novel coronavirus Archives - Amazing Health Advances

UC San Diego Health Launches Novel Coronavirus Blood Testing to Identify Past Exposure

AHA Publisher — Sat, 18 Apr 2020 07:00:06 +0000

University of California San Diego Health via Newswise – Serological tests look for antibodies produced in response to infection, and will help determine who may have potentially acquired immunity to COVID-19—and who remains at risk. Newswise — Clinical laboratory physicians and scientists at UC San Diego Health have launched a pair of serological tests that will look for novel coronavirus antibodies — evidence in persons tested that they have previously been infected by SARS-CoV-2, the viral cause of COVID-19, even if they never experienced tell-tale symptoms. The effort will be overseen by the UC San Diego Center for Advanced Laboratory Medicine (CALM), which houses the majority of UC San Diego Health’s Clinical Laboratories and related research activities and is already the hub for the health system’s in-house PCR-based diagnostic testing of patients and persons suspected of having COVID-19. “This is part of the next wave of testing,” said Ronald W. McLawhon, MD, PhD, director of CALM and UC San Diego Clinical Laboratories and chief of the Division of Laboratory and Genomic Medicine. “It’s intended to answer those growing questions about who has been infected and who might still be vulnerable to exposure.” The effort is built upon two assays developed by Diazyme Laboratories, Inc., a division of General Atomics, based in Poway, Ca. The tests analyze blood samples, similar to those taken for routine clinical reasons, for the presence of two of the body’s five classes of antibodies: IgG and IgM. Antibodies are proteins used by the immune system to recognize and help neutralize pathogenic invaders, such as viruses or bacteria. The IgG antibody is the most abundant type; IgM is one of the first antibody types produced by the body’s immune system to fight a new infection. Looking for these two types of antibodies together, rather than one, increases the treating physician’s confidence in being able to differentiate between a recent infection versus a past exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. “These tests have already gone through an initial assessment and validation by Diazyme,” said Robert Fitzgerald, PhD, professor of clinical pathology at UC San Diego School of Medicine and director of the Toxicology Laboratory and associate director of Clinical Chemistry Laboratory at UC San Diego Health. “We’ve put them through our validation processes as well, including comparing samples from patients known to have COVID-19, healthy volunteers and blood samples from 2018, long before the virus appeared.” McLawhon said initial capacity for serological testing will be a combination of up to 1,200 of IgM or IgG antibody tests per day, with results within 24 hours. The system, he said, is scalable. The presence of novel coronavirus antibodies can reveal persons who may have unknowingly contracted COVID-19 and recovered, but never showed signs of infection. The first testing cohort will likely be health care workers, which will help identify who are now in a convalescent phase after a documented exposure and, perhaps, may have acquired at least some degree of immunological protection. At this point, it has not been established whether the presence of IgG antibodies is an indicator of immunity to SARS-CoV-2 infection or re-infection, as seen with many other viral infectious diseases. Serological testing will also be used to assess health care workers who are suspected of having COVID-19, but not tested by PCR and are recovering at home under quarantine. McLawhon said the twin Diazyme tests have shown high sensitivity and specificity, particularly compared to most point-of-care, rapid-response serological tests for novel coronavirus now flooding the international market. Thus far, only one rapid serological test, which claims a result within 15 to 20 minutes, has received Emergency Use Authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). “There are a lot of these unproven rapid tests out there. Some are performed using technology found in today’s pregnancy tests, using a drop of blood,” said McLawhon. “But none have gone through FDA review nor have they been validated in terms of their clinical performance. Many do not perform well. The results aren’t clear-cut. There’s a lot of subjectivity in user interpretation. And, they can do only one sample at a time, which means a staff member might reasonably be able to collect and complete between four to a dozen tests in an hour.” Aside from identifying past coronavirus exposure, serological testing will likely be a valuable epidemiological tool. There are expansive plans to use blood tests to map where the virus has spread, which cities, states and regions may have developed some degree of “herd immunity” to future outbreaks and which places and populations remain at greatest risk. The Centers for Disease Control has announced plans for three such clinical trials across the country. Serological (antibody) tests are not considered frontline tests for detecting a current or active infection. They have clear limitations for diagnosing new coronavirus infections because the immune response and antibody production varies by individual. There is often a lag of several days — as much as five to 10 days — between initial virus exposure and the first produced antibodies detected in the blood. During this time, called the “window period,” an infected person can be contagious, but may not be displaying any symptoms. “You can’t use the serological testing to differentiate timing of infection,” said Michael J. Kelner, MD, director of the Clinical Chemistry Laboratory at UC San Diego Health. “They can’t be done in lieu of a PCR test. But they can tell us who has been exposed — or not — and that’s important. As we go forward, we’ll see if they can help answer more questions.” The coronavirus blood testing program at UC San Diego Health is, for now, open-ended. “The greatest strength of our laboratory program at CALM is the team of clinicians who bring different expertise to the problem of managing this pandemic,” said Steve Gonias, MD, PhD, chair and chief of the Department of Pathology at UC San Diego School of Medicine. “As a team, our goal is to continue to develop the most advanced assortment of diagnostic laboratory tests to assess COVID-19 in the state.” “There are worries about subsequent waves of outbreaks elsewhere or that the virus might reappear in places,” said McLawhon. “No one can yet say what will happen. Right now, I’m guessing we’ll be doing this type of testing for at least another 18 months. Or until a vaccine is developed. Or for as long as there continues to be a global pandemic.” To read the original article click here.

