[FRIAM] Antiviral and Vaccine development and immune profiling from one of many insiders in the fray..

[Steven A Smith]

FWIW -

This just in from my daughter, molecularBio/Virologist at OHSU on the
topic of antivirals and vaccines and human samples for immune profiling:

    Also, this concept of targeting the host rather than the virus for
    antiviral development is not a new one, has lots of complications,
    and is something that people have been trying to do for years with
    limited success.  However, there are lots of good virologists on
    here (many flavivirologists!), and I do have some hope that
    something good might come from it.  The press coverage of this work
    makes me feel a little uncomfortable--not that he's being
    opportunistic or dishonest necessarily but when the University PR
    office gets involved, there's almost always some spin/exaggeration.
    I will say (I don't know if you've seen the interviews with Nevan)
    that I am enjoying his increased fondness for eccentric suit jackets. 
     
    I spent 4 hours yesterday on conference calls partly because no one
    has anything else to do, but also because everyone's doing their
    very best to get involved with Covid research, I think mostly with
    good intentions.  We will be setting up some vaccine development,
    which is extremely unlikely to have any benefit for the current
    epidemic (although who knows? the current estimate of how long we
    will be fighting this keeps lengthening), and I will also be filling
    in in a colleague's lab who is collecting and banking Covid19+ human
    samples for immune profiling--gotta go get fit tested for an N95
    mask today. I'm not particularly worried about it but I have lots of
    people worrying for me, so then I wonder if I should be worried...

    One interesting thing I heard in the endless conference calls
    yesterday was that they have tried an anti-CCR5 antibody in some
    compassionate use cases with enough success that they are going to
    try in more people.  The hypothesized activity is that it prevents
    'cytokine storm' (basically very high levels of inflammation that
    are responsible for most of the damage that happens at the end
    stages). The good thing about this approach is that there are many
    antibody treatments that would presumably do the same thing, so
    there are lots of avenues to explore if this turns out to really work.


I've been relying mostly on TWIV for keeping up with the current
research because there's a ton out there, and it's good to have someone
smart sift through it for me.
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