LIVE BLOG: R&D response to COVID-19 pandemic (Archived)

Celltrion announced results of preclinical testing of an antibody it is developing against COVID-19 and said it aims to start human trials in late July. In animal models the product reduced viral load up to 100-fold, with recovery from light symptoms after the first day of treatment, and of serious lung inflammation after seven days of treatment. The antibody drug is part of a national project managed by the Korean Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. In April, president Moon Jae-in committed €153 million of government funding for the development of COVID-19 drugs.

Oxford University’s entrepreneurship centre the Oxford Foundry announced the four winning projects in its COVID-19 funding opportunity. The winners are: My110, a project to develop a non-invasive saliva test for COVID-19, which will improve testing capabilities and effectiveness; the Devie coaching app to help parents of very young children; the Oblivious AI team, which is working in India to use contact-tracing while keeping data secure; and the Crowdless app which shows how busy supermarkets and shops are, to help people avoid crowds and queues.

The UK Medical Research Council Charity LifeArc has announced the 15 clinical trials that are to be funded by its £10 million COVID-19 research fund, announced on March 20. The 15 projects from around the world will test a mixture of approved drugs and drugs in late state development in other indications with a known mechanism of action, to assess if they could be repurposed to treat coronavirus infections.

Researchers at Ruhr University Bochum are to use human lung organoids grown from stem cells to directly study the effects of COVID-19 infection and assess the impact of antiviral drugs. The project, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, starts on Monday and will last for 18 months. Organoids have advantages over animal models and cell cultures based on human lung tissue from biopsies, in that they can be produced in large volumes and all have the same genetic background. That makes them a more reliable 3D model for studying the interchange between the virus and the different host cells in the lungs, to see how the virus replicates and assess the effect of antiviral drugs. The researchers have engineered the COVID-19 virus, inserting a gene for a green fluorescent protein, making it possible to study interactions between the virus and cells of the lung organoid with high resolution microscopy.

The government funding agency UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) announced  it is joining the public-private US consortium that is bringing the power of supercomputers to the analysis of COVID-19 epidemiology, bioinformatics and molecular modelling data.

The high performance computing consortium, announced early in April, has around 40 members including IBM, Google, Microsoft, NASA and US research institutions. UKRI will provide access to the Archer supercomputer at Edinburgh University and machines at the Science and Technology Facilities Council and the Earlham Institute. UKRI is the first European supercomputing partner to join the consortium. There is a rolling call for research that addresses Covid-19 and proposals seeking access to UK facilities will be subject to peer review and assessed according to project needs.

G7 science and technology ministers said they will work to enhance cooperation on shared COVID-19 research priorities, including basic and applied research, public health, and clinical studies. After meeting by video link on Thursday, the ministers said all government-funded COVID-19 epidemiological and related research data and information will be made accessible to the public in machine-readable formats. They also agreed to strengthen the use of high-performance computing for the COVID-19 response. Away from the pandemic, the ministers approved the launch the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, envisioned under the 2018 and 2019 G7 presidencies of Canada and France, to enhance cooperation in the ethical development of AI. Here is the statement from the ministers, representing Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US.

Swedish public confidence in politicians’ comments about coronavirus in the news media is decreasing, according to the latest findings of a study being conducted by Vetenskap & Allmänhet, a Swedish non-profit that works to promote dialogue and openness between researchers and the public. The most recent survey on 11 – 17 May, carried out in collaboration with researchers from the Karolinska Institute and Södertörn University, found confidence in politicians has fallen by 12 percentage points, from 40 per cent in April, to 28 per cent. Unlike other countries in Europe, Sweden adopted a no-lockdown policy. In total, the country, which has a population of around 10 million, has seen 4,125 deaths from COVID-19. That compares badly to Nordic neighbours, with 312 deaths in Finland’s population of five million, and 563 deaths in Denmark, which has a population of 5.8 million.

With the number of COVID-19 infections falling it will take longer to gather sufficient evidence that the vaccines currently in development are effective. An alternative is human challenge studies in which volunteers are infected with the virus under strict medical supervision. But with no effective rescue therapy, that is viewed as unethical.

Now, in a peer reviewed paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics, Adair Richards, honorary associate professor at Warwick University, has set out ethical guidelines for deliberately infecting volunteers who have been given a vaccine candidate. Richards, who leads on research ethics training for postgraduate researchers in science and medicine, said deliberately infecting volunteers with a disease as dangerous as COVID-19 has previously been considered to be unethical. “However I believe that the current global situation is so different to those previously faced, that it is ethical in this case,” he said. In other areas of life it is ethical for individuals do things that put them at personal risk, such as volunteer fire fighters or live organ donors.

Speeding up vaccine development even by a few weeks or months could result in saving many lives. The suggestions are in line with principles for human challenge trials in COVID-19 vaccines development set out by the World Health Organisation earlier in May, while the European Medicines Agency has said human challenge trials could provide information to speed up the regulatory appraisal of vaccines.

The COVID-19 MS Coalition coordinated by Manchester University will involve more than 500 scientists from 18 countries in analysing blood samples from COVID-19 patients using mass spectrometry. The aim of the project is to help improve testing methods and therapeutic programmes. Mass spectrometry will provide precise diagnostic data at the molecular level of viral antigens, to inform testing for the virus. The coalition will also look for biomarkers to predict the progression of disease and draw up a detailed map of the interaction between the virus and the host, providing important insights for the development of vaccines.

The New Zealand government has announced it will allocate NZD$37 million (€20.9 million) to COVID-19 vaccine research and manufacturing, of which NZD$15 million is for international research, including the projects supported by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, and NZD$7 million for the vaccine alliance Gavi, which distributes vaccines in low to middle income countries. The intention is to ensure New Zealand gets access to any vaccine developed through international research. The government has also set up a task force involving several ministries and government regulatory agencies to coordinate the vaccine strategy.