publication date: May. 8, 2020

Jeff Patton was named chief executive officer of OneOncology. Patton has been Acting CEO and president of Physician Services since February.

OneOncology includes five practices throughout the U.S., represents over 400 providers, and cares for approximately 250,000 patients annually at 160 sites of care. OneOncology partner practices deliver integrated oncology care services including screening and diagnosis, clinical trials, therapies, and survivorship or end-of-life care. A main responsibility of OneOncology is to help its partner practices expand services in cancer care.

We formed OneOncology in 2018 with the idea that with physician leadership, common technology platforms, and access to capital, practices could have both the necessary scale and local decision-making authority needed to not only survive but thrive in todays marketplace, Patton said in a statement. Today, as practices grapple with COVID-19 and plan for caring for patients post peak, the ideas that brought us together are exactly what will propel our future growth.

Patton will continue as the executive chairman of the board at Tennessee Oncology.

Blumenthal named VP of Global Oncology Regulatory Affairs at Merck

Gideon Blumenthal was named vice president for Global Oncology Regulatory Affairs at Merck.

He is a former deputy director of the FDA Oncology Center of Excellence.

Haura, Khushalani named clinical science research leaders at Moffitt

Eric B. Haura was named the associate center director of Clinical Science at Moffitt Cancer Center, and Nikhil Khushalani was named assistant center director of Clinical Research Review & Partnerships in a newly created role at Moffitt Cancer Center.

Haura will provide the strategic vision in developing physician-led laboratory science, as well as oversight of Moffitts clinical research operations, which includes more than 600 active clinical interventional trials and over 100 observational studies, including Moffitts Clinical Trials Office and Clinical Research Unit. Additionally, he will facilitate team science and clinical research opportunities with affiliate and consortium partners, and he provide guidance and mentorship to investigators at Moffitt.

Haura joined Moffitt in 2000 and has served in leadership roles in research, including director of the Lung Cancer Center of Excellence and co-leader of the Chemical Biology and Molecular Medicine Program. His research focuses on identifying new vulnerabilities and biomarkers in lung cancer, where his goal is to develop novel therapeutic strategies for his patients. His lab is also heavily involved in proteomics, the large-scale study of proteins, to identify new diagnostic tools for lung cancer. Haura treats patients as a senior member of the Department of Thoracic Oncology.

As assistant center director of Clinical Research Review & Partnerships, Khushalani will oversee Moffitts clinical trial scientific review operations. He will also work closely with Jennifer I. Vidrine, assistant center director of Research Strategic Partnerships, to expand clinical research offerings to affiliates and partners, including a clinical research unit opening in collaboration with AdventHealth in Celebration, Florida. This position also reports to Haura.

Khushalani joined Moffitt in 2015 as an associate member of the Department of Cutaneous Oncology, and became the vice chair and a senior member of the department. His clinical and research interests are in the development of novel therapeutics for patients with melanoma and other skin cancers. He studies the economic impact of new skin cancer therapies on health care, with the goal of devising strategies to reduce costs for patients. Khushalani is the principal investigator on several skin cancer clinical trials at Moffitt.

Bona named director of Benign Hematology at Smilow Cancer Hospital

Robert Bona was named professor of medicine (hematology) and inaugural director of the Benign Hematology Program at Smilow Cancer Hospital. He will also join as Medical Director of the Hemophilia Treatment Center for the Pediatric Hematology & Oncology Program at Smilow Cancer Hospital.

Bona will begin in his roles July 1.

Bona has been serving as a part-time member of the hematology department at Yale Cancer Center for the last three years.

Bona joins Yale from Quinnipiac University where he is a founding faculty member and professor of medical sciences at the Frank H. Netter MD School of Medicine. Bona has led several research studies, clinical trials, and care innovations to advance the treatment of blood diseases.

Prebet, Zeidan named hematology leaders at Yale Cancer Center

Thomas Prebet was named leader of myeloid malignancies on the Disease Aligned Research Team, and Amer Zeidan was named director of the Hematology Early Therapeutics Program at Yale Cancer Center.

In these new roles, Prebet and Zeidan will work closely with Stephanie Halene, interim chief of hematology at YCC.

Prebet is an associate professor of medicine (hematology) and is focused on developing clinical trials for myeloid malignancies and translational advances for patients with acute myeloid leukemia and myelodysplastic syndromes. In his new role as DART leader for myeloid malignancies, he will oversee the clinical trial team for myeloid malignancies and work to develop a complete portfolio of trials for our patients.

Zeidan is an associate professor of medicine (hematology) and is the Yale principal investigator for multiple NCI-sponsored and clinical trials in myeloid malignancies. Zeidan is also chairing the steering committee for a large pharma-sponsored randomized trial of myelodysplastic syndromes. As director of the Hematology Early Therapeutics Program, Zeidan will partner closely with Patricia LoRusso, associate cancer center director for Experimental Therapeutics at YCC, to develop a comprehensive phase I clinical trial portfolio for patients with hematologic malignancies.

Hamilton, Danilov join City of Hope

Stanley Hamilton, formerly of MD Anderson Cancer Center, was named chair of the Department of Pathology at City of Hope, and Alexey Danilov was named associate director of City of Hopes Toni Stephenson Lymphoma Center.

Hamilton said his goal is to bring access to state-of-the-art specialized pathology to every patient at every City of Hope satellite center, as well as improving and enhancing the biomarker data used in clinical trials, and further integrating digital pathology into the overall informatics of the institution.

Danilov brought his independently-funded lab to City of Hopes Toni Stephenson Lymphoma Center. Danilov researches treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukemia and many forms of lymphoma.

Danilov is focused on identifying cell proteinssome that promote cancer growth, some that inhibit itlearning how they deteriorate, and finding drugs that can affect the process.

Tempera named associate professor in the Gene Expression & Regulation Program at Wistar

Italo Tempera was appointed associate professor in the Gene Expression & Regulation Program of The Wistar Institute Cancer Center.

Tempera is a molecular virologist with special expertise in the study of the Epstein Barr virus and how it regulates expression of its genes in the host cell during infection. Although EBV infection is very frequent and asymptomatic in most cases, in some individuals, especially those with a compromised immune system, it has a causative role in development of some types of cancer, including Burkitts lymphoma, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, and Hodgkins and non-Hodgkins lymphomas.

Research in the Tempera laboratory aims to disrupt the natural capacity of EBV to modulate its gene expression pattern as a new approach for treating EBV-associated cancers.

Tempera identified the main cellular factor that regulates the three-dimensional structure of the EBV genome and his laboratory focuses on the role of this factor, named CTCF, in the formation of loops in the virus DNA.

These loops allow distant segments of the genome to be in close proximity and regulate expression of EBV genes that are necessary for its life cycle within the cell. The team is also exploring how EBV chromatin loops are regulated by another cellular factor called PARP1. Given the role played by PARP1 in regulating cell metabolism after DNA damage, these studies could provide an exciting link between host cell metabolism and regulation of EBV chromatin structure.

The Tempera lab specializes in genomics techniques that allow them to study long-range interactions within chromatin, or the genetic material in which DNA and proteins are packed together to form chromosomes.

Tempera comes to Wistar from the Fels Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Biology at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine of Temple University, where he established his lab in 2012 and was promoted to associate professor in 2017.

Bin Tian appointed professor, co-director of the Center for Systems & Computational Biology at Wistar

Bin Tian was appointed professor at the The Wistar Institute Cancer Center.

A molecular biologist by training, Tian focuses on RNA biology and understanding how gene expression is regulated at the post-transcriptional level. His research involves interdisciplinary approaches, including molecular biology, genomics and computational biology, to study RNA biogenesis and metabolism. His lab was among the first to characterize the functional genomics of alternative polyadenylation and has uncovered its role in many diverse cellular processes.

Bins research has led to groundbreaking advances understanding the role of alternative polyadenylation in development and cell differentiation as well as in the context of cancer and cellular stress, Dario C. Altieri, Wistar president and CEO, director of the Cancer Center, and the Robert and Penny Fox Distinguished Professor, said in a statement. Bins work strengthens our RNA biology research and brings expertise in complex computational and genomic methods that will synergize with the work of our scientists across our research programs.

Tian joins Wistar from Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, where he was a professor. In 2003, he established his research group at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School where he became a tenured professor in 2014.

Tsvi Gal named head of infrastructure at MSK

Tsvi Gal has been appointed Head of Infrastructure of MSK.

Gal will lead the hospitals technological and architectural development and make technical recommendations that align with MSKs institutional and digital priorities.

Reporting to MSKs Chief Information Officer, Atefeh Riazi, Gal will work with other leaders in Digital Informatics and Technology Solutions to develop a modernized infrastructure and data environment in support of MSKs digital strategy, set by MSKs Chief Digital Officer Claus Jensen.

Seattle Cancer Care Alliance opens Acute Clinical Evaluation Clinic

Seattle Cancer Care Alliance opened an Acute Clinical Evaluation clinic. The three bed ACE clinic at SCCAs South Lake Union campus serves individuals receiving cancer care at SCCA who experience cancer- and treatment-related pain and symptoms that surpass their ability to manage at home.

Originally planned for summer 2020, the ACE clinic opened ahead of schedule so that cancer patients would not have to visit an urgent care or emergency room for cancer-treatment related issues, especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We are committed to advancing the standard of cancer care, regionally and beyond, and the ACE clinic is a reflection of that commitment, said Nancy Davidson, president and executive director of SCCA. At SCCA, we provide comprehensive care, and the ACE clinic provides our patients with access to care from our highly trained, compassionate staff, specifically for their treatment-related pain and other symptoms.

The ACE clinic is staffed by an oncology advanced practice provider and registered nurses specializing in cancer care. SCCA providers can refer patients to the clinic who need medical oncology care for pain and symptom management for issues including but not limited to gastrointestinal discomfort, fever/chills, dehydration, dizziness/lightheadedness, urinary tract infections, swallowing difficulties, swelling and skin conditions/rashes.

The ACE clinic does not provide emergency care and is limited to patients who are already receiving treatment from SCCA providers.

Robert Peter Gale receives ASJA award for Chernobyl, the HBO miniseries: Fact and Fiction

Robert Peter Gale has won an award in the opinion/op-ed category from the American Society of Journalists and Authors Inc. for his series Chernobyl, the HBO miniseries: Fact and Fiction (The Cancer Letter, May 17-June 21, 2019).

Gale is visiting professor of hematology at the Imperial College London, and executive director of clinical research in hematology and oncology at Celgene Corp.

Gales series is fortified by his firsthand experience with one of mankinds worst calamities, the ASJA judges wrote. He provides unsparing detail, outstanding insight, and intense perspective as he sorts fact from fiction as presented by HBOs 2019 miniseries.

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Patton named CEO of OneOncology - The Cancer Letter

Ventus Therapeutics, with offices in Waltham, Massachusetts and Montreal, closed on a $60 million Series A rounding led by founding investors Versant Ventures. GV, formerly Google Ventures, participated.

Ventus was founded by Harvard Medical School Professor Hao Wu and Yale University Professor Richard Flavell and others, with Marcelo Bigal as chief executive officer and president. Bigal joined Versant as a partner after leaving Purdue Pharma as chief medical officer. Before Purdue, Bigal was with Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and Merck & Co. Wu is Professor, Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard and Senior Investigator of Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Boston Childrens Hospital. Flavell is Sterling Professor of Immunobiology, Yale University and Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The monies raised are slotted to be used to advance three pipeline programs and expand Ventuss structural immunology platform. The innate immune systems inflammasome and nucleic acid sensing pathways are notoriously difficult to target, but Ventus believes its structural immunology platform can do so. The companys approach leverages protein engineering capabilities and expertise to create and express stable monomers of known targets.

