Get all the latest news on coronavirus and more delivered daily to your inbox. Sign up here.
Dr. Thomas Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, warned that the U.S. is “still at the beginning” of the coronavirus outbreak, and outlined five conditions that must be met before the country should consider relaxing social distancing practices.
In the third week of February, as the covid-19 epidemic was still flaring in China, I arrived in Kolkata, India. I woke up to a sweltering morning—the black kites outside my hotel room were circling upward, lifted by the warming currents of air—and I went to visit a shrine to the goddess Shitala. Her name means “the cool one”; as the myth has it, she arose from the cold ashes of a sacrificial fire. The heat that she is supposed to diffuse is not just the fury of summer that hits the city in mid-June but also the inner heat of inflammation. She is meant to protect children from smallpox, heal the pain of those who contract it, and dampen the fury of a pox epidemic.
Thirty thousand base pairs make up the (relatively tiny) SARS-CoV-2 genome. A singular genome holds limited information. But, by comparing multiple genomes from different patients, animals, places, or time periods, the DNA’s information can be unlocked. From where the virus originated to how it spilled over from animals into humans, how quickly it mutates, and how those changes affect infections—genome comparisons may provide the answers.
Image: This illustration, created at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reveals ultrastructural morphology exhibited by coronaviruses. A novel coronavirus, named Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), was identified as the cause of an outbreak of respiratory illness first detected in Wuhan, China in 2019. The illness caused by this virus has been named coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). (CDC/Alissa Eckert, MS)
Bloomberg Philanthropies and the state of Maryland will spend $4 million to back a Johns Hopkins University study into whether the blood of recovered COVID-19 patients can be used to treat patients suffering from the disease.
The effort will also include researchers from nearly two dozen institutions, including the Mayo Clinic, Stanford University Medical Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Arturo Casadevall, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, will lead the study.
Sometimes, business success requires someone who has your back.
Now in its sixth year, 757 Angels continues to support start-ups in Hampton Roads and elsewhere by investing capital in them.
The Angel Capital Association, a national industry alliance based in Kansas, named 757 Angels as one of the nation’s top 10 angel groups, by total dollars invested, for 2018.
And last year, 757 Angels saw continued growth, and its biggest year, as the group invested $15 million in 11 companies.
Image: Monique Adams, executive director of 757 Angels, gives a talk.(Courtesy of 757 Angels)
Medical biotech company Emergent BioSolutions is one of the many health industry players turning its efforts towards addressing the current global coronavirus pandemic. Their work includes a two-pronged effort to pursue plasma-based treatments that could help lessen the impact of COVID-19 on health care systems, with a fast-tracked development timeline that could see human clinical trials start as soon as this summer.
The study of the COVID-19 pandemic often involves sequencing the SARS-CoV-2 virus using Illumina, Nanopore, IonTorrent and Sanger technologies alone or in combination. Depending on the sampling and library preparation method used, this can involve metatranscriptomic data of varying viral content.
In this webinar tutorial, the following topics will be discussed:
QIAGEN N.V. QGEN announced that it started shipping its new QIAstat-Dx Respiratory SARS-CoV-2 Panel test (which is to be sold as an in-vitro diagnostic or IVD) in the United States to help diagnose coronavirus-infected patients. The announcement came after a new policy of an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) was declared by the FDA early this month. Notably, the company will submit the related EUA to the FDA this week.
Image: https://www.nasdaq.com
Gentian Diagnostics AS is pleased to announce that the results from a study conducted in collaboration with University College of London (UCL) are published in Critical Care 2020, Meeting Abstracts from the 40th International Symposium on Intensive Care & Emergency Medicine. The results indicate that calprotectin can be used as an early biomarker for infection and inflammation. The study also shows earlier release of calprotectin compared to other conventional biomarkers (procalcitonin and C-reactive protein (CRP)). Early activation of immune response and recognition of bacterial infection and sepsis is a key step for early and correct initiation of antibiotic treatment. Calprotectin is released by neutrophils upon their activation and may thus act as an early biomarker of inflammation and bacterial infection.
When Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan decides to close nonessential businesses, bars and restaurants and limit public gatherings, he isn’t doing so all on his own.
Hogan has a team of seven public health specialists that he consults as he figures out how to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic.
Even without an official shelter-in-place order like a handful of other states have implemented, Maryland has some of the strictest rules across the nation to contain the spread of COVID-19.
Image: Dr. Linda Singh, interim executive director and CEO of TEDCO and a retired major general in the Maryland National Guard, is among the seven public health specialists Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan consults with regularly during the coronavirus pandemic. Here they talk in April 2018 at Aberdeen Proving Ground.(Kenneth K. Lam / Baltimore Sun)
