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

[Marcus Daniels]

Alrighty, let's return attention to those genetically-engineered babies!
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From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Steven A Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com>
Sent: Tuesday, March 24, 2020 12:16 PM
To: friam at redfish.com <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] Antiviral and Vaccine development and immune profiling from one of many insiders in the fray..


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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