The know-how and technologies within Ventus provide the opportunity to develop selective small molecule drugs for innate immunity, Bigal stated. These capabilities have enabled us to tackle several challenging and disease-relevant pathways. With the backing from Versant and GV, we can now translate our progress into innovative medicines for autoimmune diseases and oncology.

During the companys stealth period, the founders and the companys Inception Discovery Engine created the structural immunology platform, screened compounds against multiple targets, and moved into lead discovery. Going forward, Ventus plans to advance the internal pipeline while also evaluating discovery-stage partnerships with outside companies.

Although the company has not specified its targets, Bigal told the Boston Business Journal that the company is interested in lupus, osteoarthritis, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), refractory seizures, cancer and severe asthma, which is indeed a wide-ranging group of indications.

Other companies working on the innate immune system include Trillium Therapeutics and IFM Due, as well as Novartis, which acquired IFM Dues sister company, IFM Tre, in 2019.

Bigal clearly has ambitions, telling the Boston Business Journal, Regeneron didnt start big. Regeneron started by actually having a very unique and defining capability. Biogen didnt start big, Amgen didnt start big, Celgene didnt start big. But they all had something that actually, they could call their own. Theres a lot out there, but we do have something that is ours and only ours.

In addition to Wu and Flavel, the companys scientific founders include Judy Lieberman, Endowed Chair in Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School; Thomas Tuschl, Professor and head of the laboratory for RNA molecular biology at the Rockefeller University; Feng Shao, Investigator and Deputy Director for Academic Affairs, National Institute of Biological Sciences, Beijing; Douglas Green, Chair, Immunology and Co-Leader, Cancer Biology Program, St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital; and Russell Vance, Professor of Immunology and Pathogenesis at the University of California at Berkeley, and Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Ventus is positioned to open up new territory for developing better medicines that target innate immunity pathways behind many important diseases, said Brendan Bulik-Sullivan, a partner at GV. We are confident in the experienced leadership team and the scientific expertise that is propelling the companys drug development.

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Ventus Launches with $60 Million to Study Diseases of the Innate Immune System - BioSpace

Thomas Lynch. Born: July 17th, 1956

Died: April 1st, 2020

A chartered accountant by profession, Thomas Lynch spent a career in biopharmaceuticals specialising in research discovery and clinical trials. He devoted his personal energy and influence to public health and resourcing higher education, specifically in the area of human health.

A man of deep conviction and belief in equality, Lynch was a very active chair of the Mater hospital, acutely conscious that its location in the heart of Dublins north inner city meant it served a severely disadvantaged community while at the same time, as a level-four acute hospital, provided a national centre of excellence.

In his wider role as chair of Ireland East Hospital Group he sought to create a centre of excellence for patient care, health profession education, and translational medical research, matching the best in the world. This model would maximise the strengths of the two major acute hospitals, St Vincents University Hospital and the Mater, the nine other hospitals in the group, and University College Dublin as academic partner, by sharing clinical expertise, systems, academic training and research. The publication of the Governments Slintecare healthcare policy in July 2019 proposed six new regional integrated care organisations and, while embracing the plan to improve integration of community and hospital healthcare, he advocated strongly for the retention of hospital group networks and the need to incorporate an academic health centre model in the developing structures.

Born in Belfast, Lynch attended Queens University and served as president of the students union for two years before graduating with a degree in economics in 1978.

While at Queens he spent his summers working as a volunteer in the Mater Hospital in Belfast and developed an interest which subsequently became a passion for medicine and medical sciences.

Qualifying as an accountant, he worked extensively in the US and Europe for KPMG and when he began to work with lan and ICON his interest in the pharma sector really blossomed.

He became chief financial officer of lan in 1993 and helped its transition into a major biotechnology company. He played a central role in the foundation of Warner Chilcott and went on to pursue a very successful career spanning the boards of biopharmaceutical and clinical research companies including Microbiotica, Stamford Devices, Adherium, Evofem Biosciences, GW Pharma, Profectus Biosciences, Amarin, and ICON. He also served on the board of the IDA from 2000 to 2010.

His knowledge and expertise led to his appointment in 2011 as chair of Molecular Medicine Ireland, now Clinical Research Development Ireland, a collaborative entity involving UCD, RCSI, University College Cork, Trinity College Dublin, and NUI Galway and their associated academic hospitals. This research partnership is designed to accelerate the translation of biomedical research into improved diagnostics and therapies for patients. He was also a member of the advisory board of the Institute for Human Virology in the US.

A man of energy and integrity, he managed not only to put people at their ease but to bring them along in a path of consensus.

He enacted his philosophy that when you have, you have to give back. He chaired the Queens University Belfast Foundation for 12 years and, through his leadership and successful fundraising activities, Queens has become a major cancer centre awarded the Queen Elizabeth prize as the foremost cancer centre in the UK in 2012.

He became involved in UCD and along with his wife, Deirdre, contributed to the major campaign for the UCD Centre for Science. He supported other fundraising campaigns and initiatives such as the Global Virus Network, a group of internationally renowned virologists who come together to respond to new virus diseases such as bird flu, Sars and now, poignantly, Covid-19.

His own release valve was music. Typical of the man, it wasnt enough for him to attend performances and he took his patronage to a whole new level, becoming a trustee of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London, between 1998 and 2010; governor of the Royal Ballet Companies, and chair of Opera Ireland until 2011. He was a director of the Dublin Choral Foundation and chaired the cross-Border orchestra, Camerata Ireland. He was a great fan and supporter of UCD Choral Scholars and his quiet generosity even reached the boys of the Palestrina Choir on their most recent tour to the US.

Another example of his quiet benevolence is the fine Robert Ballagh portrait of James Joyce, UCDs most famous alumnus, which hangs in the foyer of OReilly Hall and forms a photo frame for generations of students on their graduation day.

A deeply spiritual man, Lynch was made a member of the Order of Knight of St Gregory by Pope Benedict and was chancellor of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre. He was awarded honorary doctorates by Queens and UCD.

He is survived by his wife Deirdre, and his three children, Jennifer, Rebecca and Mark.

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Thomas Lynch obituary: Pharma executive with passion for public health - The Irish Times

SAN FRANCISCO, May 7, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Gladstone Institutes is launching two new biomedical research institutes to broaden its impact on unsolved diseases. The first is the Gladstone Institute of Virology, led by Melanie Ott, MD, PhD, which will study the current coronavirus, as well as search for novel therapies against future infectious diseases. The second is the result of a close partnership with UC San Francisco (UCSF); the Gladstone-UCSFInstitute of Genomic Immunology, led by Alexander Marson, MD, PhD, will bring together genomics and immunology to develop next-generation cell therapies.

The two institutes are an evolution of the former Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology, which was led by Warner Greene, MD, PhD, since its establishment in 1991 and made significant contributions to the fight against HIV/AIDS.

"As the joint Gladstone-UCSF search committee met with eminent scientists from around the globe to find a new director for the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology, Melanie and Alex stood out as exceptional candidates in terms of their research accomplishments and their scientific vision," says Gladstone President Deepak Srivastava, MD, who chaired the search committee. "We realized they represent complementary, rather than alternative, directions for the future of Gladstone."

"They are both remarkable scientists," he adds. "We are honored to have them join our scientific leadership team and we look forward to the discoveries that will emerge from these new institutes."

The Gladstone Institute of Virology will focus on how viruses interface with human host cells to cause disease and how to intervene in that process. Ott's goal is to identify critical pathways that are common to human pathogenic viruses as a way to develop innovative treatments.

"Contrary to the current strategy of combining several drugs to treat one virus, we want to develop one drug against multiple viruses," says Ott, senior investigator at Gladstone and professor in the UCSF Department of Medicine. "As antibiotic resistance becomes an increasingly urgent problem, we will also delve into how we can use viruses as therapeutics, which involves using viruses against themselves or to fight bacteria."

Ott and her colleagues in the institute are concentrating their immediate efforts on the study of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. This work will continue to contribute important insights into the current pandemic through the development of rapid diagnostic, prevention, and treatment strategies, as well as help be better prepared for future coronavirus outbreaks and other emerging infections.

The Gladstone-UCSF Institute of Genomic Immunology will combine cutting-edge genomic technologies with gene editing and synthetic biology to better understand the genetic control of human immune cells and develop novel cell-based immunotherapies. Manipulation of the immune system holds great promise not only to treat cancer, but also for infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases, and maybe even neurologic conditions such as Alzheimer's disease.

"These rapidly advancing fields are starting to converge in ways that are too big for any single lab to take on," says Marson, senior investigator at Gladstone and associate professor in the Departments of Medicine and Microbiology and Immunology at the UCSF School of Medicine. "The impetus to start a new institute was the realization that we need to create an ecosystem to bring together people with different perspectives to think about transformative opportunities for how patients can be treated in the future."

Marson's institute will have lab space at Gladstone, adjacent to UCSF's Mission Bay campus, as well as at the University's Parnassus Heights campus, creating a unified community across the two campuses.

"The importance of pursuing advances in virology and immunology for human health has never been more clear, and we at UCSF applaud Gladstone's visionary leadership in establishing these two new institutes," says UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood, MBBS. "Under Melanie and Alex's excellent leadership, these research institutesincluding the first-ever Gladstone-UCSF institutewill complement and enhance UCSF's strengths in immunology and cell therapy, and will build on Gladstone's established expertise in the host-pathogen interface and gene editing technologies. Our long-standing partnership leverages the best of both institutions."

About the Search Committee

The joint Gladstone-UCSF search committee that recruited Melanie Ott and Alexander Marson was chaired byDeepak Srivastava. Other members included Katerina Akassoglou, Warner Greene, Todd McDevitt, Katherine Pollard, and Leor Weinberger from Gladstone, as well as Max Krummel, Susan Lynch, Tiffany Scharschmidt, Anita Sil, and Julie Zikherman from UCSF.

About Melanie Ott

A native of Germany, Melanie Ott, MD, PhD,is the director of the Gladstone Institute of Virology, a senior investigator at Gladstone Institutes, and a professor of medicine at UCSF.

Ott is passionate about using viruses to find fundamental new biology in host cells. She has made important discoveries about how virusesincluding the hepatitis C virus and Zikahijack human cells, and has contributed to efforts to eradicate HIV by gaining insight into viral transcriptional control. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, she pivoted the focus of her team and spearheaded the effort to establish a dedicated airborne pathogen BSL-3 lab to enable work on live SARS-CoV-2.

Prior to joining Gladstone in 2002, Ott started her own research group at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany, working closely with Nobel laureate Harald zur Hausen. She is a trained neurologist with an MD from the University of Frankfurt/Main in Germany. She transitioned to basic virology research during the AIDS crisis, earning a PhD in molecular medicine from the Elmezzi Graduate School in Manhasset, New York.

Ott has received several honors, including the Young Researcher Award at the European Conference on Experimental AIDS Research and the Hellman Award. She is a member of the Association of American Physicians and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. She is a recipient of the Chancellor's Award for Public Service from UCSF for her work as the founder and co-chair of the student outreach committee at Gladstone. Ott also received the California Life Sciences Association's Biotechnology Educator Pantheon Award for establishing thePUMAS (Promoting Underrepresented Minorities Advancing in the Sciences) internship programat Gladstone, which seeks to increase diversity in STEM.

About Alexander Marson

Alexander Marson, MD, PhD,is the director of the Gladstone-UCSF Institute of Genomic Immunology, a senior investigator at Gladstone Institutes, and an associate professor in the Departments of Medicine and Microbiology and Immunology at UCSF.