The post UC San Diego Health Launches Novel Coronavirus Blood Testing to Identify Past Exposure appeared first on Amazing Health Advances.

FDA Approves Emergency Use of Anti-Malarial Drugs to Treat People Infected with COVID-19

AHA Publisher — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 07:00:47 +0000

Steve Warren via CBN News – The US government is giving reserved approval to two new weapons in the war against the COVID-19 virus, which has so far claimed the lives of more than 2,500 in the US and a total of 35,300 people around the world. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cut the red tape to give limited emergency-use approval to use the oral anti-malarial drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat patients infected with the novel coronavirus. In a statement released Sunday night, the US Department of Health and Human Services announced it had received 30 million doses of hydroxychloroquine and one million doses of chloroquine donated to a national stockpile of potentially life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies from the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis. The FDA has authorized the drugs “to be distributed and prescribed by doctors to hospitalized teen and adult patients with the coronavirus, as appropriate, when a clinical trial is not available or feasible.” Clinical trials are still being planned by the National Institutes of Health and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, according to ABC News. There have been questions about the effectiveness of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine since they haven’t gone through official scientific studies. And one shocking case out of Arizona may serve as a warning after an older couple consumed some chloroquine phosphate – an additive used to clean fish tanks. The husband died and his wife was left in critical condition. But France has just given its official approval to use the drug chloroquine to combat coronavirus, so the US isn’t the only country moving ahead with the experimental treatment. Meanwhile, the CEO of the drug company Novartis says hydroxychloroquine is one of the best drugs available to treat the COVID-19 virus. “Pre-clinical studies in animals, as well as the first data from clinical studies, show that hydroxychloroquine kills the coronavirus,” Novartis Chief Executive Vas Narasimhan told the SonntagsZeitung newspaper on Sunday. Hydroxychloroquine, which is also produced by several drug companies, including Novartis’s Sandoz division, is also used in the treatment of arthritis and lupus. “We are working with Swiss hospitals on possible treatment protocols for the clinical use of this drug (against COVID-19), but it is too early to say anything definitive,” added Narasimhan. The drug company had previously promised to give away 130 million individual doses of the drug. “Novartis will work with stakeholders including the World Health Organization to determine the best distribution of the medicine to ensure broad access to patients most in need of this medicine globally,” the company said in a statement on March 20. Research continues on other Novartis drugs as other possible remedies for the coronavirus. These include the multiple sclerosis drug Gilenya and the cancer drug Jakavi. To read the original article click here. For more articles from CBN News click here.

The post FDA Approves Emergency Use of Anti-Malarial Drugs to Treat People Infected with COVID-19 appeared first on Amazing Health Advances.

Chemist Aims at COVID-19 Following Success With Related Virus

AHA Publisher — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 07:00:15 +0000

