Category Archives: Genetic Medicine

I am a trial lawyer in Honolulu and I am representing several people whose cancer was caused by Ranitidine (Zantac).

But I am not writing this to sign you up as a client. Lawsuits are about money. That can be important to anyone whose life and family are being interrupted and threatened by cancer. But that is not what I am writing about, and it is not what I just asked of you.

I asked you: what now . now what?

The first question for anyone who has a diagnosis of cancer _ any cancer _ is can I survive? The answer to that question is always: maybe. I can tell you that if you have a cancer diagnosis, you are in a race against time. No time to procrastinate. No dawdling!

Here is a suggested road map for the next 6 months. Iknow this road.

Depending on the cancer type (colon, breast, prostate, lung, Non Hodgkin lymphoma, multiple myeloma .. etc. etc.), the odds of survival differ. But if you got your biopsy results yesterday, what I am going to suggest to you is that you need to start tomorrow.

Go toFoundation Medicinewhich has a program calledFOUNDATIONONECDx.

Foundation One will review a patients actual cancer biopsy report and note all of the genetic mutations in the cancer cells. Foundation One then matches up those mutations with all available treatments _ including new treatments in Clinical Trial _ identifies specific new drugs or treatments, and advises the patient about which drugs are best suited to that patients cancer.

Foundation One is a fantastic new resource that a patient can use to educate themselves about what treatments are available for their particular genetic makeup. The patient gets a detailed and easy to understand report. All treatments are FDA approved. You take that report to the next appointment with the oncologist. If no appointment is scheduled, call and schedule one. Ask questions.

You also get information on where those treatments are available. It costs nothing, or a small amount of money.

The the family can then speak with the treating doctors here in Honolulu and ask intelligent questions.

A key issue is that in standard medicine, the oncologists always start with old-fashioned standard chemotherapy, which has not been working for decades. They start that treatment, which may have a temporary shrinkage of a tumor, or lowering of a cancer blood marker, like CA19-9 or CA-125. Then they tell you to wait and see if the cancer starts to grow again. That, they will tell their patients, is the standard practice. What happens is that when the cancer starts to grow again, its over. The cancer has spread everywhere.

New research is showing that new genetic and targeted treatments should be started immediately. For instance, Erleada in prostate cancer may be more effective if started as soon as possible.

As I said earlier, cancer is a race against time. In some cancers, like breast cancer, the new treatment modes are being successful at holding back the cancer.

Start by educating yourself about the new, targeted, genetic treatment options atFoundation MedicineandFOUNDATIONONECDx may extend and you may save your life.

Then, if you want to hold responsible, those corporations that made huge profits from Zantac sales, you dont need to call a mainland 800-number. I have offices downtown and in Kalihi, and I have lived and worked as a trial lawyer in Hawaii for many years. I represent people here whose cancer was caused by Zantac.

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You have cancer .. and used a lot of Zantac Now what? - Legal Examiner

Metastatic brain tumor and primary lung cancer were found to have gotten different genetic characteristics in the course of genetic mutation, researchers said.

By making the most of these characteristics, medical professionals will be able to upgrade the effect of targeted therapies, they added

The joint research team of Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) attached to Harvard University College of Medicine has recently released the results of analyzing the genetic mutations of metastatic brain tumors and primary lung cancer.

Brain tumors spread from lung cancer are very malignant, and the number of patients has been increasing recently. However, their treatments have been limited due to their insufficient study

The research team has selected 73 patients suffering from brain tumors spread from lung cancer and analyzed the genetic mutations of metastatic brain tumors and primary lung cancer.

The Korean and U.S. researchers confirmed MYC, YAP1, MMP13, and CDKN2A/B genetic mutations occur in metastatic brain tumors, unlike primary lung cancer. Even the same cancer cells showed different genetic mutations, depending on whether they belong to the lung or brain.

The research team explained this is a very significant finding in the targeted treatment of brain tumors spread from lung cancer. If medical professionals treat patients with targeted therapies developed to suit the characteristics unique to a metastatic brain tumor, they will be able to upgrade therapeutic effects, it added.