Marson is interested in how DNA controls the behavior of cells in the human immune system. He uses the power of CRISPR technology to genetically engineer cells to fight cancer, autoimmune diseases, and infectious diseases.

He completed his undergraduate studies at Harvard University, and earned an MPhil in biological sciencesfromCambridge. He earned his PhD at Whitehead Institute at MIT, where he worked with mentors Rick Young and Rudolf Jaenisch on transcriptional control of regulatory T cells and embryonic stem cells.

After completing his MD at Harvard Medical School and an internship and residency at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Marson joined UCSF in 2012 to complete clinical work as an infectious diseases fellow. He started his lab as a Sandler Faculty Fellow, before joining the faculty at UCSF and becoming scientific director of biomedicine at the Innovative Genomics Institute. He is also a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator and member of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.

About Gladstone Institutes

To ensure our work does the greatest good, Gladstone Institutes focuses on conditions with profound medical, economic, and social impactunsolved diseases. Gladstone is an independent, nonprofit life science research organization that uses visionary science and technology to overcome disease. It has an academic affiliation with the University of California, San Francisco.

About UCSF

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is exclusively focused on the health sciences and is dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care.UCSF Health, which serves as UCSF's primary academic medical center,includestop-ranked specialty hospitalsand other clinical programs, and has affiliations throughout the Bay Area. Learn more atucsf.edu, or see ourFact Sheet.

Sources

Gladstone Institutes: Megan McDevitt | megan.mcdevitt@gladstone.org | 415.734.2019

UCSF: Pete Farley |peter.farley@ucsf.edu | 415.502.4608

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Two New Research Institutes in the Bay Area - WFMZ Allentown

Five scientists have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. They are among 120 members and 26 international members elected.

The newly elected members from HMS are:

Joel Habener, professor of medicine and chief of the laboratory of molecular endocrinology at Massachusetts General Hospital

Judy Lieberman, professor of pediatrics and chair of cellular and molecular medicine at Boston Children's Hospital

Margaret Livingstone, the Takeda Professor of Neurobiology in the Blavatnik Institute

Olivier Pourqui, the Frank Burr Mallory Professor of Pathology at Brigham and Women's Hospital and professor of genetics in the Blavatnik Institute

Suzanne Walker, professor of microbiology in the Blavatnik Institute

Get more HMS news here

Other Harvard faculty elected this year include: Dennis Gaitsgory, professor of mathematics, Michael Kremer, the Gates Professor of Developing Societies in the Department of Economics and Wilfried Schmid, professor of mathematics.

The National Academy of Sciences is a nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, andwith the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicineprovides science, engineering, and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations. The National Academy of Sciences charter commits the Academy to provide scientific advice to the government whenever called upon by any government department. The NAS is committed to furthering science in America, and its members are active contributors to the international scientific community.

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Five HMS Faculty Elected to National Academy of Sciences - Harvard Medical School

Four UT Southwestern Medical Center scientists have been elected to the The National Academy of Sciences, one of the top honors for American scientists.

Peer scientists selected Sean Morrison, Kim Orth, Michael Rosen, and Sandra Schmid for their original research and achievements. UT Southwestern now has 25 members of the academy, the most of any institution in Texas.

Election to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences recognizes the pioneering contributions these scientists have made to advance our understanding of basic cellular function and molecular processes with application to addressing a broad spectrum of unmet medical needs including cancer and treatments for bacterial infections, said Dr. Daniel K. Podolsky, President of UT Southwestern Medical Center via release. Their election enriches the National Academy of Sciences efforts to provide data and advice on the nations most critical issues in science, health, and medicine.

Morrison is the Director of the Childrens Medical Center Research Institute (CRI) at UT Southwestern and Professor of Pediatrics and has worked in the fields of stem cell biology and cancer, and has created new methods to purify stem cells and allow them to persist and regenerate after injury. This recognizes, first and foremost, the work of many talented people over the years in my lab, most of whom have now gone on to their own laboratories at UT Southwestern and other institutions. Many of the key insights for the important discoveries that were made came from them so this really recognizes their work. Id also like to acknowledge all my colleagues, all of you at UT Southwestern and at Childrens Health, for the incredible environment that you created for science, Morrison said via release.

Orth is a Professor of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and has discovered biochemical mechanisms behind many bacterial infections, revealing how pathogens use host cells for their own benefit. I want to thank you all for this wonderful celebration, even though we have to Zoom . Thanks to this amazing institution, UT Southwestern, the wonderful administration including Drs. (Daniel) Podolsky and (David) Russell and the other administrators and staff. As (Chair of Molecular Biology) Eric Olson said, I have moved up the ranks here, starting as a technician, to a student, a postdoc, and now Professor, Orth said via release. And this path has driven my success. Another major key to my success is all of the talented people that have worked in my lab and my mentors, friends, collaborators, and, of course, my family.

Rosen is the Chair of Biophysics and Professor in the Cecil H. and Ida Green Comprehensive Center for Molecular, Computational, and Systems Biology, and investigates how cells compartmentalize processes without the use of membranes. When we began our work on phase separation about a decade ago, it really was not obvious at all whether this was going to be some weird, esoteric little thing that a few proteins did or (if) it was going to become a more general principle in biology. So it wasa tremendous risk that many of us took in making a move in this new direction. More than anything, I want to thank the various people whojoined me in taking this great risk a decade ago that I think has proved to be very much worthwhile, Rosen said via release.

Schmid is the Professor and Chair of Cell Biology and is recognized for her work on endocytosis, or how cells absorb nutrients and other molecules, including the major pathway for uptake within the cell. Ive been lucky to start and end my academic career at two unique institutions, Schmid said via release. As a PhD student in the early 80s, I was supported and challenged by my peers and faculty in the Biochemistry department at Stanford to ask important questions and do the most impactful research. Over decades, the leadership at UT Southwestern has inspired, supported and celebrated the very best research creating a collegial culture that breeds success.

This important recognition by their peers reflects the breadth and quality of research underway at UT Southwestern, and serves as inspiration for new generations of trainees and scientists to carry on the tradition of discovery that is the hallmark of distinguished academic medical centers, said Dr. W. P. Andrew Lee., Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, Provost and Dean of UT Southwestern Medical School via release.

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Four UTSW Researchers Named to The National Academy of Sciences - D Magazine

Clockwise from top left, Dmitri Basov, Lawrence Goldstein, Terence Hwa, Clifford Kubiak, Kimberly Prather

The National Academy of Sciences elected five professors affiliated with the University of California San Diego to membership in the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors bestowed on U.S. scientists and engineers.

UC San Diego faculty members Dmitri Basov, Lawrence Goldstein, Terence Hwa, Clifford Kubiak, and Kimberly Prather whose work spans fields ranging from medicine and biological sciences to atmospheric chemistry and physics were recognized Monday in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research, according to the Academy. They were among 120 American scientists and 26 international members named this year.

For a young institution such as ours, having five professors inducted into the National Academy of Sciences speaks volumes of the innovative and visionary nature of this university and our well-respected and accomplished faculty, said UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla. I am proud to see the career accomplishments of these five professors recognized on such a distinguished national platform, alongside the countrys other leading researchers.

This brings the total number of National Academy of Sciences members from UC San Diego to 86.

Dmitri Basov is an affiliated UC San Diego professor in the Department of Physics, where he served as chair between 2010 and 2015. He is also a Higgins professor in the Department of Physics at Columbia University, where he is the principal investigator of the Basov Infrared Laboratory, the director of the DOE Energy Frontiers Research Center on Programmable Quantum Materials and co-director of the Max Planck Society New York Center for Nonequilibrium Quantum Phenomena. His research interests include physics of quantum materials, superconductivity, two-dimensional materials and infrared nano-optics. Basov has received numerous prizes and awards including a Sloan Fellowship (1999), the Genzel Prize (2014), a Humboldt research award (2009), the Frank Isakson Prize, American Physical Society (2012), Moore Investigator (2014), the K.J. Button Prize (2019) and the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (U.S. Department of Defense, 2019).

Basov earned his PhD at the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1991). He served as postdoctoral research associate at McMaster University (1992-96) and as an assistant physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory (1996) before joining UC San Diego.

Lawrence Goldstein, PhD, is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Department of Neurosciences in the UC San Diego School of Medicine. He founded and directed the UC San Diego Stem Cell Program and the Sanford Stem Cell Clinical Center at UC San Diego Health and is founding scientific director of the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine. He was instrumental in the development and passage of Proposition 71 in 2004, which created an unprecedented $3 billion fund and infrastructure for stem cell medical research in California.

For more than 25 years, Goldsteins research focus has been to unravel how molecular motors interact with and control the behavior of axonal vesicles in neurons, and how defects in these processes underlie neurological conditions, such as Alzheimers disease (AD).In 2012, his lab was the first to create stem cell-derived in vitro neurons of sporadic and hereditary AD, giving researchers a much-needed method for studying the diseases causes and pathologies and a new tool for developing and testing drugs to treat a disorder that afflicts 5.4 million Americans.

More recently, this work has led to the identification of new cellular targets in AD drug development and a deeper understanding of AD genetics and disease progression. He is among the nations leading scientific figures in promoting AD research and evidence-based treatments.

Terence Hwa is the Presidential Chair and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics with a joint appointment in the Division of Biological Sciences. Trained in theoretical physics, Hwa launched a biology wet-lab 15 years ago and developed a unique quantitative approach to studying bacterial physiology. During this time, the Hwa Research Group established a number of bacterial growth laws and formulated a principle of proteomic resource allocation. This line of study culminated in a theory of bacterial growth control, accurately predicting bacterial behaviors and gene expression for a variety of environmental and genetic perturbations, and resolving a number of long-standing mysteries in microbiology. Hwas research team continues to extend its quantitative approaches to characterize bacterial species singly and in consortium, to uncover underlying principles governing the spatiotemporal dynamics of microbial communities.

Hwa is a champion of interdisciplinary research. In 2001, he launched an extended program at the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, which has been regarded as a watershed event in bringing physicists to post-genome biology. He is also the founder and co-director of the Quantitative Biology specialization program at UC San Diego. Hwa received fellowships and awards from the Sloan, Beckman, Guggenheim and Burroughs-Wellcome Foundations, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Microbiology. Hwa received his PhD in physics from MIT. After postdoctoral research at Harvard University in condensed-matter physics, he joined UC San Diegos physics faculty in 1995.

Clifford Kubiak is a Distinguished Professor and former chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, who holds the Harold C. Urey Chair in Chemistry. His Kubiak Research Group at UC San Diego is especially known for its work on developing catalysts for the electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide. Kubiak is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Chemical Society (ACS). He has received several awards including the prestigious ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry (2018), the Tolman Medal (2018), the Basolo Medal for Outstanding Research in Inorganic Chemistry (2015), the Inter-American Photochemical Society, Award in Photochemistry (2013) and the ACS Award in Inorganic Chemistry (2012). Kubiak has held visiting appointments at Tohoku University, University of Chicago and University of Erlangen, and he was a visiting associate in chemistry at the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis at Caltech. He has served on the Editorial Advisory Boards of Accounts of Chemical Research, Inorganic Chemistry and Materials Science in Semiconductor Processing. He is the author of more than 290 scientific articles.

Before joining UC San Diego in 1998, Kubiak was a faculty member at Purdue University (1982-98). Before that he was a postdoctoral associate with Mark S. Wrighton at MIT (1980-81). He received his PhD in chemistry from the University of Rochester (1980), where he worked with Richard Eisenberg.

