The conversation
3 medical innovations fueled by COVID-19 that will survive the pandemic
No-based vaccines have ever been approved for humans before the coronavirus pandemic. Juan Gaertner / Science Photo Library via Getty Images A number of technologies and tools have had the opportunity to prove themselves for the first time in the context of COVID-19. Three researchers engaged in vaccine-based vaccines, portable diagnostics and drug discovery explain how their work is challenging the pandemic, and they hope that every technology is now ready to continue to make major changes in medicine. Genetic Vaccines Deborah Fuller, professor of microbiology at the University of Washington, thirty years ago, researchers first injected mice with genes from a foreign pathogen to elicit an immune response. As with many new discoveries, these first vaccine-based vaccines have had their ups and downs as well. Early mRNA vaccines were difficult to store and did not produce the right kind of immunity. DNA vaccines were more stable, but were not effective in ending up in the cell nucleus, so they did not produce adequate immunity. Researchers have slowly overcome the problems of stability, by getting the genetic instructions where they should be and causing them to have more effective immune responses. By 2019, academic laboratories and biotechnology companies around the world had dozens of promising mRNA and DNA vaccines for infectious diseases, as well as for cancer in development or in Phase 1 and Phase 2 clinical trials on humans. When COVID-19 struck, especially mRNA vaccines were ready to be tested in the real world. The efficiency of the 94% mRNA vaccines exceeded the highest expectations of health officials. DNA and mRNA vaccines offer great advantages over traditional vaccines, as they only use the genetic code of a pathogen – rather than the whole virus or bacteria. Traditional vaccines take months, if not years, to develop. In contrast, once scientists get the genetic sequence of a new pathogen, they can design a DNA or mRNA vaccine within days, identify a leading clinical trial candidate within weeks, and have millions of doses manufactured within months. This is basically what happened to the coronavirus. No-vaccines also produce precise and effective immune responses. It not only stimulates antibodies that block an infection, but also a strong T-cell response that can clear up an infection if it occurs. It makes these vaccines better able to respond to mutations, and it also means that they may be able to eliminate chronic infections or cancer cells. The hope that gene-based vaccines could one day provide a vaccine for malaria or HIV, cure cancer, replace less effective traditional vaccines, or be ready to stop the next pandemic before it starts is no longer far-fetched. Indeed, many DNA and mRNA vaccines against a wide range of infectious diseases for the treatment of chronic infections and cancer are already in advanced stages and clinical trials. As someone who has been working on these vaccines for decades, I believe that their proven efficacy against COVID-19 will usher in a new era of vaccination with genetic vaccines at the forefront. Smart watches and other wearable technologies enable users to record more continuous health data than ever before. Pixabay Portable Technology and Early Detection of Diseases Albert H. Titus, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, University of Buffalo During the pandemic, researchers took full advantage of smartwatches, smart rings and other portable health and wellness technologies. These devices can measure the person’s temperature, heart rate, activity level and other biometrics. With this information, researchers were able to detect and detect COVID-19 infections even before people realize they have any symptoms. As portable use and adoption have increased over the past few years, researchers have begun to study the ability of these devices to monitor disease. Although real-time data collection was possible, previous work focused primarily on chronic diseases. But the pandemic both served as a lens to focus many researchers in the field of health articles and provided them with an unprecedented opportunity to study real-time detection of infectious diseases. The number of people potentially affected by a single disease – COVID-19 – has given researchers a large population at one time to exhaust and to test hypotheses. Combined with the fact that more people than ever carry carry health monitoring features and that these devices collect a lot of useful data, researchers were able to try to diagnose a disease using only data from portable items – an experiment they could only dream about before. Wearables can detect symptoms of COVID-19 or other diseases before the symptoms become noticeable. Although they appear to be able to detect disease early, the symptoms that are portable are not unique to COVID-19. These symptoms can be predictable for a number of potential illnesses or other health changes, and it’s much harder to tell what illness someone has than to simply say they are sick of something. If we move to the post-pandemic world, it is likely that more people will use wearing materials in their lives and that the devices will only improve. I expect that the knowledge that researchers gained during the pandemic about how to use health articles to monitor health will be a starting point for dealing with future outbreaks – not just viral pandemics, but possibly other events such as outbreaks of food poisoning. and seasonal flu episodes. . But since portable technology is concentrated in the pockets of affluent and younger populations, the research community and society as a whole must simultaneously address the differences that exist there. Every place where a coronavirus protein interacts with a human protein is a potentially intoxicating place. QBI Coronavirus Research Group, CC BY-ND A New Way to Discover Drugs Nevan Krogan, Professor of Cellular Molecular Pharmacology and Director of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute, University of California, San Francisco Proteins are the molecular machines that make your cells function. When proteins break down or are hijacked by a pathogen, you often get disease. Most drugs work by disrupting the action of one or more of these proteins that do not function well. A logical way to seek new medicine to treat a specific disease is to study individual genes and proteins that are directly affected by the disease. For example, researchers know that the BRCA gene – a gene that protects your DNA from damage – is closely linked to the development of breast cancer and ovarian cancer. So much work has focused on finding drugs that affect the function of the BRCA protein. However, some proteins are not solely responsible for diseases. Genes and the proteins they encode are part of complex networks – the BRCA protein interacts with ten to hundreds of other proteins that help it perform its cellular functions. My colleagues and I are part of a small but growing field of researchers studying these connections and interactions between proteins – what we call protein networks. My colleagues and I have been researching the potential of these networks for several years to find more ways in which drugs can improve diseases. When the coronavirus pandemic struck, we knew we had to try this approach and see if it could be used to quickly find a treatment for this emerging threat. We immediately began mapping the extensive network of human proteins that cut SARS-CoV-2 so that it could replicate. After compiling this map, we identified human proteins in the network that can easily target drugs. We found 69 compounds that affect the proteins in the coronavirus network. 29 of them have already been FDA approved treatments for other diseases. On January 25, we published an article showing that one of the drugs, Aplidin (Plitidepsin), currently used for the treatment of cancer, is 27.5 times stronger than inhibitor in the treatment of COVID-19, including one of the new variants. approved for phase 3 clinical trials in 12 countries as treatment for the new coronavirus. But this idea of mapping the protein interactions of diseases to seek new drug targets does not only apply to the coronavirus. We have now used this approach on other pathogens as well as other diseases including cancer, neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders. With these maps we can connect the dots between very seemingly diverse aspects of single diseases and discover ways in which drugs can treat them. We hope that this approach will enable us and researchers in other fields of medicine to discover new therapeutic strategies and also to see if old drugs can be used again to treat other conditions. [Understand new developments in science, health and technology, each week. Subscribe to The Conversation’s science newsletter.]This article was published from The Conversation, a non-profit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Deborah Fuller, University of Washington; Albert H. Titus, University of Buffalo, and Nevan Krogan, University of California, San Francisco. Read more: We found 47 old medicines that can treat the coronavirus: results show promising clues and a whole new way to fight COVID-19. Can vaccinated people still spread the coronavirus? Deborah Fuller is a co-founder of Orlance, Inc., which develops a needle-free technology for the delivery of DNA and RNA vaccines. She has provided funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense and the Washington Research Foundation. Albert H. Titus received research funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Defense. He also received funding for research in this area from Garwood Medical Devices. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, a senior member of the IEEE, a member of BMES, ASEE, and is a member of the BME Council of Chairs. Nevan Krogan works for Gladstone Institutes. He receives funding from NIH, DARPA and Roche Pharmaceuticals.