The COVID-19 Pandemic – News and Features

SARS-CoV-2 uses a surface spike protein to latch onto human cells and initiate infection. But, the drug heparin is capable of binding tightly to the same surface spike protein, potentially blocking the infection from happening.

Infectious disease experts have suggested that universal testing may be the key to reducing COVID-19 infections in long-term care facilities, which have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic.

Lab-based informatics systems, such as LIMS and ELNs, are becoming more commonly used in labs. We spoke with Jeff Carter, co-founder and COO of lab software company Arxspan, to discover how COVID-19 has helped drive digitization and how tools are developing to become more flexible and connected.

A study published in Nature Communications presented evidence of transplacental transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from an infected mother to her unborn child.

A single protein derived from a common strain of bacteria found in the soil will offer scientists a more precise way to edit RNA.

Researchers have found that placental cells minimally express the instructions, or mRNA, to generate the cell entry receptor and protease required by the virus that causes COVID-19 to invade human cells.

Pharmacists at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg have succeeded in detecting small amounts of SARS-CoV-2 using mass spectrometry and gargle solutions of COVID-19 patients.

Technology Networks recently spoke with David Younger, PhD, Co-founder and CEO of A-Alpha Bio, to learn more about how the company has harnessed synthetic biology and next-generation sequencing techniques to measure millions of interactions between proteins in a single test tube. This enables the identification of potential drugs for the treatment of infectious diseases, including COVID-19.

One of the COVID-19 vaccine candidates that received fast track designation by the FDA is mRNA-1273, developed by Moderna, a clinical stage biotechnology company. The company has shared the positive interim results from a Phase I clinical trial of the vaccine in The New England Journal of Medicine .

A survey of UK people conducted in April at the height of COVID-19 lockdown suggests that distancing measures severely affected individuals' ability to gauge the passage of time. Ruth S. Ogden of Liverpool John Moores University, U.K., presented these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on July 6, 2020.