The latest research is the result of the seven years of joint study since 2013 between SNUH and MGH. The two institutions have shared case reports and treatment methods through 14 video conferences, and have several joint studies underway by strengthening their cooperation in research.

We jointly published the genetic mutations observed only in metastatic brain tumor in the journal Cancer Discovery jointly with MGH in 2015, said Professor Baek Seon-ha of the Department of Neurosurgery at SNUH. The recent research is its follow-up study, a result of the close cooperation and continuous joint study between the two hospitals.

Professor Park Seong-hye of the Department of Pathology at SNUH also said, This research will exert a decisive influence on the research and deciding on the treatment method of brain tumor spread from lung cancer.

Co-researchers from the U.S. side were Professor Priscilla Brastianos, and research fellow Scott Carter of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

The research results were published on the online edition of the March issue of the journal Nature Genetics.

cks@docdocdoc.co.kr

< Korea Biomedical Review, All rights reserved.>

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New horizon opens for targeted therapy of metastatic brain tumor - Korea Biomedical Review

South Korean health officials reported on Friday that they were investigating 91 cases of COVID-19 where patients who were thought to have recovered retested positive.

Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a press release that a cluster of infections at a nursing home found that 18 out of 36 confirmed cases that had been released from quarantine had re-tested positive just days after testing negative.

Generally, an infected patient is considered recovered when they have tested negative twice in the span of 24 hours.

Scientists say there are several potential scenarios for these test results. Possibilities include: the patients were actually infected with a different variation of the virus from the original infection, there were errors in the testing, or the patients never fully recovered. Another possibility is when a virus from the original infection mutates in the body and causes a re-infection, but this is considered rare.

Dogma suggests if we are infected with a virus the first time and we recover, we have an antibody response to that virus, so we produce neutralizing antibodies that help us eliminate that virus from our system, Dr. Marc-Andr Langlois, a molecular virologist and professor with the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa, told CTVNews.ca in an interview.

If you have a primary infection and you mount an antibody response, the chances to be re-infected with that same virus is almost nil. This is what happens in a normal response.

Scientists around the world are currently doing research into antibody testing and how immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, could be one path to fighting the pandemic.

If a patient is infected with a variation of a particular virus, the antibodies might not necessarily recognize and neutralize it accordingly.

Its a virus that does mutate, but it does not mutate at the same rate, at the same speed as other RNA viruses like influenza or HIV, Langlois said.

Nextstrain, an open-source project, looks at the genetic data of SARS-CoV-2 to track the virus evolution as it moves around the world and how it spreads locally. Genetic sequencing of the virus isolated in different parts of the world - Asia, Europe, and North America - have found variations that can be clustered and traced. The genetic footprint of the virus circulating in New York, for example, can be traced to Europe, according to separate studies conducted by scientists at New Yorks Mount Sinai and NYUs Grossman School of Medicine.

Scientists have said that the genetic variations so far are quite minor, with the different strains being fairly similar to one another.

'REACTIVATED' VIRUS?

Health officials in Korea appeared unconvinced the 91 patients had been somehow re-infected, according to media reports of press briefings held this week. KCDC Director-General Jeong Eun-kyeong told reporters the virus may have been reactivated instead, due to the short time frame between when the patients were discharged and when they tested positive again.

THE KCDC said response teams at both the local and national level were investigating the epidemiological and clinical characteristics of these cases, which include examining virus isolation cultures and blood antibody tests.

There have been reports from China as well of patients retesting positive after having recovered. An NPR report last month looked at four such cases involving residents in Wuhan, where the outbreak first began. The patients tested positive days or weeks after they were deemed recovered.

There are still a lot of uncertainties and unknowns around SARS-CoV-2 - in this case, whether the virus detected in the retests are active or dead. This would determine whether the patient can infect others or not. Research indicates that RNA can still be detected in tests even after a patient is no longer infectious.

