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At Medical News Today, we have been observing how scientific advances are providing much-needed hope during the COVID-19 pandemic. This special feature discusses recent progress in vaccine clinical trials and other ways that researchers hope to combat the new coronavirus.
What are the bright beacons at this uncertain time? This is a question that we, in MNTWe have been wondering.
To try to answer it, every two weeks, we review the latest coronavirus research and present our readers with the most promising and encouraging findings from scientific studies.
Last fortnight, in the special article COVID-19: The vaccine may be ready for the fall and other reasons for hope, we talked about how researchers at the University of Oxford in the UK planned to launch clinical trials for a new SARS vaccine. CoV-2, hoping to have it ready by fall 2020.
In this special feature, we explain how those plans have progressed and look at other steps specialists have been taking to end the pandemic.
On April 23, the University of Oxford announced the launch of the UK’s first human trial for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.
The researchers hope that the trial will involve about 1,100 volunteers, half of whom will receive the actual experimental vaccine, while the other half will receive a meningitis vaccine, acting as controls. Participants will not know which of the two they have received.
The experimental vaccine should stimulate the immune system to recognize and react to the SARS-CoV-2 peak protein, which allows it to enter and infect healthy cells.
A week ago, the first two volunteers received the inoculation. Both are scientists who were interested in contributing in some way to efforts to combat the new coronavirus.
One of the volunteers, Edward O’Neill, Ph.D., who works in the oncology department at the University of Oxford, said in an interview that participating in the early stage of this clinical trial “seems like the right thing to do. is making sure that we can fight this disease a little bit and get over it much faster. “
The other pioneering participant, Elisa Granato, Ph.D. – from the university’s zoology department – has expressed a similar sentiment, saying, “I’m a scientist, so of course I want to try to support science […]Since I don’t study viruses, I felt a little useless these days, so I felt this. [taking part in the trial] it’s a very easy way to support the cause. “
A few days after receiving the vaccine, Granato sent a public message to assure everyone that he was fine.
Professor Sarah Gilbert, who is from the Jenner Institute for Vaccine Research in Oxford and led the research that led to this trial, has said she is confident that the vaccine will be a successful effort:
“Personally, I have a high degree of confidence in this vaccine.”
The researchers hope it will take 2 to 6 months to confirm whether the vaccine is safe and works as expected.
Recent reports indicate that scientists around the world are currently experimenting with eight different types of possible vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 and that researchers are working on at least 90 vaccines at the moment.
The one researchers at the University of Oxford are testing is protein-based. It contains an inactivated or weakened virus, in this case an adenovirus, which acts as a “carrier” for the SARS-CoV-2 tip protein and must trigger a response from the immune system, “teaching” it to react to that protein .
Another type of vaccine uses inactivated versions of SARS-CoV-2 but has a similar end goal: to “teach” the immune system to identify and fight the virus.
On April 19, researchers associated with Chinese biotech company Sinovac Biotech reported successfully inoculating rhesus macaques with inactivated SARS-CoV-2, protecting them from the new coronavirus, which some scientists say could affect non-human primates and humans.
In the preliminary study, the results of which were made available online as a preprint, the scientists tested their inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, which they call PiCoVacc, on a group of eight rhesus macaque monkeys.
This experiment followed previous tests on mice and rats. When it came to rhesus macaques, the researchers chose them because, they say, this species can develop symptoms similar to COVID-19 after infection with SARS-CoV-2.
The researchers report that they deliver the experimental vaccine intramuscularly to the monkeys three times, in any medium (3 micrograms. [mcg] per dose) or high doses (6 mcg per dose) each time.
At 7 days after infection with the virus, the rhesus macaques that had received the high doses of the vaccine showed the best results, the researchers say. None of these animals had a detectable viral load in their pharynx or lungs at this point.
Commenting on these results, Professor Florian Krammer of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York has said: “I like it. This is the old school, but it could work. “
“What I like the most is that many vaccine producers, also in lower middle-income countries, could make such a vaccine,” he added.
Recent research from the University of California, Los Angeles and the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy in San Francisco, California, also suggests that a tool that scientists use in cancer therapy could help researchers who are developing vaccines against cancer. SARS-CoV-2. This study document is also available online as a preprint.
According to its authors, a computational tool designed to aid in the development of cancer vaccines could also be helpful in discovering the best approaches for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.
They point out that this tool could help researchers understand more about how killer T cells, a type of white blood cell that plays a key role in the immune response, can react to SARS-CoV-2.
You could do this by revealing whether multiple vaccines are likely to be effective in a diverse human population.
In a short recent comment on Nature Reviews ImmunologyMiriam Saffern, who is studying for a doctorate at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, emphasizes the relevance of initiatives like this.
“SARS-CoV-2 T-cell vaccines are developing at a rapid rate,” he writes, “but it is imperative that the proteins or peptides they deliver bind to a wide variety of HLAs. [human leukocyte antigen] haplotypes in the world population. “
An individual’s HLA haplotype refers to a set of genes that helps your body distinguish its own proteins from those created by viruses and bacteria.
HLA haplotypes vary between different people, so being able to determine if the proteins in a vaccine bind to a variety of these could be a good indication of whether the vaccine could serve a diverse population.
“This publicly available dataset [from the preliminary study] it will be an important resource to guide vaccine development. “
– Miriam Saffern
The researchers are also putting a lot of effort into trying to come up with targeted therapy to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 in people who have already contracted the virus.
Scientists have been experimenting with new and old drugs to try to find the most promising avenues.
According to a new study published online before printing in the magazine Antiviral research, ivermectin, an existing antiparasitic drug, a treatment for infestations such as those caused by lice, is promising as a treatment.
In laboratory experiments, researchers at Royal Melbourne Hospital and Monash University, also in Melbourne, Australia, infected cell cultures with SARS-CoV-2 isolates before exposing them to a 5-micromole dose of ivermectin.
This experiment effectively removed the virus from cell cultures in a short period of time, leading the researchers to conclude that ivermectin may deserve more attention as a possible therapeutic candidate for COVID-19 in the future.
“We found that even a single dose could essentially remove all of the viral RNA within 48 hours and that even within 24 hours, there was a really significant reduction.”
– LEad researcher Kylie Wagstaff, Ph.D.
According to Wagstaff, a readily available drug could accelerate global efforts to curb the pandemic.
“When we have a global pandemic and there is no approved treatment, if we had a compound that was already available worldwide, that could help people sooner,” he says.
In addition to efforts to find an effective way to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infections or treat COVID-19, the disease that causes the virus, scientists have also worked hard on something else.
Around the world, researchers have been searching for accurate, safe, and effective methods to screen people for antibodies to the new coronavirus, a marker that indicates they have overcome a SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Antibodies can also show who has acquired a degree of immunity to the virus, albeit temporary, although the World Health Organization (WHO) cautions that “there is no evidence that people who have recovered from COVID-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection. “
Still, a widely available, safe and accurate antibody test could help decision makers better understand the dynamics of viral spread and the state of the outbreak at a given time in a given location. This information could assist authorities to gradually lift blocking measures or restrictions, when possible.
It seems that such a test will soon reach at least some countries in Europe. According to recent reports, the European Union (EU) has now certified an antibody test produced by Abbott Laboratories as safe to use.
The test evaluates the presence of the IgG antibody, which emerges when an infection is decreasing and remains present for a time after it has been removed.
According to the manufacturer, this antibody test “demonstrated specificity and sensitivity of more than 99% 14 days or more after symptoms began.”
As laboratories in the UK already have a significant number of machines that would allow them to perform this antibody test, Abbott is now negotiating to provide tests to this country.
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