Kimberly Prather is a Distinguished Professor who holds a joint appointment between UC San Diegos Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Prathers research focuses on understanding the influence of atmospheric aerosols on clouds, human health, and climate. Early in her career, she developed a technique known as aerosol time-of-flight mass spectrometry that is widely used in atmospheric field studies around the world to determine the origin and chemistry of aerosols. She is the founding director of the National Science Foundation Center for Aerosol Impacts on Chemistry of the Environment (CAICE), the largest federally funded center in the history of UC San Diego. CAICE researchers replicate ocean/atmosphere interactions in a laboratory setting to study the influence of ocean biology on atmospheric chemistry, clouds, and climate.

Prather joined UC San Diego in 2001. She was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2010. In 2019, she became the first woman at UC San Diego to be elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Previously this year, she won the 2020 Frank H. Field and Joe L. Franklin Award for Outstanding Achievement in Mass Spectrometry from the American Chemical Society. She received her PhD in chemistry from the University of California, Davis.

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Five UC San Diego Professors Elected to National Academy of Sciences - UC San Diego Health

Antimicrobial resistance is a global health threat that requires international collaboration between researchers from multiple disciplines

Around the world, millions of people are at risk of contracting infections and illnesses that cannot be treated becausethe causative agents superbugs are resistant to medicines. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in which bacteria, parasites, viruses and fungi have developed ways to survive treatments that once killed them is a serious threat to global public health.

At the University of Bristol, researchers from numerous disciplines are working together to understand and control AMR in an effort to save lives at home and abroad. The majority of the worlds efforts to address AMR are around bacteria, says Matthew Avison, a professor of molecular bacteriology at the universitys School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine. In the UK, E. coli causes more deaths than any other bacterium, he says. Over time, it has adapted and becomeresistant to the drugs that doctors had previously used to treat it.

His team investigates E. coli, among other pathogenic bacteria. But simply understanding a bacteriums structure and behaviour is not enough.

Our successes are really due to our work with other disciplines, Professor Avison says. Our discoveries, which would otherwise be fairly basic regarding the behaviour of bacteria, can be applied to useful things.

Professor Avison leads the Bristol AMR interdisciplinary research network, funded by the Wellcome Trust. At Bristol, were good at interdisciplinary work, he says. Because the geography of the university is relatively small, and were close to other departments and schools, we can physically interact with each other.

This is how he and his team came to work with a group of physicists and be instrumental in spinning out a company. There are ways you can visualise and collect data with instrumentation that we in the biological sciences arent familiar with, he says. There were physicists at Bristol, however, who were experts in optics and, through collaboration, developed a device that can visualise individual bacteria and watch them move.

This invention has important implications for testing whether bacteria are resistant to a specific antibiotic. Bacteria move differently in the presence of antibiotics, Professor Avison says. If the antibiotics are working and killing them, the bacteria eventually stop moving.

The bacteriologists supplied the physicists with antibiotics and bacteria, while the physicists provided an imaging technique not initially developed for use in the biological sciences. This technique, Total Internal Reflection Microscopy (TIRM), is the cornerstone of Vitamica, a spin-out company specialising in rapid AMR diagnostics, and is now being trialled in hospitals, testing bacteria in patients urine. TIRM can image how the bacteria behave when in the presence of a specific antibiotic: if they do not die, then they are resistant to that drug.

The reason why its so good is that its rapid, says Profesor Avison. You put a sample in and, in less than an hour, you can tell if the antibiotic will work or not. He reiterates that it is still being trialled, but that it is a potentially very important technology in the fight against AMR.

Another vital collaboration for Professor Avison is with colleagues in veterinary science. Kristen Reyher heads the AMR Force, a research group within the Bristol Vet School that examines key topics about veterinary AMR.

In our projects, weve tried to lead with behaviour and social science, she says. We realised that you can have the best solutions and know all the technical answers, but still not be able to change the situation because you arent communicating in the right way.

One recent project spearheaded a method of farmer peer-to-peer learning, to try and change their behaviour with respect to antibiotics. As a vet, I think about disease all day, every day, Dr Reyher says. I dont think about the myriad things that farmers have to balance, but their peers do. They are the best people to listen and challenge one another to be the best stewards of these important medicines.

This awareness of context is fundamental to Bristol researchers AMR efforts. Maria Paula Escobar, another researcher at Bristol Vet School, is interested in how farmers in different countries use antibiotics and how this has an impact on AMR. She has projects in Colombia and collaborates with Dr Reyher and Professor Avison on one in Argentina.

There is a perception that countries just need more time and more money to address excessive antibiotic usage through targets, says Dr Escobar. This lacks an understanding of the different cultural contexts in which antibiotics are used. Antibiotics are not always used for the same reasons and those involved are not always veterinarians and farmers. In Europe, you cannot get hold of an antibiotic if a veterinarian has not prescribed it. That is not the case in many countries.

Bristol researchers also have AMR projects in Thailand, China, sub-Saharan Africa and more. Were not just looking at this as a UK problem, Professor Avison says. Low-income communities, particularly in developing countries, are disproportionately affected by healthcare problems, including AMR. Overcrowding and poor sanitation, for example, are driving infections, and people cant get access to new antibiotics [that would fight resistant infections] they are stuck with the old ones.

And a global problem, such as AMR, requires global collaboration. We couldnt do our work [in other countries] without great collaborations with local researchers, Professor Avison says. All of the work we do involves people going out and collecting samples from farms, from the environment, from people, which is done by researchers in those countries.

Training local researchers is part of this support, he says. These skills are becoming increasingly vital in an age of AMR a problem which will never go away entirely.

I dont think well ever solve the problem, Professor Avison concludes. Bacteria are very adaptable. They will always evolve and come back to us. That is why researchers have to be adaptable, too.

Find out more about the University of Bristol.

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Taking the fight to superbugs - Times Higher Education (THE)

In the early 1950s, psychiatrists began treating schizophrenia with a new drug called chlorpromazine. Seven decades later, the drug is still used as an anti-psychotic.

But now scientists have discovered that the drug, also known as Thorazine, can do something entirely different. It can stop the new coronavirus that causes Covid-19 from invading cells.

Driven by the pandemics spread, research teams have been screening thousands of drugs to see if they have this unexpected potential to fight the coronavirus. Theyve tested the drugs on dishes of cells, and a few dozen candidates have made the first cut.

Theyre startlingly diverse. Some, like chlorpromazine, have been used for years not for viral infections, but for conditions including cancer, allergies, arthritis, even irregular menstrual periods. Other drugs have not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, but they have already proven safe in clinical trials. Their track records might help them get approved faster than a drug designed from scratch.

As researchers publish findings on these promising drugs, theyre starting tests on animals and people to see how well they perform. No one should try self-medicating with any of the drugs for Covid-19, the researchers warned, since they may have dangerous side effects and have yet to be proven effective in clinical trials.

Im going to be brutally honest with you: 95 to 98 percent of these are going to fail, said Sumit K. Chanda, a virologist at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in La Jolla, Calif. But we only need one or two.

The strategy Dr. Chanda and other researchers are using is known as drug repurposing. It has a history that started decades before Covid-19 appeared. In 1987, for example, the cancer drug zidovudine became the first F.D.A.-approved drug against H.I.V.

The most obvious drugs to repurpose against the new coronavirus are those that work against other viruses. One high-profile antiviral being investigated is remdesivir, which Gilead Sciences previously tested unsuccessfully as an antiviral against Ebola.

But over the years, researchers have found some drugs that originally had nothing to do with viruses turn out to be good antivirals, too. Its just hard to tell in advance which ones have this hidden power.

We dont know a lot about why drugs do what they do, said Matthew Frieman, a virologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

In 2012, another coronavirus disease known as MERS emerged in the Middle East. Dr. Frieman responded by starting a drug-repurposing study. He and his colleagues tested 290 F.D.A.-approved drugs and found that 27 of them blocked the MERS virus from infecting cells. They also proved effective against the related coronavirus that causes SARS.

Dr. Frieman and his colleagues have now tested those drugs against the new coronavirus, and made a preliminary report that 17 of them showed promise. Along with chlorpromazine, they include drugs for disorders as varied as Parkinsons disease and leukemia.

Recently, Dr. Chandas team in California began a mammoth search of their own for drugs to repurpose for Covid-19. They doused infected cells with 13,000 compounds and looked for ones that slowed down the virus. They then narrowed down these candidates by reducing their doses, in order to mimic the levels that would end up in a patients lungs.

On April 17, Dr. Chandas team reported in a preprint, which has not yet been peer-reviewed by a journal, that six drugs showed particular promise, including one for osteoporosis and one thats been investigated as treatment for arthritis.

Yet another team has been trying to find drugs that work against coronavirus and also to learn why they work.

The team, led by Nevan Krogan at the University of California, San Francisco, has focused on how the new coronavirus takes over our cells at the molecular level.

The researchers determined that the virus manipulates our cells by locking onto at least 332 of our own proteins. By manipulating those proteins, the virus gets our cells to make new viruses.

Dr. Krogans team found 69 drugs that target the same proteins in our cells the virus does. They published the list in a preprint last month, suggesting that some might prove effective against Covid-19.

The researchers shipped the compounds to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Those labs tried them out on infected cells.

Brian Shoichet, a pharmaceutical chemist at U.C.S.F. who helped build the list, was keenly aware of how often drug repurposing fails.

I wasnt that hopeful at all, he said.

It turned out that most of the 69 candidates did fail. But both in Paris and New York, the researchers found that nine drugs drove the virus down.

The things were finding are 10 to a hundred times more potent than remdesivir, Dr. Krogan said. He and his colleagues published their findings Thursday in the journal Nature.

Strikingly, the drugs hit only two targets.

One group temporarily stops the creation of new proteins inside cells. This group includes molecules that are being tested as cancer drugs, such as ternatin-4 and Zotatifin.

Dr. Shoichet speculated that these compounds starve the virus of the proteins it needs to make new copies of itself. This attack may suddenly halt the viral production line.

Viruses are actually delicate beasts, he said.

The other compounds home in on a pair of proteins known as Sigma-1 and Sigma-2 receptors. These receptors are part of the cells communication network, helping the cell withstand stress in its environment.

Why does the new coronavirus need to manipulate Sigma receptors? We dont really know, Dr. Shoichet said.

One possibility is that the virus uses Sigma receptors to make a cell produce more of the oily molecules that form membranes for new viruses.

Among the substances that act on Sigma receptors and block the virus, the researchers found, are the hormone progesterone and the drugs clemastine and cloperastine, both used against allergies.

In addition, Dr. Krogan said that all of Dr. Friemans candidates, including chlorpromazine, target Sigma receptors. A third of Dr. Chandas candidates do too, he said.

The researchers also tested dextromethorphan, a Sigma-receptor-targeting drug in many brands of cough syrup. They were surprised to find that, at least in their cell samples, it actually made infections of this coronavirus worse.

In their paper, the researchers raised the possibility that Covid-19 patients may want to avoid dextromethorphan. Dr. Krogan emphasized that more study would be needed to see if it actually increases coronavirus infection in humans. But if it was me, he said, to be cautious, I would not be taking these cough syrups.

The anti-malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine act on the Sigma receptor. Dr. Krogans team found that they also fought the virus in cells. Those compounds were extolled by President Trump for weeks despite no firm evidence they actually helped cure Covid-19.

Dr. Frieman and Dr. Chanda also found that chloroquine-related drugs worked fairly well in slowing the virus in cell cultures. But Dr. Chanda found they didnt work as well as the six compounds at the top of his list.