But in order to see how these patients are testing positive again, Langlois said researchers will need to look at the genetic sequence of the virus in the initial positive sample prior to when they were considered recovered, then look at the genetic sequence of the second test and compare. Scientists would also need to monitor whether the individuals produced antibodies.

That is the only way you can absolutely ascertain that re-infection occurred, Langlois said. But sequencing is not consistently done due to the volume of testing being conducted.

All they want to do is make sure theyre positive or negative so they can triage them properly ... the sequencing is not routine for every single diagnostic case and thats part of the issue. Theres no capacity to sequence everything. Its costly and time intensive.

ROOM FOR ERROR

Errors at the testing level and faulty results could also be the source of the unusual results, scientists say.

A test for COVID-19 is typically done through swabbing the nasal airways - a nasopharyngeal swab - with the sample then placed in a liquid that is used to detect the genome of the virus. The swabbing needs to be deep enough to collect from the areas where the virus is most prevalent, and errors can occur when the swab is not done correctly.

The test uses a polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a process in molecular biology that allows scientists to make millions of genetic copies from a very small sample, amplifying it in enough quantities to study. Different countries and health organizations designed different versions of the test and early in the outbreak, some were less sensitive than others, resulting in faulty results. This is one theory behind the positive retests in China and a possibility for the cases in South Korea.

These are all areas of questioning - as to are these really re-infections or was something missed the first time? Langlois said. My hunch is that it is not a re-infection by the same virus.

More on this story from CTVNews.ca

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South Korea investigating COVID-19 cases where recovered patients have retested positive - The Loop

When will we have a Covid-19 vaccine? Public-facing scientists such as the UKs chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, and his US counterpart, Anthony Fauci, keep repeating that it wont be before 12 to 18 months. But other voices including some of those in the race to create a vaccine themselves have suggested that it could be as early as June. Who is right?

The former, probably, but its complicated because this pandemic is forcing change at almost every step in the process by which a new vaccine arrives at a needle near us.

It really depends on what you mean by having a vaccine, says Marian Wentworth, president and CEO of Management Sciences for Health, a Massachusetts-based global not-for-profit organisation that seeks to build resilient health systems, and a long-time observer of vaccine development. If you mean one that can be used in a mass vaccination campaign, allowing us all to get on with our lives, then 12 to 18 months is probably right.

But in terms of an experimental vaccine that is deemed safe and effective enough to be rolled out in a more limited way to high-risk groups such as health workers, say that could be ready within weeks or months, under emergency rules developed by drug regulatory agencies and the World Health Organization in the context of the recent Ebola epidemics in Africa.

When the University of Oxfords Adrian Hill told the Guardian that his groups Covid-19 vaccine candidate could be ready by the summer, it was this kind of readiness to which he was probably referring. The group, led by Sarah Gilbert, has since stated that a vaccine shown to be effective in phase-3 clinical trials that could be manufactured in large quantities wont be ready before the autumn even in a best-case scenario. And that scenario is highly ambitious and subject to change.

Normally, a vaccine is developed in the lab before being tested on animals. If it proves safe and generates a promising immune response in this pre-clinical phase, it enters human or clinical trials. These are divided into three phases, each of which takes longer and involves more people than the previous one. Phase 1 establishes the vaccines safety in a small group of healthy individuals, with the goal of ruling out debilitating side effects. Phases 2 and 3 test efficacy, and in an outbreak like the present one they are conducted in places where the disease is prevalent. In parallel with these later phases, production capacity for the candidate vaccine is gradually built up, so that factories are capable of producing it on a large scale if and when regulatory agencies judge that it should be licensed.

In an article published in The New England Journal of Medicine on 30 March, representatives of the Oslo-based not-for-profit Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi), which is helping to finance and coordinate Covid-19 vaccine development, laid out an accelerated version of this process that they believe is more suited to a pandemic. This pandemic paradigm implements certain steps in parallel, such as animal and phase-1 clinical testing. It also involves scaling up production capacity before sufficient safety and efficacy data are available a financially risky step, given that that may never materialise, and one that requires governments and not-for-profit organisations such as Cepi to share that extra financial risk with pharmaceutical companies if they want them to engage. Mass production is critical in a pandemic, when hundreds of millions if not billions of doses are needed and many countries are now scrambling to build new vaccine production facilities.

