and investigate their interactions, and those of a related series of derivatised fluorescent carbon dots (FCDs) with target Mycobacteria. The RA will produce, and subsequently derivatise, recombinant ferritins; characterise these materials using biophysical approaches including electron microscopy, light and X-ray scattering, and superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) magnetometry; and investigate their interactions with target bacteria. The successful applicant will also be expected to prepare applications for time at the Diamond Light Source and other large scale facilities elsewhere in Europe.

Candidates should have a PhD in a Physical (Chemistry, Physics) or Life Sciences (Biochemistry, Microbiology) discipline awarded or soon to be awarded; or equivalent professional qualification/experience. They should have a strong background in recombinant protein production and characterisation and/or in biophysics/soft matter physics methods. Moreover the successful candidate will be passionate about interdisciplinary working, able to communicate clearly and effectively across a diverse team, be willing to contribute to the scientific direction of the project and disseminate its outputs and have excellent organisational skills.

For informal enquiries please contact Dr Annela Seddon (Annela.seddon@bristol.ac.uk); or Dr Jim Spencer (jim.spencer@bristol.ac.uk).

We welcome applications from all members of our community and are particularly encouraging those from diverse groups, such as members of the LGBT+ andBAME communities, to join us.

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Research Associate, School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine job with UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL | 209066 - Times Higher Education (THE)

Have you ever heard that taking vitamin D supplements or following a ketogenic (keto) diet will protect you from the new coronavirus? In this Special Feature, we explain why these and other persistent myths are not grounded in science.

Even before the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the new coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, their director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned of the danger associated with spreading false information about the virus.

At a conference on February 15, 2020, he declared that were not just fighting an epidemic; were fighting an infodemic.

Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus and is just as dangerous, he emphasized.

However, it can be difficult to tell what is credible and what is not given the sheer quantity of information that people are sharing both on and offline.

Previously on Medical News Today, we compiled a list of 28 myths surrounding the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). In this Special Feature, we will take an in-depth look at five more persistent myths and explain why people should not take them at face value.

Some articles claim that if a person takes vitamin D supplements, they will be less likely to contract SARS-CoV-2.

In part, people have based these claims on a controversial paper that appears in the journal Aging Clinical and Experimental Research.

The papers authors claim to have found a correlation between low mean levels of vitamin D in the populations of certain countries and higher rates of COVID-19 cases and related deaths in those same countries.

Based on this correlation, the authors hypothesize that supplementing the diet with vitamin D may help protect against COVID-19. However, there is no evidence to suggest that this would actually be the case.

In a rapid review of the evidence published on May 1, 2020, researchers from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom unequivocally conclude: We found no clinical evidence on vitamin D in [the prevention or treatment of] COVID-19.

They also write that [t]here was no evidence related to vitamin D deficiency predisposing to COVID-19, nor were there studies of supplementation for preventing or treating COVID-19.

Other researchers who have conducted reviews of the existing data surrounding a potential relationship between vitamin D and COVID-19 agree.

One report by specialists from various institutions in the U.K., Ireland, Belgium, and the United States which appeared in BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health in May 2020 also points to a lack of supporting evidence in favor of taking vitamin D supplements to prevent infection with SARS-CoV-2.

The reports authors warn that:

[C]alls [for high dose vitamin D supplementation as a preventive strategy against COVID-19] are without support from pertinent studies in humans at this time, but rather based on speculations about presumed mechanisms.

They also note that although sufficient vitamin D can contribute to overall good health on a day-to-day basis, taking supplements without first seeking medical advice can be harmful.

For example, taking too much vitamin D in the form of a dietary supplement could actually jeopardize health, especially among people with certain underlying chronic conditions.

Another widespread rumor is that taking zinc supplements could help prevent infection with SARS-CoV-2 or treat COVID-19.

It is true that zinc is an essential mineral that helps support the functioning of the human immune system.

Starting from this notion, a team of researchers from Russia, Germany, and Greece hypothesized that zinc might be able to act as a preventive and adjuvant therapeutic for COVID-19. Their results appear in the International Journal of Molecular Medicine.

The researchers refer to in vitro experiments that apparently showed that zinc ions were able to inhibit the action of a certain enzyme that facilitates the viral activity of SARS-CoV-2.

However, they also point out the lack of actual clinical evidence that zinc might have an effect against SARS-CoV-2 in humans.

Other papers that cite the potential of zinc as an adjuvant in COVID-19 therapy including one that appears in Medical Hypotheses are more speculative and not based on any clinical data.