Dr. Chanda expressed skepticism about the chloroquine drugs, noting their failure against other viruses.

Weve been down this road multiple times, he said. I would happy to be wrong about this.

Last week, the F.D.A. issued a warning against using hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine for Covid-19 outside the hospital setting or a clinical trial. Thats because the drug has a well-known risk for causing irregular heart rhythms.

In their new study, Dr. Krogan and his colleagues ran an experiment that might explain this risk at the molecular level.

They found that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine bind not just to Sigma receptors, but to a heart protein called hERG, which helps control heartbeats.

I think its a rational argument, said Dr. Frieman, who was not involved in the Nature study. Chloroquine does a lot of things in the cell.

Dr. Krogan and his colleagues found that other compounds target Sigma proteins in a more promising way.

An experimental anticancer compound called PB28 is 20 times more potent than hydroxychloroquine against the coronavirus, for example. But its far less likely to grab onto the hERG protein.

Dr. Chanda said that PB28 in particular looks really fantastic.

Dr. Krogan said that studies are underway to test the drug in hamsters to see if that promise holds. Dr. Frieman and his colleagues are starting animal studies of their own, as well as testing drugs on a chip lined with human lung cells.

Timothy Sheahan, a virologist at the University of North Carolina who was not involved in the new studies cautioned that it will take more testing to make sure these promising drugs are safe to give to patients ravaged by Covid-19.

Cancer drugs, for example, can be like a sledgehammer to your body, he noted. Are you going to want to do that when someone is really sick?

In addition to animal tests and clinical trials, researchers are now planning to tweak the structure of these drugs to see if they can work even more effectively against the virus.

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Old Drugs May Find a New Purpose: Fighting the Coronavirus - The New York Times

A team of CU Anschutz researchers, along with scientists at the Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic, Stanford University and others, have won a grant from the American Heart Association (AHA) to investigate the effects of Covid-19 on the bodys cardiovascular and cerebrovascular systems.

The Covid-19 and Its Cardiovascular Impact Rapid Response Grant received over 750 proposals from institutions around the nation, one of the largest responses the AHA ever had to a single topic request for applications. The association awarded $1.2 million to teams at 12 of those institutions, including CU Anschutz.

Despite extensive evidence of clinically important cardiac involvement in some Covid-19 patients, virtually nothing is known about how the virus is affecting the heart and why patients with a history of heart problems are more at risk, said Michael Bristow, MD, PhD, professor of cardiology and leader of the team from the CU School of Medicine. We dont even know if the virus can directly infect heart muscle cells.

But based on work done in his lab over the last 15 years, Bristow and his team know that the receptor the Covid-19 virus binds to is increased in abnormal heart muscle and other mechanisms may be responsible for patients with histories of heart problems being more susceptible to the cardiac effects of Covid.

In this study of Covid-19 patients with evidence of cardiac involvement with catheters, well be taking samples of the heart muscle, measuring the amount as well as the cell-localization of the virus, Bristow said. Well then investigate how the virus is altering the hearts histologic and molecular makeup. Hopefully, these findings will set the stage for more specific treatment of cardiac involvement in COVID-19 disease.

The other team members include: Natasha Altman, MD, Cardiology; John Messenger, MD, Cardiology; Edward Gill, MD, Cardiology; Thomas Campbell, MD, Infectious Diseases and Amber Berning, MD, Pathology.

The Cleveland Clinic will serve as the initiatives COVID-19 Coordinating Center. A team from this center will collect results from the research projects and coordinate the dissemination of all study findings.

Several of these studies focus on disparity and underserved populations and many with pre-existing conditions and thats critical because were seeing these people coming in sicker and getting sicker faster from the complications of COVID-19 and we need to understand whats causing that and how we can help them, said American Heart Association president Robert A. Harrington, M.D., FAHA, Arthur L. Bloomfield Professor of Medicine and chair of the department of medicine at Stanford University.

The research projects are considered fast-tracked to report results as quickly as possible to address the COVID-19 crisis. Research will get underway as early as June 1, with findings expected in less than six to nine months for most of the studies. Several researchers aim to have actionable outcomes before a new anticipated wave of COVID-19 strikes in the winter.

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CU Anschutz Researchers Win Grant to Study Covid-19 Effects on Heart - CU Anschutz Today

Premier League players who have suffered COVID-19 symptoms will undergo additional testing for potential lung and heart problems as part of the return-to-play protocol.

Top-flight teams will discuss on Friday the detailed proposals to allow a phased return to small group sessions and then normal squad training before a proposed June restart.

The new rules include players needing to wear face masks or snoods in training and all footballs to be disinfected.

But before this Training Return Date, all clubs must undertake a risk assessment of every player for potential respiratory and/or cardiac complications associated with COVID-19.

For players who are suspected or confirmed sufferers, the preferred testing will see doctors in PPE carrying out blood tests and ECG (electrocardiogram) scans.

The protocol states: All exercise will be stopped until blood results have returned to normal, which may take weeks or months as ongoing elevated blood results may indicate ongoing inflammation and as such risk of sudden arrhythmic death.

Ian Hall, Professor of Molecular Medicine at Nottingham University, said: Groups of individuals, including footballers, who have had COVID19 will include many who had disease which was very mild, with minimal symptoms, and a small number who had more severe disease, potentially resulting in a hospital admission with viral pneumonia.

In general, disease has been more severe in patients who are elderly and have other medical conditions such as high blood pressure, heart disease or chronic lung disease.

"One would therefore expect most premier league footballers who had COVID19 to have had mild forms of the disease.

"I would predict most footballers will not have long term complications if they have had COVID19, but there may be a small number who have some reduction in physical fitness due to having had more severe disease.

"So monitoring simple indicators such as lung function and cardiac function would make sense.

Premier league footballers obviously require high levels of overall fitness, so even a small reduction in lung or heart function could have significant effects on performance.

All players and staff will have to undergo COVID-19 tests at the Premier League's expense within 48 hours of returning to group sessions at the training ground.

Any positive tests will see individuals isolated for seven days before a re-test.

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Premier League stars with coronavirus symptoms to have lung and heart tests before return - Mirror Online

OXFORD, England & BURLINGTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Blue Earth Diagnostics, a Bracco company focused on molecular imaging diagnostics, today announced that its CEO, Dr Jonathan Allis, has been appointed as Chair of the UK Rapid Testing Consortium (UK-RTC) for COVID-19 by the UK Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC). The UK-RTC has been formed to draw upon the expertise and resources of the UKs life sciences industries in a combined effort to design and develop a home use antibody test to determine whether people have developed antibodies (and perhaps, potential immunity) after contracting and recovering from COVID-19. It combines the science of Oxford University with the development and manufacturing skills of four UK diagnostic companies: Abingdon Health in England, BBI Solutions in Wales, Omega Diagnostics in Scotland and CIGA Healthcare in Northern Ireland. In his role as Chair of the UK-RTC, Dr Allis will serve as an independent liaison between the participating diagnostic companies and the government. The part-time engagement is of a limited duration, during which time Dr Allis will retain his responsibilities as CEO of Blue Earth Diagnostics. The UK-RTC Chair is independent of the diagnostic companies involved, and Blue Earth Diagnostics is not otherwise engaged in this initiative.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200501005100/en/

Jonathan Allis, CEO of Blue Earth Diagnostics (Photo: Business Wire)

When the DHSC invited me to chair a consortium to develop a COVID-19 antibody test based on new technology developed at Oxford University, and in light of the urgency of the COVID-19 health crisis worldwide, I felt it was my absolute duty to say yes, said Jonathan Allis, D. Phil, CEO of Blue Earth Diagnostics. Testing for the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (antigen testing) and immune response after COVID-19 (antibody testing) is possible in large hospital and public and private labs now, but what we really need is a home test (somewhat similar to a home pregnancy test), which can be used to test the whole population. This would help us understand how much of the population has been exposed to the virus and help determine plans for people getting back to work.

Dr Allis continued, Medical diagnostics are critical to informing proper care and treatment for patients, and I feel honoured that my industry experience in the rapid development of healthcare diagnostics may be of value in this effort.

This is a great story of how our manufacturers in the UK are stepping up to the challenge of COVID-19, and I am hopeful that this product will make an impact in our battle against this terrible disease," said Lord Bethell, Health Minister for Innovation and Testing. This is a big step in the right direction. People want to know if theyve had the disease, with a test they can trust.

Jonathan Allis is the founding CEO of Blue Earth Diagnostics. Prior to this role, Dr Allis was the General Manager for PET at GE Healthcare Life Sciences, and had global responsibility for GE Healthcares PET agent and PET synthesis platforms business. He has previously held positions in R&D, Marketing and Product Development at GE Healthcare, Amersham plc, Siemens Medical Solutions and Oxford Magnet Technology, in the UK, USA and Germany.

Dr Allis is Non-Executive Chairman of Polarean Imaging plc and previously served as Co-Chair of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imagings Industry Value Initiative. He has an undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Cape Town and a doctorate in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford.

About Blue Earth Diagnostics

Blue Earth Diagnostics is a leading molecular imaging diagnostics company focused on the development and commercialization of novel PET imaging agents to inform clinical management and guide care for cancer patients in areas of unmet medical need. Formed in 2014, Blue Earth Diagnostics is led by recognized experts in the clinical development and commercialization of innovative nuclear medicine products. The companys first approved and commercially available product is Axumin (fluciclovine F 18), a novel molecular imaging agent approved in the United States and European Union for use in PET imaging to detect and localize prostate cancer in men with a diagnosis of biochemical recurrence. Fluciclovine F 18 has a broad range of other potential applications in cancer imaging and Blue Earth Diagnostics is investigating the molecule for other cancers including in neuro-oncology. The company's pipeline includes innovative Prostate Specific Membrane Antigen (PSMA)-targeted radiohybrid ("rh") agents, which are a clinical-stage, investigational class of theranostic compounds, with potential applications in both the imaging and treatment of prostate cancer. Blue Earth Diagnostics is a subsidiary of Bracco Imaging S.p.A., a global leader in diagnostic imaging. For more information, visit: http://www.blueearthdiagnostics.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200501005100/en/

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Blue Earth Diagnostics CEO Jonathan Allis Appointed Chair of UK Rapid Testing Consortium (UK-RTC) for COVID-19 by UK Department of Health and Social...

Researchers at Stanford Medicine are thinking up new ways to tackle one of the world's most daunting diseases: cancer.

My colleague Krista Conger and I tag-teamed an article in the new issue of Stanford Medicine magazine that features some of the latest and most innovative tactics Stanford researchers are pursuing to detect cancer earlier and stop the disease in its tracks.

More than a dozen scientists told us about the impressive research that's helping patients survive what was once a death sentence.

"In biomedicine, we're faced all the time with intractable problems, and cancer is one of these problems that is very difficult to solve," biochemistry professorSteven Artandi, MD, PhD, the Laurie Kraus Lacob Director of theStanford Cancer Institute, told us. "Often, these problems are solved by thinking about them in a completely different perspective, and that's the kind of attitude and approach that we foster at Stanford."

In this feature, we highlighted a handful of new diagnostics Stanford researchers are developing, such as smart toilets to detect signs of cancer from stool and urine. We also described several treatments that are in clinical trials or under development.

In the lab of of Garry Nolan, PhD, for instance, scientists are using a powerful and complex cell analysis technique called multiplexed ion beam imaging to detect and measure levels of certain molecules, including those that flag cancer. The research could reveal a new, deeper understanding of cancer at a molecular level.