People now appreciate that the lengthy process of conventional licensing of vaccines is not going to be helpful in the context of an epidemic, says Beate Kampmann, who heads the vaccine centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Bringing a new vaccine to the clinic has taken 10 to 20 years in the past

Prudently, Cepi did not attach a timeline to its accelerated paradigm, but the 12- to 18-month estimate already takes it into account. Bringing a new vaccine to the clinic has taken 10 to 20 years in the past. Nevertheless, the accelerated paradigm is being implemented now. A Boston-based biotech firm, Moderna, saw its experimental Covid-19 vaccine enter human trials on 16 March, just 10 weeks after the first genetic sequences of Sars-CoV-2 the virus that causes the disease were released. Others will follow soon.

Were getting to candidates much more quickly, says Kampmann, who puts this progress down to advances made in the fight against Ebola. The step-up in technology that we have seen in the last five years has really made a difference.

There are many hurdles ahead, though. Most of the 70-odd Covid-19 vaccine candidates being developed and tested will not make it to the licensing stage, and those that have been fastest out of the blocks may still encounter problems later on. Modernas innovative technology allowed it to generate a candidate quickly, but no vaccine using this platform has been licensed to date.

At the Pasteur Institute in Paris, on the other hand, a Covid-19 vaccine candidate is still in pre-clinical development, but because it piggybacks on established technology a licensed measles vaccine the testing and licensing processes will go faster. And this kind of vaccine can already be produced in large quantities.

While there can be no shortcuts to establishing safety and efficacy, proposals have been put forward for how these experimental vaccines might be tested more rapidly without sacrificing scientific rigour. In February, for example, the WHO published a draft protocol for phase 2 and 3 trials that would test a number of candidates simultaneously, in multi-country trials according to standardised criteria.

Another proposal is to conduct controlled human challenge trials, in which healthy volunteers are given a candidate vaccine and then infected with Sars-CoV-2. These are ethically questionable, especially before scientists understand why young and otherwise healthy people are ending up on ventilators. A similar approach, being implemented by the London-based clinical research group Hvivo, invites volunteers to be infected with a milder coronavirus but how applicable its findings will be to Sars-CoV-2 is not clear.

If our own body cant prevent us from getting it again, that would be one pretty damning signal

There are still many unknowns with respect to Covid-19, including for how long any vaccine will provide protection. A strong indication of this will be whether people who have recovered from the disease can catch it again. There have been anecdotal reports of re-infection, but the phenomenon is not well understood. If our own body cant prevent us from getting it again, that would be one pretty damning signal, says Wentworth.

Once a vaccine is licensed, there will still be political obstacles to getting it to where its needed, because each country or public health jurisdiction has to make its own decision to roll it out. There will also be issues of prioritisation who should get it first, if supplies are limited which authorities are discussing now.

A vaccine that is approved a year from now may arrive after the end of the current pandemic, but if so it wont be wasted first because Covid-19 may recur seasonally, and second because the vaccine could itself be repurposed in the event of an outbreak of a different coronavirus. That will be no consolation to victims of this pandemic, or their relatives, but it does mean that humanity will be better protected in future. As Wentworth says: That learning, we wont unlearn.

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Coronavirus vaccine: when will we have one? - The Guardian

SALT LAKE CITY, April 08, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Myriad Genetics, Inc. (MYGN), a global leader in personalized medicine, announced today that due to the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the company is withdrawing its fiscal year 2020 financial guidance.

Prior to mid-March we were experiencing volume trends consistent with our expectations across all products; however, recent social distancing guidelines have had a significant impact on test volume trends in late March and into the fiscal fourth-quarter, said R. Bryan Riggsbee, interim president and CEO and chief financial officer at Myriad Genetics. Our priority as an organization during the coronavirus pandemic has been to maintain business continuity and access to testing, while ensuring the safety of our employees and customers. As an organization we have taken steps to advance these dual aims, and I am very proud of how the Myriad team has responded to the crisis.