In a Practice patterns and guidelines paper from April 2020 which appears in BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health nutritionist Emma Derbyshire, Ph.D., and biochemist Joanne Delange, Ph.D., reviewed existing data about zinc (alongside other nutrients) in relation to viral respiratory infections.

They found that, according to available research in humans, zinc supplementation may help prevent pneumonia in young children, and that zinc insufficiency may impair immune responses in older adults.

However, they note that there is not enough evidence about the role of zinc supplementation in preventing viral infections in general.

Rigorous trials [] are yet to determine the efficacy of zinc supplementation, they write.

Vitamin C is another essential nutrient that has received a lot of attention. Many people believe that it can prevent or even cure the flu or common cold.

Although it is true that sufficient vitamin C can help support immune function, current evidence regarding its effectiveness in treating or preventing colds and influenza is limited and often contradictory.

Despite this, there have been claims that this vitamin might help fight infections with the new coronavirus.

It is possible that people are basing these claims on an existing ongoing clinical trial in China, which is looking at the effects of high dose intravenous (IV) vitamin C on hospitalized patients receiving care for severe COVID-19.

The researchers expect to complete the trial by the end of September 2020. No results are available in the interim.

Commenting on the trial, experts from the Linus Pauling Institute which focuses on health and nutrition at Oregon State University in Corvallis explain that although high dose IV vitamin C might help alleviate COVID-19 symptoms in severely ill patients, regular vitamin C supplements are very unlikely to help people fight off infections with SARS-CoV-2.

The experts warn that IV vitamin C is not the same as taking vitamin C supplements, as they would never raise blood levels of this vitamin as highly as an IV infusion would.

They also warn people who may be tempted to up their dosage of vitamin C of the fact they could end up taking too much and experiencing adverse side effects.

Keto diets, which are high in fats and low in carbohydrates, have also received some attention in the context of treating or preventing COVID-19.

This may be because there is some evidence to suggest that keto diets could help boost the immune system. However, much of that evidence is based on animal studies rather than human trials.

Also, an upcoming clinical trial from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, proposes to look at whether or not a ketogenic intervention might help intubated COVID-19 patients by reducing inflammation.

The intervention would necessitate the administration of a specially devised ketogenic formula through enteral feeding. It would be a last-resort procedure for those in a critical condition.

There is currently no evidence to suggest that following a keto diet could help a healthy person prevent or treat infection with SARS-CoV-2.

However, there is evidence to suggest that keto diets can expose people to certain health risks such as by raising cholesterol levels. Keto diets may also have side effects, such as flu-like symptoms, headaches, nausea, and changes in blood pressure.

There are also claims suggesting that various herbal medicines might be able to fight off the new coronavirus.

This may partly be based on a statement issued by a Chinese official in April 2020, suggesting that certain herbal drugs could help treat COVID-19, as a communication in The Lancet on May 15, 2020, reports.

Author Yichang Yang from the Department of Traditional Chinese Medicine at the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine in Hangzhou, China warns that people should take encouragements to use herbal remedies in the treatment of COVID-19 with a pinch of salt.

Yang warns that herbal remedies including the drugs that the Chinese official names can have unexpected risks and may not be as effective as some people claim. Also, evidence from human trials is very limited.

For similar reasons, he also notes that the mechanisms through which herbal drugs work on the body are often unclear, which may mean that they are not always safe.

A mystery herbal cure for COVID-19 on sale in Madagascar a herbal tea made from artemisia plants has also spurred worry among specialists, who say that the remedy may do more harm than good.

Matshidiso Moeti, director of WHO Africa, has also commented on this:

We [the WHO] would caution and advise countries against adopting a product that has not been taken through tests to see its efficacy.

Although people may be tempted to try anything and everything in the face of such a threat to health as SARS-CoV-2, the most important preventive step is to follow official national and international guidelines for public health, as well as individual health advice from doctors and other healthcare professionals.

For more information on the new coronavirus and how to stay safe during the pandemic, take a look at the information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the WHO.

For live updates on the latest developments regarding the novel coronavirus and COVID-19, click here.

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5 false claims about coronavirus remedies and why they are wrong - Medical News Today

The Great Covid R&D Collaboration - Cooperation accelerating drug development

Pharma battles coronavirus with a mega-collaboration; its own health requires competitive balance.