Among the treatments featured in the article is one some people call a "cancer vaccine," a breakthrough from the lab of oncologist Ronald Levy, MD, who has dedicated his career to fighting blood cancers. Unlike a traditional vaccination, which prevents disease before it starts, this one bolsters the body's ability to battle disease that already has a foothold.

Levy injects tumors with an agent that boosts activity of immune cells called T cells, after the T cells have infiltrated the cancer and begun to fight it.

Levy and his colleagues have shown that their strategy could eliminate established human tumors in mice not only at the site of injection, but also at distant sites throughout the body.

Image by Keith Negley

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Outsmarting cancer: Innovative treatments and diagnostics offer new hope - Stanford Medical Center Report

Biotech executive, Julia Berretta, Ph.D., is named Chief Executive Officer

Genespire, a biotechnology company focused on the development of transformative gene therapies for patients affected by genetic diseases, announced today the successful close of a 16M Series A financing from Sofinnova Partners, a leading European life sciences venture capital firm based in Paris, London and Milan. The company also announced the appointment of Julia Berretta, Ph.D., as Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board of Directors. Graziano Seghezzi, Managing Partner at Sofinnova Partners, and Lucia Faccio, Ph.D., Partner at Sofinnova Partners, will also join the Board.

Genespire was founded in March 2020 as a spin-off of the San Raffaele-Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy (SR-Tiget), one of the worlds leading cell and gene therapy research institutes spearheaded by gene therapy pioneer Prof. Luigi Naldini. The Company was co-founded by Fondazione Telethon and the San Raffaele Hospital, along with Prof. Naldini and Dr. Alessio Cantore.

The funds will be used to advance Genespires leading-edge platform technologies towards the development of novel gene therapies in two main areas: primary immunodeficiencies and metabolic genetic diseases.

"Our mission has always been to develop breakthrough solutions for genetic diseases," said Prof. Naldini, Genespires co-founder and Director of SR-Tiget. "This financing enables the company to translate our innovative science and early stage programs into clinical development. The appointment of Dr. Berretta as CEO is a major reinforcement of our team."

Sofinnova Partners Dr. Faccio added, "Genespire is an exciting investment with all the key ingredients for success: Outstanding scientists that developed the first ex-vivo gene therapy to market, experienced executives brought in through Sofinnova Partners network and game changing technologies that have the potential to impact the lives of patients with genetic diseases."

"I am thrilled to be joining Genespire and such exceptional scientific founders," said Dr. Berretta. "Genespire was born of decades of experience in the gene therapy field, and is optimally positioned to advance transformative therapies for patients affected by severe inherited diseases."

Dr. Berretta was part of the Executive Committee of Cellectis S.A., a Nasdaq-listed clinical stage gene editing company developing CAR-T cell therapies for cancer, where she led business development as well as strategic planning. She is also an independent Board member of Treefrog Therapeutics, an innovative stem cell company.

About Genespire

Genespire is a biotechnology company focused on the development of transformative gene therapies for patients affected by genetic diseases, particularly primary immunodeficiencies and inherited metabolic diseases. Based in Milan, Italy, Genespire was founded in March 2020 by the gene therapy pioneer Prof. Luigi Naldini, Dr. Alessio Cantore, Fondazione Telethon and Ospedale San Raffaele. It is a spin-off of SR-Tiget, a world leading cell and gene therapy research institute and is backed by Sofinnova Partners. http://www.genespire.com

About Sofinnova Partners

Sofinnova Partners is a leading European venture capital firm specialized in Life Sciences. Based in Paris, France, with offices in London and Milan, the firm brings together a team of 40 professionals from all over Europe, the U.S. and Asia. The firm focuses on paradigm-shifting technologies alongside visionary entrepreneurs. Sofinnova Partners invests across the Life Sciences value chain as a lead or cornerstone investor, from very early-stage opportunities to late-stage/public companies. It has backed nearly 500 companies over more than 48 years, creating market leaders around the globe. Today, Sofinnova Partners has over 2 billion under management.

For more information, please visit: http://www.sofinnovapartners.com

About Fondazione Telethon

Fondazione Telethon is a non-profit organisation created in 1990 as a response to the appeals of a patient association group of stakeholders, who saw scientific research as the only real opportunity to effectively fight genetic diseases. Thanks to the funds raised through the television marathon, along with other initiatives and a network of partners and volunteers, Telethon finances the best scientific research on rare genetic diseases, evaluated and selected by independent internationally renowned experts, with the ultimate objective of making the treatments developed available to everyone who needs them. Throughout its 30 years of activity, Fondazione Telethon has invested more than 528 million in funding more than 2.630 projects to study more than 570 diseases, involving over 1.600 scientists. Fondazione Telethon has made a significant contribution to the worldwide advancement of knowledge regarding rare genetic diseases and of academic research and drug development with a view to developing treatments. For more information, please visit: http://www.telethon.it

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About Ospedale San Raffaele

Ospedale San Raffaele (OSR) is a clinical-research-university hospital established in 1971 to provide international-level specialised care for the most complex and difficult health conditions. OSR is part of Gruppo San Donato, the leading hospital group in Italy. The hospital is a multi-specialty center with over 60 clinical specialties; it is accredited by the Italian National Health System to provide care to both public and private, national and international patients. Research at OSR focuses on integrating basic, translational and clinical activities to provide the most advanced care to our patients. The institute is recognized as a global authority in molecular medicine and gene therapy, and is at the forefront of research in many other fields. Ospedale San Raffaele is a first-class institute which treats many diseases and stands out for the deep interaction between clinical and scientific area. This makes the transfer of scientific results from the laboratories to the patients bed easier. Its mission is to improve knowledge of diseases, identify new therapies and encourage young scientists and doctor to grow professionally. For more information, please visit: http://www.hsr.it

About the San Raffaele-Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy (SR-Tiget)

Based in Milan, Italy, the San Raffaele-Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy (SR-Tiget) is a joint venture between the Ospedale San Raffaele and Fondazione Telethon. SR-Tiget was established in 1995 to perform research on gene transfer and cell transplantation and translate its results into clinical applications of gene and cell therapies for different genetic diseases.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200429005417/en/

Contacts

Julia BerrettaCEO, Genespire S.r.linfo@genespire.com +39 02 83991300

Bommy LeeHead of Communications, Sofinnova Partnersblee@sofinnovapartners.com +33 (0) 6 47 71 38 11

North AmericaRooneyPartners LLCKate Barrettekbarrette@rooneyco.com +1 212 223 0561

FranceStrategiesImage (S&I)Anne Reinanne.rein@strategiesimage.com +33 6 03 35 92 05

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Genespire Secures 16 Million Series A Financing from Sofinnova Partners to Advance Transformative Gene Therapies - Yahoo Finance

As much of the United States braces for its Covid-19 peak in coming weeks, state and public health officials are looking ahead to prepare the country to incrementally phase out stay-at-home orders. While some experts have projected timelines for when it's safe to reopen parts of the country, former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb' recently released a report that outlines explicit criteria states should meet before they flip the switch:

Covid-19 weekly webinar: What health care leaders need to know

Gottlieb's conditions emphasize the critical roles testing and surveillance play in slowing the spread of the virusthe first step to relaxing social restrictions.

Ultimately, we think a community's ability to monitor the spread of Covid-19 boils down to their ability to answer three key questions about their population: Who is immune? Who is contagious? Where is the virus still spreading?

The narrative around a community's readiness to reopen businesses largely hinges on measuring potential immunity through the availability and efficacy of antibody testing. These tests, also known as serological tests, measure the amount of antibodies (IgG and IgM) in a person's bloodeven those considered asymptomatic. Understanding the amount of antibodies in a population clarifies the full scope of community spread and reveals the virus' true transmission and fatality rates.

However, antibody testing is no a silver bullet. Stories of "reactivated" cases are reminders of how little is known about a patient's immunity after recovering from the virus. Dawn Bowdish, a professor of pathology and molecular medicine at McMaster University in Ontario told Scientific American, "We simply don't know yet what it takes to be effectively protected from this infection."

Where is it happening already?

After a small county in Colorado failed to launch a county-wide serology testing program, large-panel studies using serological tests by the National Institutes of Health and Beaumont Health Research Institute are center stage for mass Covid-19 immunity research. Findings from Beaumont's study will be particularly valuable as it is open to all 38,000 Beaumont Health employees, making it the largest study focused on the susceptibility of health care workers and their antibody responses to Covid-19. Should results prove fruitful, communities could use a variety of tactics to open up economic activity and jobs to immune individuals, such as immunity passports being considered in other countries.

What is in the way of doing more?

The short answer here is a lack of FDA-approved antibody tests. Compared to PCR tests, developing an accurate antibody test is particularly difficult because the threat of false positive is high. If the test lacks specificity, previous exposure to other viruses within the coronavirus family, like any of the four that cause the common cold, can lead to a false positive. So far, three antibody tests have EUA approval from the FDA: Cellex and Chembio's rapid tests and Ortho Clinical Diagnostics high-throughput test. At least 70 other antibody test makers have validated and are planning to market their tests in the United States under the FDA's "Policy D" for serology tests, though these tests are not FDA-approved.

While Cellex's 15-minute, rapid test has speed on its side, it is limited to processing one specimen at a time. This won't be sufficient for widespread testing until specimens can be processed on automated, high-throughput instruments.

Another underlying challenge that requires stay-at-home orders stay in effect is the lack of visibility into infectiousness. Health officials are vying for tools that will predict where outbreaks will recur and who will need care.

To complement testing, experts argue an augmented disease surveillance system is needed to give officials a national view of where patients seek care and for what symptoms. Tracking demand for Covid-19-related care can help leaders assess the infectiousness of their regions and make informed decisions about reopening while enabling public health officials to distribute resources based on near real-time data.

Where is it happening already?

The private sector is playing a big role here. Advisory Board's Andrew Rebhan spoke with Kinsa the public health company collecting up to 162,000 daily temperature readings from their internet-connected thermometers to create the U.S. Health Weather Map, which allows consumers to understand where and when an illness is spreading. Scripps and UCSF are researching whether biometric data from wearable fitness devices could predict where health care workers are about to fall ill regionally. Genomics company, DxTerity Diagnostics, launched a subscription Covid-19 testing service for employers to safely screen for, and intercept, their pre-symptomatic employees as they return to the office.

What is in the way of doing more?

Scaling and syncing disparate surveillance methods into one system will be a technical (and unlikely) feat. Feasibility aside, the prospect of sharing personal health information with any organization will always prompt a discussion about privacy. Privacy laws are likely to preclude the U.S. from considering South Korea's surveillance strategies, regardless of their efficacy. For now, public-private partnerships are the keystone to monitoring the infectiousness of the virus and proactively managing the response.

The CDC cites "very aggressive" contact tracing of those testing positive for Covid-19, and a major scale-up of personnel to take on that work, as key competencies the country must invest in to safely reopen. Former CDC Director Tom Frieden estimates upwards of 300,000 dedicated contact tracers are needed just to match the scale of contact tracing in Wuhan, China. National contact tracing efforts require laborious interviewing and investigative work from trained public health experts, but they won't be acting alone as the technology sector joins the fight.

Where is it happening already?

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R) formed the nation's first Contact Tracing Collaboration with global non-profit, Partners In Health, to train and deploy 1,000 public health students across the state as contact tracers.

Tech giants, Apple and Google are teaming up to create a contact-tracing tool for their billions of iPhone and Android users. The ability to wirelessly exchange anonymous information via apps run by public health authorities is expected by mid-May. Covid-19 positive users can opt to upload their test results to a public health app, which will notify other users who came into close proximity over the previous several days and encourage them to isolate themselves.

What is in the way of doing more?