Case Western Reserve University via Newswise – International group led by Ohio researcher Blanton seeks expanded NIH support to ‘target virus at molecular level.’ Newswise — CLEVELAND—A team of scientists, led by Case Western Reserve University chemistry Professor Blanton Tolbert and his research lab, are conducting the underlying research to develop an antiviral to slow the spread of novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Tolbert said he and research partners from Duke and Rutgers universities hope to hear soon from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) whether their project to develop an antiviral against the novel coronavirus behind the global pandemic of COVID-19 will receive funding. The research team recently laid the groundwork to develop novel antivirals against Enterovirus 71 (EV71), a similar RNA virus that causes hand, foot and mouth disease. Tolbert said they are now poised to make significant inroads into identifying vulnerable COVID-19 targets. “We’ve already shown the necessary ‘proof of concept’ with EV71, which shows we know how to get things done,” Tolbert said. “And now we have assembled an expanded international group to include scientists from the University of Michigan, the United Kingdom and Taiwan, where they isolated some very early COVID-19 viruses from two infected patients at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital.” Tolbert said that his Taiwanese collaborators have been able to clone the novel coronavirus in the lab, providing a copy to study at the molecular level—the first step in learning how it works. Tolbert’s lab studies basic biochemical processes of ribonucleic acid (RNA) viruses, working to better understand the physical interactions between the virus and host. Their most recent work has determined the 3D structures of pieces of viruses from HIV and EV71, he said. While EV71 is not a coronavirus, both fall under “the bigger umbrella of positive-sense RNA viruses that infect humans,” he said. “And if you can figure out how the virus interacts with the cellular environment it has infected, where the real activity takes place, you can understand it better,” Tolbert said. “You can look at how it takes over the cellular machinery with the ultimate goal of making drugs to block those processes. But first you have to know how it hijacked the cells in the first place.” Early Start on Coronavirus Focus It was still early February of this year when Tolbert sat in a conference room in Durham, North Carolina, with colleagues from Rutgers and host Duke University. They were meeting to celebrate their recent success with EV71 and to talk about next steps in publishing (their work is published on a pre-print site, but not yet in a named journal) and expanding their work on that particular virus. But a new, still barely known novel virus, which had just appeared in Wuhan, China, was also on their minds. China had just recently shared the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus on Jan. 12, and soon the World Health Organization would declare a public health emergency of international concern over the global outbreak of the novel coronavirus, then referred to as nCoV. So when Tolbert and his colleagues turned their attention and expertise toward COVID-19, they were ahead of the curve, he said. The NIH didn’t even announce for another two weeks that emergency funds to fight COVID-19 were available. “We were already working on something for which there are no antivirals, something with high mortality and morbidity (illness and other conditions associated with the virus) rates—especially for children in Southeast Asia,” he said. “So when we saw the early signs that this coronavirus had no antivirals or vaccine, we decided to see how we might get involved, knowing we already had that proof-of-concept with this other virus.” He said how quickly the research group hears from the NIH on whether it will get a new influx of funding to tackle COVID-19 will likely depend on whether the agency considers the work urgent enough—either for “flattening the curve,” the phrase for leveling out over time the rapidly rising number of cases, or finding a permanent antiviral. “I cannot anticipate what is coming next,” he said. “This is something that needs to be done if an antiviral is going to be achieved. The bottom line is that we believe we are equipped and ready to go, and we can make a difference. “I don’t know if that means it will lead directly to an antiviral yet, but I believe we can find ways to target this at the molecular level.” To read the original article click here.

The post Chemist Aims at COVID-19 Following Success With Related Virus appeared first on Amazing Health Advances.

Is the Coronavirus Outbreak of Unnatural Origins?

AHA Publisher — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 07:00:17 +0000

Society for Risk Analysis via EurekAlert – Did coronavirus mutate from a virus already prevalent in humans or animals or did it originate in a laboratory? As scientists grapple with understanding the source of this rapidly spreading virus, the Grunow-Finke assessment tool (GFT) may assist them with determining whether the coronavirus outbreak is of natural or unnatural origins. Unless the question of origin is asked, unnatural outbreaks cannot be identified. Public health training, practice and culture defaults to the assumption that every outbreak is natural in origin and does not routinely include risk assessments for unnatural origins. A study, “Application of a risk analysis tool to Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV) outbreak in Saudi Arabia,” recently published in Risk Analysis, developed a modified GFT (mGFT) to improve the sensitivity of the tool, which has been validated against previous outbreaks. The mGFT contains 11 criteria for determining if an outbreak is of unnatural origin. The criteria are as follows: 1. Existence of a biological risk: The presence of a political or terrorist environment from which a biological attack could originate. 2. Unusual strain: In unnatural outbreaks, the strains may be atypical, rare, antiquated, new emerging, with mutations or different origins, genetically edited created by synthetic biotechnology. It may demonstrate increased virulence, unusual environmental sustainability, resistance to prophylactic and therapeutic measures, or difficulty in detection and identification. 3. Special aspects of the biological agent: It cannot be ruled out that a biological agent has been genetically manipulated. 4. Peculiarities of the geographic distribution of disease: It is unusual from an epidemiological perspective, if the disease, is identified in a region concerned for the first time ever or again after a long period of time. 5. High concentration of the biological agent in the environment: If a biological agent is released artificially, we can expect to find it in unusually high concentrations in the air, soil and drinking or surface water over a large area. 6. Peculiarities of the intensity and dynamics of the epidemic: Characterized by the percentage of cases of a disease per unit of time or the total number of cases. 7. Peculiarities of the transmission mode of the biological agent: In general, natural epidemics will feature paths of transmission which are typical for the pathogen and its natural hosts, deviations from the natural paths of infection could indicate that biological agents have been deliberately disseminated. 8. Peculiarities of the time of the epidemic: Epidemics of certain infectious diseases occur in increased numbers during certain seasons, either because they are dependent on the weather, or they occur after certain intervals in time. 9. Unusually rapid spread of the epidemic: The speed at which some epidemic spreads is determined by the virulence, resistance and concentration of the pathogen, the contagiousness of the disease and the intensity of the transmission process, on the one hand, and on the susceptibility and disposition of the exposed population, on the other. 10. Limitation of the epidemic to a specific population: Biological attacks can be directed against large heterogeneous population groups and military contingents or against selected target groups. 11. Special insights: Any suspicious circumstances identified prior to the outbreak, during the period of outbreak or post-outbreak, which would point to an unnatural outbreak. If the tool reveals a score of less than 30 points, out of 60 possible points, then the outbreak is of natural cause. Each criterion is given a value between 0-3, based on available data. The value is then multiplied by a set weighting factor between 1-3 points. The sum of points is divided by the maximum number of points, for a probability which indicate the likelihood of bioterrorism. This tool can be applied to the coronavirus outbreak to flag unusual patterns. To read the original article click here.

