The COVID-19 Pandemic – News and Features

Researchers are conducting a Phase 2 clinical trial to determine if the oral cancer drug ibrutinib can help patients with cancer or other immunocompromised conditions recover from COVID-19.

Scientists have taken a deeper look at how the immune system changes with age and their findings could help to make flu vaccines much more protective.

Two doses of an experimental vaccine to prevent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) induced robust immune responses and rapidly controlled the coronavirus in the upper and lower airways of rhesus macaques exposed to SARS-CoV-2.

What happens when you transiently turn "off" the gene that encodes ACE2, the protein that is required for SARS-CoV-2 to enter and infect cells? This is what Jamie Hackett and colleagues are currently exploring in animal models, to determine whether epigenetic silencing could be a treatment approach for COVID-19 in humans.

A new drug candidate SRI-37330 was tested on isolated human and mouse pancreatic islets, mouse and rat cell cultures and animal models of both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, and was shown to significantly improve four detrimental characteristics of diabetes.

By reconstructing the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2, researchers have discovered that the lineage that gave rise to the virus has been circulating in bats for decades and likely includes other viruses with the ability to infect humans. The findings, have implications for the prevention of future pandemics stemming from this lineage.

Scientists have developed a convenient, low-cost test for COVID-19 that uses a single drop of blood from a skin prick.

New research suggests that blood platelet counts at the higher end of normal could indicate a high risk of cancer in men aged 60 or over and should be investigated.

Clinician-scientists at Nanyang Technological University have demonstrated a way to improve the speed, handling time and cost of COVID-19 laboratory tests. The improved testing method yields results in 36 minutes - a quarter of the time required by existing gold-standard tests.

The first U.S. patients have been dosed in a phase 2/3 clinical trial testing whether a lead mRNA vaccine candidate can prevent infection with the virus that causes COVID-19.