The U.S. has thousands of newly idled workers who could be activated for contact tracing. Nearly 7,000 PeaceCorps volunteers returned home in mid-March and there are thousands more "furloughed public employees, phone bank staff (most tracing work is done by phone), workers from health organizations, social service and nonprofit agencies, and recent graduates," Frieden wrote in a New York Times opinion piece. Expediting training for furloughed employees could reactivate part of the unemployed workforce and supplement technology-based contact tracing efforts. However, the cost and scope of such a national recruiting effort coming together in coming weeks appears unrealistic.

Advisory Board's Jackie Kimmell and Jordan Angers also note that Apple and Google's technology solution is not without limits. The bluetooth connection that contact tracing tech relies on is notoriously inconsistent and can lead to false positives. More challenging is that the technology's use is voluntary so it is only as effective as the number of people who decide to share their testing information.

Many officials are already pointing to the next phase of the new coronavirus epidemic, but without an understanding from local government about how the virus is spreading in their communitiesand how their communities are respondingthe country could be hamstrung on figuring out that "opening date" and therefore see continued micro-surges.

More here:

We can't reopen the country without answering these 3 questions - The Daily Briefing

Everyone wants the virus that causes COVID-19 to be a one-and-done. But reports from South Korea are raising the possibility that infections can be reactivated, or that the infected, once recovered, could be infected anew.

At least 110 people in South Korea have tested positive for the pandemic virus after having been thought cured, according to reports. The World Health Organization told Reuters on Saturday the agency is working hard to get information on the cases.

Its believed the virus may have reactivated in some people, as opposed to them being re-infected all over again, or that repeat testing may simply be picking up harmless fragments of virus genetic material that can linger for weeks or months after a person recovers.

It could also come down to nothing more than faulty testing.

There are many different hypotheses

Canadian health officials are trying to verify the information from South Korea. I think there are many different hypotheses, Dr. Theresa Tam, Canadas chief public health officer, said Monday. Tam said its important to get our international partners to expand more on what is actually happening and maybe, yes, having an international collaboration in terms of looking at what happens to someone who has initially been infected.

We actually dont know if a test positive means that there is any viable virus in that particular person. Thats one of the first questions to actually answer, Tam said.

But the mystery cases illustrate just how little is known about the virus how the human body actually mounts an immunity and what actually happens in the longer term, Tam said. That could hamper the herculean efforts being poured into developing vaccines and, in the absence of a vaccine, make natural herd immunity harder to achieve.

Reports from Seoul describe people who tested negative for COVID-19 using PCR (polymerase chain reaction) testing who, some days later, tested positive again.

According to top U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, advisor to the U.S. presidential COVID-19 task force, how long immunity lasts remains unknown. However, in an interview with the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Fauci said the virus isnt changing much, and that the working assumption, although there is not 100 per cent certainty, is that if we get infected in February or March and recover, that next September, October, the person whos infected, I believe, is going to be protected.

While most people in the medical and scientific community share that thinking, wed be foolish to think we know everything about this virus, given that we have only known about its existence for about four months, cautioned Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious diseases physician and scientist with the Toronto General Hospital.

What proportion of people get immunity, to what extent do they have immunity, and how long immunity lasts are still unanswered questions, Bogoch said. When we hear about people being reinfected it obviously raises a few red flags.

Bogoch believes that the most likely explanation is that the recovered patients tested positive using PCR (polymerase chain reaction) testing, which detects viral RNA, because they still carry some residual virus in the areas being swabbed, typically the back of the nose and throat. It doesnt mean theyre contagious to others, or that the viral fragments are capable of causing disease. The test may be positive for days, even weeks after people have recovered from an infection.

Another possibility is that some people who were initially told they were positive werent positive, but then became positive. And of course, the third possibility that we really hope is unlikely is that there is either reinfection or reactivation of the virus, Bogoch said. Obviously, we hope thats an unlikely scenario. But I think it still warrants exploration.

With reactivation, the virus triggers another eruption, the way the virus that initially causes chicken pox, varicella zoster, can come back years later as shingles.

I think these are remote, but not impossible scenarios, Bogoch said. Given that the virus is so new to humans, we should at least be open-minded to other possibilities, he said.

Dr. Anand Kumar, a critical care doctor at Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre, said PCR tests have a certain sensitivity. Some viruses, like herpes, can get inside cells, go into a latent phase and then pop out again under stress. But coronavirus isnt known to be one of them.

True reinfection is possible, Kumar said. But they dont say the amount of time between the (South Koreans) being cleared and the time they became positive again.

Without seeing any kind of academic paper, the idea of people bouncing back from negative to positive would likely come down to a testing issue, added Dr. Mark Loeb, a professor of pathology and molecular medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton.

If someone has had a natural infection, its likely that they would be immune, at least in the short term, Loeb said. Its not proven, though. Were dealing with likelihoods right now. Is it likely? I think its likely. Is it certain? No.

Email: skirkey@postmedia.com | Twitter:

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Can COVID-19 infect you twice? Mystery cases show how little is known about the virus - National Post

COVID-19s mortality rate has less to do with the pathology of the disease itself and more to do with common autoimmune conditions that leave patients particularly susceptible to infection.

The vast majority of deaths caused by SARS-Cov-2 have been linked to underlying illnesses like hypertension, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Positive cases with any one of these diseases tend to endure critical COVID-19 symptoms compared to otherwise healthy individuals.

To lighten the burden placed upon overwhelmed medical faculties experts are urging the uninfected to maintain a healthy lifestyle until COVID-19s growth curve is successfully subdued.

According to two researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, those who regularly exercise decrease their odds of developing fatal reactions to SARS-Cov-2.

We cannot live in isolation forever. Regular exercise has far more health benefits than we know. The protection against this severe respiratory disease condition is just one of the many examples.

Extracellular superoxide dismutase, a molecular transducer of health benefits of exercise

In their new paper, Dr. Zhen Yan and Hannah R.Spaulding identified an antioxidant called extracellular superoxide dismutase (EcSOD) thats naturally produced by our muscles when we commit to cardiovascular exercise.

In previously conducted studies, EcSOD seemed to improve viral clearance and enable patients to endure prolonged infection.

The longer SARS-Cov-2 replicates its genetic material inside host cells the more likely sufferers will develop acute respiratory syndrome (ARS).

The condition suppresses agents that eliminate debris inside of our lungs.

Forty percent of those that develop ARS do not survive.

EcSOD targets free radicals and protects the bodys tissue from disease and decreases oxidative stress. The antioxidant can be administered to patients who occasion aggressive manifestations of the SARS-Cov-2 pathogen, which could shorten the duration that patients are held in intensive care units as well as the number of confirmed cases that end up there in the first place.

Independent research has shown that gene therapy is a viable way to protect those with metabolic disorders and immune deficiencies.

The protective effect of endurance exercise is likely mediated by EcSOD in the cartilage tissues. In another study in mice, long-term forced treadmill running improved cartilage histology in the joint in wild type mice, the authors wrote in the new paper. The facts that EcSOD expression is promoted by endurance exercise in skeletal muscle and can be redistributed to other vital tissues to protect the target tissues against oxidative damage in various pathological processes (Fig. 2) strongly support exercise-induced EcSOD as an effective therapeutic intervention for prevention and treatment of numerous oxidative stress-related diseases.

Additionally, after administering EcSOD, mice suffering from renal failure began to endure less kidney damage over time.

We often say that exercise is medicine. EcSOD set a perfect example that we can learn from the biological process of exercise to advance medicine, Yan concluded.

Although COVID-19 seldomly results in medical intervention, fatal manifestations of the disease are almost always avoidable.

Poor diet and sedentary lifestyles are responsible for the majority of the fatal outcomes documented in the US, Italy and Wuhan, China.

Given the prevalence of diseases caused by poor lifestyle choices, The CDC reports that 20% to 40% of hospitalized COVID-19 cases will lead to ARS.

All you hear now is either social distancing or ventilator as if all we can do is either avoiding exposure or relying on a ventilator to survive if we get infected, Yan said in a press statement. The flip side of the story is that approximately 80% of confirmed COVID-19 patients have mild symptoms with no need of respiratory support.

Be sure to read the full paper published in the journal Redox Biology.

Excerpt from:

Scientists find doing this simple activity every day can help fend off dying of COVID-19 - Ladders

Darryl / stock.adobe.com

Coronaviruses, so named for their knobby surface projections that create a crown-like appearance,1-3 were first identified in the 1930s but are thought to have originated more than 10,000 years ago.4,5 They and their associated illnesses have been observed in cattle, horses, cats, dogs, swine, rabbits, rodents and bats, among others.6,7

In humans, seven coronavirus strains have been identified, as have their bat and rodent reservoirs, and their intermediate hosts, including cattle, camels and civets.8-16 Most of these strains cause nothing more than the common cold in people, but threesevere acute respiratory syndrome (SARS),17 Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)18 and SARS-CoV-2have proven more daunting.

As the professionals with the most thorough understanding of One Health, veterinarians around the world have been working hard on COVID-19 diagnostic, prevention and treatment measures. Heres a look at some of the work being done.

At Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, a group of researchers have shunted their work to focus on SARS-CoV-2. Virology professor and coronavirus expert Gary Whittaker, PhD, who has done extensive research on MERS, is investigating the SARS-CoV- 2 spike protein and its mechanisms for fusing with the host cell.19 He hopes to apply his findings to drug and vaccine development. The team also includes investigators who are working on diagnostic tests for SARS-CoV-2.

Researchers at Louisiana State University School of Veterinary Medicine are working to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, slated to begin animal trials soon. The group, which includes investigators who study bovine coronaviruses, is collaborating with researchers at Tulane University, one of the first facilities to obtain samples of SARS-CoV-2 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The coronavirus that afflicts cats and causes deadly feline infectious peritonitis (FIP) has long been a subject of research at the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine. Investigators at the school have used an antiviral drug shown to block virus replication in monkeys and mice as a springboard for developing a protocol to treat FIP in cats experimentally infected with feline enteric coronavirus.20

"Its the virus-infected cells that are producing all of these nasty cytokines that are causing this inflammation, explains Niels Pedersen, DVM, PhD, who has been studying feline coronavirus for the past five decades, so if you can stop the replication cold in its tracks, you're going to immediately stop the cytokines from being produced."

Treatment has been largely successful in feline studies, which gives Pedersen hope for the nearly identical remdesivir, now in clinical trials for the treatment of SARS-CoV-2. If it can be done in cats, why can't it be done in humans?" he says.

The concept of drug repurposing might also be applied to the parasiticide ivermectin, an FDA-approved anti-parasitic agent for animals and humans that, in recent years, has been shown to have antiviral activity in vitro by interfering with virus replication.21-25 In vitro studies have demonstrated that ivermectin interferes with replication of many viruses, including human immunodeficiency virus 1,22 West Nile virus,23 dengue virus,22,24 Venezuelan encephalitis virus,25 simian virus,22,26 pseudorabies27 and influenza.21

A recent study,28 published in the journal Antiviral Research, demonstrates that ivermectin impedes SARS-CoV-2 in vitro.* Previous reports on similar coronaviruses describe the role of specific proteins in viral transport into the host nucleus, suggesting that ivermectins nuclear transport inhibitory activity may be effective against SARS-CoV-2.

Cells infected with SARS-CoV-2 were treated two hours post infection with a single dose of ivermectin at serial dilutions. At 24 hours, the addition of 5 M ivermectin produced a 99.8% reduction in cell-associated viral RNA, which increased to 99.98% at 48 hours; this equated to an approximately 5,000-fold reduction of viral RNA compared with control samples. No cell toxicity was observed at this concentration.