Pharmas search for a vaccine or drug to prevent/treat Covid-19 has fostered collaboration among companies on an unprecedented scale.The new business model brings together the best minds in the industry to compress into months the search for a drug or vaccine and subsequent clinical testing that typically take decades.While there is no guaranty that any of the candidates chosen will achieve a timely cure, the scale of the effort has led even conservative experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci to predict that a vaccine could be available as soon as yearend, compared to the current world record of six years for the Ebola vaccine.

The worlds expectations pose a serious challenge for pharma.Industry observers, like Bernard Munos and Jack Scannell, have documented a decades long decline in productivity.One might reasonably ask, if collaboration is able achieve these results in a crisis, could it do the same against the major diseases, like cancer and Alzheimers disease, which together kill more each year than Covid-19?Could a cooperative industry be more productive than a competitive one?

The Power of Collaboration

In the last eight months the pandemic has emerged with stunning suddenness to infect more than 6.5 million people world-widekilling nearly 400,000.Cambridge University estimated that losses over the next five years would total nearly $27 trillion, more than 5% of global GDP.As the world hopes for salvation, how pharma responds will have a profound effect on its future.

Though related to predecessors like SARS and Ebola, the CoV2 virus has a unique structure and genetic signature that will likely require new medicines from an industry with an unimpressive track record at innovation.The era of modern molecular medicine began only 40 years ago and is still in relative infancy.Over the last five years, pharma have brought to market an average of 44 new drugs, costing over $2.5 billion each and many taking more than a decade.Pharma will need all their collective wisdom and resources to stop this viral firestorm before it runs is course.

In response, industry leaders have created a mega-collaboration within the commercial research community.Safi Bahcall, writing in the Wall Street Journal, explained that nearly all the major players in drug discovery and development have[established an] insider-only collaborationcalled Covid R&Dto accelerate creation of a vaccine or cure.In these unprecedented discussions, sworn competitors have shared proprietary data from promising drug candidates that they ordinarily would guard like prized jewels.Representatives of the Food and Drug Administration have even joinedto offer assistance.

With businessmen and attorneys out of the room, scientists across the industry can identify and advance projects at rates far faster than any single group. We dont need four companies with four versions of the same drug running redundant clinical trials at the nations hospitals, yet thats what we have today. In normal times, thats how business is done. But these arent normal times. Either industry leaders should empower their consortium to decide which companies should sacrifice their redundant programs, or the federal government should step in and do it for them.

Tahir Amin, Co-Executive Director of Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge and Rohit Malpani, former policy director for Medecins Sans Frontieres, writing in STAT, claim that pharma could be better prepared for pandemics and more responsive to global health-care needs, if existing research [took] place in a more open and transparent manner, even if it is protected by intellectual property. The pharmaceutical industry sits on libraries of patented molecules and research, some of which originates [sic] from public funding, but which is [sic] not developed unless market opportunities arise.[In the case of remdesivir a] more transparent and open science platform could have motivated broader research participation earlier and potentially saved valuable time andimproved collective understandingof the drug.

The Problem With Collaboration

The Covid R&D collaboration focuses, not on drug discovery per sethere is no time for thatbut on selecting or modifying the best of candidates already on the market or in development and accelerating their path to the bedside.This is engineering on a grand scale.But can it help with invention, which is needed to sustain the industry in normal times? Are the competitive friction and apparent inefficiency of business-as-usual impediments to progress or essential elements in a productive commercial ecosystem?

While required in a crisis, cooperation fails as a sustainable foundation for the pharmaceutical industry, because it dilutes incentive and does not support the quantity and diversity of research required for a strong, responsive industry.Innovation does best with many competing high-risk, high-reward projects, rather than a single coordinated effort.Competitive costs are more than covered by the value of the breadth and flexibility of the industry that a collaboration eliminates in the interests of speed.

Drug development is experimental innovation, based on trial-and-error.In a world where nine-candidates-out-of-ten fail in clinical trials and only one-in-five approved drugs is a commercial success, researchers do not know what will work against CoV2 or any pathogen.When outcomes cannot be predicted in advance, likelihood of success is proportional to the number of candidates tested and the degree to which they are differentiated from one another.

In the collaboration, senior team members set an agenda based on their expert judgment, narrowing the range of research to accelerate the development of a few of the most promising candidates.In the case of Covid-19, it means picking winners without clinical or market data, i.e. guessing.

With Covid the strategy has a good chance of yielding results, because the technology for targeting viruses is relatively advanced; the target is well characterized and, according to Michael Farzan at The Scripps Research Institute, more druggable than most targets; the timeframe is short; the scope is enormous, encompassing many candidates; and the cost of failure or delay is so high that it justifies massive spending, regardless of risk.