In responding to the pandemic, Myriad has made several changes to its business practices to promote the safety of both customers and employees including ceasing in-office sales calls and implementing virtual selling, granting all non-essential personnel the ability to work from home, enabling direct sample collection for patients and implementing policies to improve laboratory personnel safety.

While the uncertain timeframe of the Coronavirus pandemic makes it difficult to predict future business trends for the company, the company will provide an update on its business, including the impact of COVID-19, on its next quarterly earnings call.

About Myriad GeneticsMyriad Genetics, Inc. is a leading personalized medicine company dedicated to being a trusted advisor transforming patient lives worldwide with pioneering molecular diagnostics. Myriad discovers and commercializes molecular diagnostic tests that determine the risk of developing disease, accurately diagnose disease, assess the risk of disease progression, and guide treatment decisions across six major medical specialties where molecular diagnostics can significantly improve patient care and lower healthcare costs. Myriad is focused on three strategic imperatives: transitioning and expanding its hereditary cancer testing markets, diversifying its product portfolio through the introduction of new products and increasing the revenue contribution from international markets. For more information on how Myriad is making a difference, please visit the Company's website: http://www.myriad.com.

Myriad, the Myriad logo, BART, BRACAnalysis, Colaris, Colaris AP, myPath, myRisk, Myriad myRisk, myRisk Hereditary Cancer, myChoice, myPlan, BRACAnalysis CDx, Tumor BRACAnalysis CDx, myChoice HRD, Vectra, Prequel, ForeSight, GeneSight and Prolaris are trademarks or registered trademarks of Myriad Genetics, Inc. or its wholly owned subsidiaries in the United States and foreign countries. MYGN-F, MYGN-G.

Safe Harbor StatementThis press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements relating to maintaining the Companys global leadership in precision medicine and the Company's strategic directives under the caption "About Myriad Genetics." These "forward-looking statements" are based on management's present expectations of future events and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially and adversely from those described or implied in the forward-looking statements. These risks include, but are not limited to: the risk that sales and profit margins of the Companys existing molecular diagnostic tests and pharmaceutical and clinical services may decline or will not continue to increase at historical rates; risks related to the Companys ability to successfully transition from its existing product portfolio to our new tests; risks related to changes in the governmental or private insurers reimbursement levels for the Companys tests or the Companys ability to obtain reimbursement for its new tests at comparable levels to its existing tests; risks related to increased competition and the development of new competing tests and services; the risk that the Company may be unable to develop or achieve commercial success for additional molecular diagnostic tests and pharmaceutical and clinical services in a timely manner, or at all; the risk that the Company may not successfully develop new markets for its molecular diagnostic tests and pharmaceutical and clinical services, including the Companys ability to successfully generate revenue outside the United States; the risk that licenses to the technology underlying the Companys molecular diagnostic tests and pharmaceutical and clinical services tests and any future tests are terminated or cannot be maintained on satisfactory terms; risks related to delays or other problems with operating the Companys laboratory testing facilities; risks related to public concern over the Companys genetic testing in general or the Companys tests in particular; risks related to regulatory requirements or enforcement in the United States and foreign countries and changes in the structure of the healthcare system or healthcare payment systems; risks related to the Companys ability to obtain new corporate collaborations or licenses and acquire new technologies or businesses on satisfactory terms, if at all; risks related to the Companys ability to successfully integrate and derive benefits from any technologies or businesses that it licenses or acquires; risks related to the Companys projections about the potential market opportunity for the Companys products; the risk that the Company or its licensors may be unable to protect or that third parties will infringe the proprietary technologies underlying the Companys tests; the risk of patent-infringement claims or challenges to the validity of the Companys patents; risks related to changes in intellectual property laws covering the Companys molecular diagnostic tests and pharmaceutical and clinical services and patents or enforcement in the United States and foreign countries, such as the Supreme Court decisions Mayo Collab. Servs. v. Prometheus Labs., Inc., 566 U.S. 66 (2012), Assn for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., 569 U.S. 576 (2013), and Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Intl, 573 U.S. 208 (2014); risks of new, changing and competitive technologies and regulations in the United States and internationally; the risk that the Company may be unable to comply with financial operating covenants under the Companys credit or lending agreements; the risk that the Company will be unable to pay, when due, amounts due under the Companys credit or lending agreements; and other factors discussed under the heading "Risk Factors" contained in Item 1A of the Companys most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as any updates to those risk factors filed from time to time in the Companys Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q or Current Reports on Form 8-K. All information in this press release is as of the date of the release, and Myriad undertakes no duty to update this information unless required by law.