The studys Australian investigators, from Monash University and the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, hypothesize that ivermectin inhibits the IMP/1-mediated nuclear import of viral proteins, but they hope to confirm this mechanism in the case of SARS-CoV-2. The identification of the specific SARS-CoV-2 and/or host component(s) impacted is an important focus their future work.

This research sets the stage for development of an effective antiviral drug that, if given to patients early in infection, could reduce SARS-CoV-2 viral load, block disease progression and limit person-to-person transmission.

The answers to the COVID-19 pandemic will be shaped like medications and vaccines. And surely, they will be colored by extensive data established by the veterinary community.

*Editors note: The FDA has issued a public warning stating that people should not self-medicate with ivermectin in an effort to treat or prevent COVID-19. The warning reads, in part: FDA is concerned about the health of consumers who may self-medicate by taking ivermectin products intended for animals, thinking they can be a substitute for ivermectin intended for humans. People should never take animal drugs, as the FDA has only evaluated their safety and effectiveness in the particular animal species for which they are labeled. These animal drugs can cause serious harm in people. People should not take any form of ivermectin unless it has been prescribed to them by a licensed health care provider and is obtained through a legitimate source. For the full FDA letter, click here.

References

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Veterinary medicine at the forefront in the fight against COVID-19 - dvm360

XconomyNational

If Peter Marks had a magic wand to perfect the sophisticated process that takes a new vaccine from idea to reality, the US could have a way to prevent some people from COVID-19 infection in nine months to one year.

In the real world, the journey to a vaccine OKd under emergency guidelines is more likely to take 12 to 18 months, said Marks, who runs the FDAs Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, on a Friday teleconference hosted by the Commonwealth Fund and the Alliance for Health Policy Teleconference for Media and Policymakers.

Marks said factors that will play a role in FDAs issuance of an emergency use authorizationnot an approvalwill include the level of coronavirus circulating, how well the vaccine works, and how safe it appears. Some of the data to back up safety and efficacy claims are likely to come from less traditional sources, such as adaptive trials, or those designed to allow changes along the way in response to early results, and real-world evidence.

Facilitating the development of a vaccine for COVID-19 is an agency priority now and for the foreseeable future since the US will likely see a second wave or even third wave [of infections] if we dont get it right and get it right quickly, he said.

The agency aims to ensure vaccine makers move forward the candidates with the most potential, he said.

What that will really mean from the FDA perspective is working with the various sponsors of the vaccines to most efficiently look at their preclinical data, understand as much as we can about the characteristics of these vaccines, (and) help people develop plans that are most efficient at understanding whether their candidates will get to the level of protection that would really warrant carrying them forward, because, frankly, vaccine candidates that have very low efficacy or not tremendous efficacy, in this particular case, could just distract from capacity for more robust candidates to come forward, he said.

Marks described the careful calculus of ensuring that any vaccine distributed is safe and effective while removing roadblocks to the fastest possible authorization and distribution.

We may not have the long-term data that we normally might like, so we may be putting real-world evidence into practice in this case by vaccinating relatively larger populations of individualsit may be individuals at higher risk for things like thisthen gathering data in the real world, he said.

Choosing which candidates to advance is an especially necessary and high-stakes effort in the face of a pandemic, Marks said.

My unique perspective on this is that its time to really mobilize as best we can in our animal modeling to try and compare things, to the extent that we can, and try and sort things out before we get to humans, knowing its never perfect to make that transition There is an opportunity cost to taking any candidate forward, and so you want to take your best candidates forward because, by definition, they will occupy capacity over one another, he said.

Esther Krofah, who heads the Milken Institutes FasterCures center, said drug companies appear to be operating with a similar timeline in mind, given some recent announcements about plans to ramp up manufacturing of their vaccine candidates in the event they prove safe and efficacious.

In recent weeks Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) announced it had selected a lead vaccine candidate to advance against the novel coronavirus, and committed to boosting its manufacturing capacity to be able to make more than one billion doses of such a vaccine. The company anticipates human tests of its candidate to start at the latest by September, and said it expects batches could be ready for use under emergency guidelines in early 2021.

Thats a substantially accelerated timeframe in comparison to the typical vaccine development process, the company noted. Krofah says Milken is tracking 86 active vaccine projects, including six clinical trials; two dozen more are slated to enter the clinic in summer or early fall.

LJ Tan, chief strategy officer at the Immunization Action Coalition, emphasized the speed at which COVID-19 vaccine development is occurring compared to typical timelines for new vaccine innovation.

Tan previously spent about 16 years in leadership roles at the American Medical Association, most recently as director of medicine and public health and as director of infectious disease, immunology, and molecular medicine for more than a decade.

Traditional vaccine development, through all its phases, can take 10, 15, sometimes 20 years, and can cost at least $800 million dollars or even more, Tan said. When you build in all the costs to build the manufacturing facility, the equipment, the quality control that goes into this, the figure can go way over $1 billion to bring a vaccine from development all the way through to market.

Moderna (NASDAQ: MRNA), whose vaccine candidate was the first to start human testing in the US, said Thursday that it anticipated the start of a Phase 2 study this quarter, if safety data from the National Institutes of Health-led Phase 1 trial supports continuation. The Cambridge, MA-based biotech also announced that the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) had agreed to award it up to $483 million to fund the vaccines development through FDA review and ramp up its manufacturing to allow it to be produced at scale this year.

The company said it plans to add as many as 150 new employees by 2021.

Some vaccine candidates are being advanced in multiple geographies. This week Inovio Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INO) announced a $6.9 million award from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness to move its vaccine into a Phase 1/2 trial in South Korea. Working with International Vaccine Institute and the Korea National Institute of Health, the trial will parallel Inovios ongoing Phase 1 in the US, which started April 6.

Remember, ultimately, were not talking about just vaccinating a few hundred thousand individuals, were taking about vaccinating a few hundred million people in this country alone and a few billion people globally, so one really would like to try to get it right to the extent they can, obviously working at a very rapid pace, Marks said.

Image: iStock/Nastco

Sarah de Crescenzo is an Xconomy editor based in San Diego. You can reach her at sdecrescenzo@xconomy.com.

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COVID-19 Vax Efforts Aim to Balance Speed, Efficacy in Race to Market - Xconomy

A woman hangs face masks out to dry before distributing them for free in a neighborhood in Tangerang, on the outskirts of Jakarta, on 9 April.

By Dyna Rochmyaningsih Apr. 18, 2020 , 3:35 PM

Sciences COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center.

Scientists in Indonesia are exasperated at the countrys response to the COVID-19 pandemic, calling it shambolic and secretive, with a lack of coordination between the national and provincial governments. They also complain that officials have sometimes snubbed their efforts to help.

We have missed many opportunities in the past. What we need now is strong leadership to tackle the pandemic, says Nurul Nadia, a public health expert at the Center for Indonesias Strategic Development Initiatives. She and others say the country needs a clear national strategy for lockdowns and a dramatic increase in testing capacity if it is to control whatat least by official numbersis a comparatively small outbreak.

As of 18 April, Indonesia had 6248 confirmed COVID-19 cases, including 535 deaths. Nearly half of the known burden is in the capital, Jakarta, but all 34 provinces now report cases.

Epidemiologists say the number of actual cases is much higher. According to an estimate by Timothy Russel and colleagues at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, published last month, only 5.4% of all symptomatic cases are reported in Indonesia, which means the country likely has well over 100,000 cases by now. One sign that COVID-19 is widespread is that mortality is spiking: Reuters reported last week that Jakarta had 4400 funerals in March, 40% more than in any other month since January 2018.

Thousands of migrant workers left Jakarta and returned to their hometowns in March, when the disease began to surge in the city, potentially spreading the virus around the country. Scientists have warned about another exodus just before 23 May, when Muslims celebrate Eid al-Fitr, a holiday marking the end of the Ramadan. A survey by the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), in collaboration with academic researchers, found that 68% of respondents on Java hope to visit family then, some of them on other islands. There will be a surge of positive cases and deaths if we dont limit mobility soon, says Henry Surendra, an epidemiologist at the Eijkman-Oxford Clinical Research Unit in Jakarta. I am afraid that many areas will end up like Jakarta, Nadia says.

The Indonesian government, worried about paralyzing the economy, has long downplayed the danger of the pandemic. In early March, Achmad Yurianto, the director-general for disease control at Indonesias Ministry of Health, told Science he doesnt care what scientists say about the pandemic because they are not important if their information only creates panic. Health minister Terawan Agus Putranto suggested in February that prayer helped keep COVID-19 out of the country.

The Ministry of Health has authorized large-scale social restrictions or partial lockdowns for cities and provinces, providing they can show an escalating number of deaths and extensive local transmission. They must also demonstrate that theyre able to meet residents basic needs during the lockdown. But Nadia says many governors lack the epidemiological support to do such analyses. Should we wait for widespread infection and seeing people die first? she asks. If so, the concept of prevention wont work. So far, the health ministry has approved lockdown proposals from 10 cities, but compliance is low.

Meanwhile, testinga huge challenge in a country of more than 267 million, scattered over some 6000 islandshas been lagging. So far Indonesia has tested fewer than 40,000 people. Wide-scale testing may come too late for cities with a major outbreak, but if combined with isolation of patients and quarantining of their contacts, it could still help contain the virus in places where it has just arrived, says Panji Hadisoemarto, an epidemiologist at the University of Padjajaran in Bandung, West Java. Better late than never.

The government has assigned 132 referral hospitals around the country to take nose and throat swabs from suspected cases. But many lack the protective equipment to take samples safely. As a result, patients must sometimes be driven to hospitals many hours away. And the hospitals dont run the tests themselves; the samples are sent to one of 32 designated test labs, causing further delays.

Seeking to increase testing capacity, the Indonesian Biomedical Association (PBMI) has identified 106 laboratories in 25 provinces that meet the World Health Organizations technical requirements to test for COVID-19. Their findings, presented in early April, were quickly welcomed by Indonesias national COVID-19 Task Force, says Fenny Dwivanny, a molecular biologist at the Bandung Institute of Technology. That same day, health minister Terawan Agus Putranto issued a letter allowing qualified labs to do the tests.

There will be a surge of positive cases and deaths if we dont limit mobility soon.

But on 15 April, Yurianto told the press that the health ministry will authorize only 78 labs to scale up testing. We are dealing with a very deadly virus. We cant just do the PCR tests in any lab, he says.

Labs, even in the capital, also face a shortage of swabs, reagents, and protective gear, says Ahmad Utomo, a molecular biologist and senior advisor at PBMI. Utomo is encouraged, however, that the Ministry of State-Owned Enterprises is installing 18 PCR machines and 2 RNA extractorsrobots that can isolate viral RNA faster and more safely than humans canin hospitals run by the ministry in 12 provinces. (The ministry did not respond to a query from Science about details of its testing plans.

The Indonesian Young Scientists Forum (YSF) has also urged the health ministry to involve Indonesian scientists in sequencing the genomes of SARS-CoV-2 isolates from the country. So far, health ministry researchers have submitted only four partial sequences from Indonesia submitted to GISAID, the online database where scientists from around the world deposit their sequences. YSF scientists met officials at the ministry on 17 April to discuss collaboration, but no definitive decisions were taken, says Berry Juliandi, a biologist at Bogor Agricultural University and YSF spokesperson.

Despite their frustration, many scientists are eager to work with the government, says Utomo. Just show us the way and have a friendly attitude, he says. Open the doors for us.

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'Open the doors for us.' Indonesian scientists say government snubs offers to help fight coronavirus - Science Magazine