The problem for innovation is not in streamlining but making decisions based on expert opinion.A 2013 article in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery showed that the single factor that correlated most closely with success in drug development was managements willingness to kill candidates early, based on data.The Covid R&D alliance has no choice but to rely on judgment, given the timeframe.In contrast, normal drug development is true scientific research.Knowledge evolves through the Darwinian selection of candidates, based on experimental outcomes.Failures play at least as important a role as successes in guiding development.Second-tier performers may find uses in other indications.Knowing only what works gives developers no indication of where to go next when they encounter a block.An unexpected toxicity can eliminate an entire generation of drugs with a similar mechanism.

Expert opinion is not a substitute for the time and cost of competitive studies.Rather than choosing winners, researchers should aggressively cut weak performers early in development.By testing more drugs, more quickly with greater diversity, developers can improve productivity.

Though the scale of the collaboration can reduce the risk somewhat with more shots-on-goal, the lack of time diversification limits the technological base to the ideas and molecules available at the moment, excluding newer, untested and often unorthodox approaches.Should the current solutions prove inadequate, the collaboration would essentially have to start over.

If It Looks Like Collaboration

The threat of consensus thinking doesnt require the formal structure of a collaboration.The infatuation of the industry with the amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimers disease caused a similar narrowing of the industry focus to a single idea.Pharma has spent well over a decade and billions on the assumption that amyloid plaques and tangles caused the disease but have no approved products or even positive clinical results to show for the effort.Rather than assuming that the experts knew the answer, despite having no data proving causation, the industry would have been better served by testing as many different hypotheses as possible.With the presumed mechanism a bust, the industry have few promising alternatives and are essentially back where they were 10 or more years ago.

Contrary to Amin and Malpani, forcing access to proprietary molecules and data would not accelerate a treatment for Covid and would compound the collaboration problem longer term.Without the results of the phase II trials, it is unlikely that, out of hundreds of potential projects, investigators would have chosen in advance to work on remdesivir, a drug that had failed in HCV and Ebola and may offer only limited protection against Covid 19.Making available proprietary data that Gilead had spent tens of millions to acquire, along with the rights to the molecule, would destroy any incentive to invest in early stage research.

The commercial innovation machinery with all its redundancy and friction has provided a remarkably quick initial responselittle more than 8 weeks after the declaration of the pandemic, the FDA issued an emergency use authorization for remdesivirand set the stage for a more complete solution in the coming months.With ninety vaccines of eight different varieties in clinical trials as reported by Nature at the end of May and more on the way, competitive excess has enabled the industry to mount a robust response to Covid threat.One hopes it will be enough.

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The Great Coronavirus Collaboration And The Future Of Drug Discovery - Forbes

People with blood type A may be more at risk of serious forms of the coronavirus, new research has shown.

The study, by researchers in Germany and Norway but not yet published in a journal, is the latest to show that people with this particular blood type may be more susceptible to the disease.

The researchers found two points in the human genome which were associated with an increased risk of respiratory failure in patients with Covid-19. One of these points is the gene that determines blood type.

Having type A blood was linked to a 50 per cent increase in the likelihood that a patient would need oxygen or go on a ventilator, the researchers found.

However, Andre Franke, professor of molecular medicine at the University of Kiel and lead author of the study, said it was not certain whether it was the blood group that determined whether someone would become more seriously ill, or the genetic marker.

We cannot disentangle yet whether actually the blood group is the risk or some genetic variants that are linked to the blood groups. Using the blood groups as proxies, we estimate a 50 per cent higher protection for [blood type] O and a 50 per cent higher risk for A, said Prof Franke.

Researchers took blood samples from 1,610 patients in hospitals in Italy and Spain who needed oxygen or had to go on a ventilator. They extracted DNA and scanned it using a technique called genotyping.

They then compared these findings with 2,205 blood donors who did not have Covid-19.

They then looked at the DNA of the Covid-19 patients to determine if they shared any of the same genetic code.

Separate studies from China and the United States have also shown that people with blood type A are more susceptible to the disease than those with type O, the more common blood type.

And during the 2002 to 2003 epidemic of Sars - the coronavirus most closely linked to Covid-19 - researchers also found that those with type A blood were more likely to contract the disease.

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People with blood type A more likely to suffer severe coronavirus symptoms, research finds - Telegraph.co.uk