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Myriad Withdrawing Financial Guidance for FY2020 Due to Business Impact from Coronavirus Pandemic - Yahoo Finance

April 10, 2020 Coronavirus research, tools and offerings are advancing at a breakneck pace. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is serving as a rallying cry across the bio-IT landscape inspiring creative new solutions, partnerships, and ideas to address the outbreak, treat and prevent the disease it causes, and address the life adjustments of our new normal. Here are some of the free tools, new solutions, and research this week.

Industry News

TheTranslational Genomics Research Institute(TGen),an affiliate of City of Hope,The Pathogen and Microbiome Institute at Northern Arizona Universityand the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at theUniversity of Arizonahave formedthe Arizona COVID-19 Genomics Union totrack the COVID-19 coronavirusby harnessing the power of state-of-the-art technology and "big data" analysis. Scientists will sequence samples from COVID-19 patients to analyze the virus' genetic codes, track its different strains, show where each sample originates from, where it may have been transmitted andpossiblyuncovercritical information for diagnostics, anti-viral drug targets and vaccine development.Press release.

AmgenandAdaptive Biotechnologiesarecombiningexpertise to discover and develop fully human neutralizing antibodies targeting SARS-CoV-2 to potentially prevent or treat COVID-19. The mutually exclusive collaboration brings togetherAdaptive'sproprietary immune medicine platform for the identification of virus-neutralizing antibodies with Amgen's expertise in immunology and novel antibody therapy development.Neutralizing antibodies defend healthy cells by interfering with the biological function of an invading virus. These antibodies may be used therapeutically to treat someone currently fighting the disease and can be given to people who have heightened risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2, such as healthcare workers.Press release.

Researchers from theCenterForMolecular MedicineOfTheAustrian AcademyOfSciences (CeMM) have released SARS-CoV-2 genomesfrom Austrian patients. Initial sequence analysis of the 29,900 nucleotide-long SARS-CoV-2 genomes from Austria revealed on average 6 mutations different to the reference genome isolated in Wuhan. The observed number of mutations is in line with other recently reported SARS-CoV-2 genomes. Most of the observed mutations lead to changes in viral proteins, providing evidence for positive selection pressure and evolution within the human population. Assessing the actual impact of these mutations for the virus life cycle and its interactions with both the host and the immune system will be within the scope of future investigations.Press release.

IRB Barcelona's Structural Bioinformatics and Network Biology Laboratoryhas joined forces with Amazon to develop the Chemical Checker, a computational tool that would help process academic literature on COVID-19. Using artificial intelligence, this tool will "read" articles and extract all relevant information related to the molecules and treatments studied. Through a limited review of the most relevant scientific literature, researchers at IRB Barcelona have so far identified more than 150 compounds that are potentially active against COVID-19. Results are already available athttps://sbnb.irbbarcelona.org/covid19/. The experience Amazon has with text-mining, machine learning and natural language understanding has allowed the automatic analysis of scientific articles to be incorporated into the Chemical Checker at a fast pace.Chemical Checker and results.

