The "good news" continues to be that the vaccination rate is picking up (12% increase over last week), even though yesterday's 600K vaccinations was less than the previous day.
The bad news of course is the increase in cases and deaths, making it look pretty obvious that we are in fact in a new (5th?) wave.
And that pulls the calendar forward to mid-October in terms of when we can expect to top 700,000 Dead Americans.
Yesterday's numbers, such as they are:
Two new items in the press.
- Janssen / J&J vaccine boosters
- New and potentially very promising therapeutics & preventatives
A second shot of the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine generates a protective response beyond the response from a single dose, the company said in a news release Wednesday.
In two studies that have not gone through scientific peer review, submitted to the preprint site Medrxiv, people who had a second shot of the J&J vaccine produced lots of immune molecules known as antibodies, which bind to and neutralize an invading virus. Their antibody levels were ninefold higher than the levels in people four weeks after a single shot.
This interim data came from what are referred to as Phase 1/2a clinical trials, which are smaller than the Phase 3 trials designed to show the efficacy of a vaccine. Johnson & Johnson is also studying a two-dose vaccine in as many as 30,000 people in a Phase 3 trial, the results of which have not yet been released.
The booster dose “further increases antibody responses among study participants who had previously received our vaccine,” Mathai Mammen, head of research and development at Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen, said in a statement. “We look forward to discussing with public health officials a potential strategy for our Johnson & Johnson covid-19 vaccine.” The second shot would come eight or more months after a first dose.
First - New approach, new drug - Jerusalem Post:
The treatment, described in a study published in Nature Microbiology, was developed by Weizmann researchers in collaboration with the Pasteur Institute in France and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US.
Most treatments and vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 target the spike protein on the virus's outer envelope, but this protein could mutate in future variants, negatively effecting the efficacy of such treatments. The Weizmann researchers decided to take a different approach, targeting the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptors through which the virus enters the cell. This approach is not susceptible to new variants.
ACE2, attached to the membrane of cells on the surface of the lungs and other tissues, is an enzyme which is important for regulating blood pressure, meaning that researchers couldn't just block the receptor and disrupt ACE2's function. In order to get around this issue, the team, led by Prof. Gideon Schreiber of Weizmann’s Biomolecular Sciences Department, began developing a small protein molecule that could bind to ACE2 better than the coronavirus, without affecting the enzyme's function.
The researchers first identified the virus's binding domain, where the spike protein physically binds to ACE2. Dr. Jiří Zahradník, a postdoctoral fellow in Schreiber's group, then performed several rounds of "evolution-in-a-test-tube" on a genetically engineered strain of baker's yeast, which is easily manipulated. This allowed Zahradník to rapidly scan millions of different mutations that accumulated in the course of the artificial evolution.
The scanning process also supplied strong evidence in favor of the hypothesis that the novel coronavirus becomes more contagious as it mutates to have an improved fit to ACE2. After the first round of selection, the lab-made variants with tighter binding capabilities to the enzyme mimicked the mutations present in the binding domains of the most contagious SARS-CoV-2 strains circulating naturally. The Delta variant, however, relies on a different trick to be more infectious by partially evading detection by the immune system.
Zahradník eventually isolated a small protein fragment with a binding capability 1,000 times stronger than that of the original binding domain from which it evolved, fitting the ACE2 enzyme exactly while conserving its function.
Schreiber's team collaborated with Prof. Yinon Rudich of Weizmann’s Earth and Planetary Sciences Department to develop a potential method to administer the molecule as a drug, creating an aerosol-based spray that would allow the molecule to be administered by inhalation to patients.
The treatment has so far been tested on hamsters infected with the coronavirus at the NIH. Preliminary results show that the treatment significantly reduces disease symptoms, with more preclinical studies are planned to take place at the NIH in the near future.
Second - Old drug, new application, Jerusalem Post again:
$15 drug gets COVID patients off oxygen support in under week – study
Fenofibrate could dramatically shorten the treatment time for severe COVID patients.
Fourteen out of 15 severe COVID-19 patients who were treated in an investigator-initiated interventional open-label clinical study of the drug TriCor (fenofibrate) didn’t require oxygen support within a week of treatment and were released from the hospital, according to the results of a new Hebrew University of Jerusalem study.
Fenofibrate is an FDA-approved oral medication. The results were published on Researchsquare.com and are currently under peer review.
Specifically, the team that was led by HU’s Prof. Yaakov Nahmias carried out the study at Israel’s Barzilai Medical Center in coordination with the hospital’s head of the Infectious Disease Unit, Prof. Shlomo Maayan, and with support from Abbott Laboratories.
The 15 treated patients all had pneumonia and required oxygen support. They were also older with multiple comorbidities, ranging from diabetes and obesity to high blood pressure.
In addition to standard of care, the patients were given 145 mg/day of fenofibrate for 10 days.
“The results were dramatic,” Nahmias told The Jerusalem Post. “Progressive inflammation markers, which are the hallmark of deteriorative COVID-19, dropped within 48 hours of treatment. Moreover, 14 of the 15 severe patients didn’t require oxygen support within a week of treatment.” The 15th patient was off oxygen within 10 days.
When looking at the data on other similar severe patients, less than 30% of them on average are removed from oxygen support within a week. In other words, fenofibrate could dramatically shorten the treatment time for severe COVID patients.
- more -
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