The post Is the Coronavirus Outbreak of Unnatural Origins? appeared first on Amazing Health Advances.

Coronavirus Is Not Mutating Rapidly, Hope for Vaccine Development

AHA Publisher — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 07:00:05 +0000

Angela Betsaida B. Laguipo, BSN via News-Medical Net – Despite the coronavirus infection numbers skyrocketing, there is still good news. A team of scientists found that the novel coronavirus is not mutating significantly, suggesting any vaccine developed to fight SARS-CoV-2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2) would remain effective in the long term. A team of scientists from Johns Hopkins University has been studying the coronavirus’s genetic code and found that it stays stable as it infects more people. The discovery could help scientists develop vaccines, which can fight against deadly illness COVID-19 for a long time. The researchers also noted that the virus is not becoming more dangerous as it spreads, shedding light on the virus’s mechanism and how it behaves. With this excellent news, pharmaceutical companies, health institutions, and scientific laboratories that are racing to find a vaccine can now develop one just like those for measles and chickenpox. These older vaccines are still effective and do not to be updated, unlike the flu vaccine. How a Virus Mutates Just as natural selection has contributed to the evolution of living things, such as humans, plants, and animals, it also shapes viruses, too. Though viruses are not considered living things since they need a host to reproduce, they are capable of mutation. When a virus enters the human body, the immune system detects it and tries to kill it. The pathogen’s job is to evade the immune system, invade a host cell, and reproduce; then it jumps to another host. To evade the immune system, the virus mutates so the body will have a hard time detecting it. Overall, viruses mutate rapidly compared to other organisms. Though it may sound frightening, neural mutations, which either improve or stem the virus’s survival, may not cause any noticeable change in the people they infect. SARS-CoV-2 Mutation In the case of the novel coronavirus, which has mutated over the course of the global pandemic, the researchers noted that it does not mutate as fast as other viruses. The coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which is caused by SARS-CoV-2, started in December 2019 in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, in China. The virus has spread to 172 countries, with China, Italy, Spain, and the United States suffering the worst of the virus. A previous study has shown that the virus has mutated, from the strain that infected more than 80,000 people in China, to the one circulating in Europe and other parts of the world. A molecular geneticist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said the strains infecting people in the United States have only four to 10 genetic variations of the strain that originated in Wuhan, China. “That’s a relatively small number of mutations for having passed through a large number of people” At this point, the mutation rate of the virus would suggest that the vaccine developed for SARS-CoV-2 would be a single vaccine, rather than a new vaccine every year like the flu vaccine,” Peter Thielen said. COVID-19 Global Situation The coronavirus pandemic is getting worse, with many countries overwhelmed with the number of infections occurring. Developing an effective vaccine against the infection will help reduce the number of infections, as well as save many lives. There are 466,955 confirmed cases of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) across 173 countries and territories. Over 21,000 have succumbed to the disease, with Italy reporting the highest number of deaths. Italy has become the new epicenter of the global pandemic. China, where the outbreak started, has started to report more recoveries, and the number of infections has dwindled. However, Italy has been scrambling to contain the virus as its healthcare system is overworked and overwhelmed. Italy has nearly 75,000 cases, while the United States over 65,000 cases. Spain has quickly followed the list with the most infections as it reached more than 49,000 confirmed cases and 3,647 deaths. This article has been modified. To read the original article click here.

The post Coronavirus Is Not Mutating Rapidly, Hope for Vaccine Development appeared first on Amazing Health Advances.