Flinders Universityresearchers working withOracle Cloudtechnology and vaccine technology developed by local companyVaxine,are testing avaccine candidate against the SARS-CoV-2coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.Oracle wastapped for technical collaboration, access to an expanded research community, and cloud infrastructure that helped enable the rapid design of the novel COVID-19 vaccine candidate.The Australian teamused computer models of the spike protein and its human receptor, ACE2, to identify how the virus was infecting human cells, and then were able to design a vaccine to block this process.Press release.

Through the end of 2020,Sandia National Laboratoriesisofferingany U.S. personnonexclusive, fast-tracklicensesfree of chargetomore than 1,000 patentedtechnologies. Thegoal of theRapid Technology Deployment Programisto enablelicensees to invest their full resources into combating theCOVID-19pandemic and its economic effects.

Japanis putting itsflagshipsupercomputerFugakuto work in combatting the pandemicby giving priority toCOVID-relatedresearch selected by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Installation of the new supercomputer began in December and isnt scheduled to go into full-fledged open useuntil2021, but someof the nodesare going intotrial useas of April1.Press release.

Latest from the Literature

A collaborativein vitrostudy led byMonash University's Biomedicine Discovery Institute(BDI)in Melbourne, Australia, with thePeter Doherty Institute of Infection and Immunity(Doherty Institute), has shown that ananti-parasitic drugalready available around the world kills the virus within 48 hours.The drug, Ivermectin, stopped the SARS-CoV-2 virus growing in cell culture within 48 hours.Ivermectin is an FDA-approved anti-parasitic drug that has also been shown to be effective in vitro against a broad range of viruses including HIV, Dengue, Influenza and Zika virus.The study was published online inAntiviral Research.DOI:10.1016/j.antiviral.2020.104787

A multidisciplinary team of scientists atThe University of Texas Medical Branch(UTMB)at Galveston have developedareverse genetic systemthatallows researchers tomake SARS-CoV-2 in the lab and manipulate it in a petri dishspeeding thedevelopmentandevaluation ofvaccines, diagnose infected patients and exploreevolution ofthe virus.The system has been used tolabel the virussoinfectedcellsturn green,creatingahigh-throughputtestsignificantly reducing the time it takes to evaluate and bring candidate vaccines to market.UTMBis making thetechnology available to academia and industry researchers working to quickly developCOVID-19countermeasures. On-campus scientistswill nowdeploy the technology forblood-based diagnostictesting.Thestudy willbe publishedinCell Host & Microbe. DOI:10.1016/j.chom.2020.04.004

Thereceptor for SARS-CoV-2 is abundantly expressed in certain progenitor cellsthatnormally develop into respiratory tract cells, according to scientistsattheBerlin Institute of Health,Charit-UniversittsmedizinBerlinand the Thorax Clinic at Heidelberg University Hospital. The discovery, whichwillbe published inThe EMBO Journal (DOI:10.15252/embj.20105114),emerged from anexamination ofsamples from non-virus-infected patientsusing used single-cell sequencing technology.An additional, preliminary finding was that receptor density on the cells increased with age andwasgenerally higher in men than in women.Dellwas responsible for the reduced processing time needed to sequence 60,000 single cells.

AUniversity of Ottawabiology professor believesstray dogsspecifically dog intestinesmaybe theorigin of the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.Hisstudy involved examining full-lengthbetacoronavirusgenomes that have been deposited into GenBank, a National Institutes of Health genetic sequence database.Evidence willbepublishedinMolecular Biology and Evolution(http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaa094). While study findings are of vital interest in the current world health crisis, theymore broadly suggest that viralevolution can be revealed bylooking at theinteraction of host defenses with viral genomes.

Researchersin the UK and GermanyreportinPNASa phylogenic network of 160SARS-CoV-2genomes, revealing three major typesof variantsone found predominantly within East Asia and the other two in Europeans and Americans.The networkreconstructsdocumented routes of infectionand might be used to trace unknown infection sourcesthatcan then be quarantined toprevent recurrent spreadof the disease worldwide.DOI:10.1073/pnas.2004999117

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TGen, Amgen, CeMM, And More: Bio-IT Community Rallies Against COVID-19 - Bio-IT World