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Coronavirus cure
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DrG:
Well, at the risk of the blind leading the blind......

One of the most exciting approaches to a treatment against a virus is to find antibodies that specifically identify and destroy the virus (as in the case of someone who has recovered from the infection) and then manufacture / purify them and then give them to someone else.

Here is some commentary on the role of mAbs https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/27/monoclonal-antibodies-for-the-coronavirus

The importance is that the study has identified such an antibody and it works, in vitro.

Identification is only the start of the process https://www.uptodate.com/contents/overview-of-therapeutic-monoclonal-antibodies

Lots of folks are going after this approach, the deployment of could be a critical pre-vaccine step to "solving"  this pandemic https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/19/coronavirus-antibody-therapies-will-they-be-ready-in-time/

Just an aside - it may be that those 'young' people who recover quickly and without severe symptoms are not even using this line of immune function and that is an interesting area in itself.

If you want to look for a "silver lining" in this mess, it is not that the "new normal" will have us living in bubbles, it is that we will advance the science significantly (e.g., the case with HIV).
cdev:
Because it is such a challenge that on the way to solving it we'll be forced to learn a lot of new stuff. Thats what I have thought too. But they are resisting learning things that might make our approach more cost effective because the investing class REALLY sees healthcare as their entitlement to milk every possible penny out of in their own captive markets.

Have you been following the battle over starting a new COVID-19 patent/IP pool? Its quite interesting. To understand the context, somebody needs to understand what happened with HIV drugs, especially the true and incredible story that is laid out in the film "Fire in the Blood" by Dylan Mohan Gray (that name is from memory and may be misspelled, anyway the film is on netflix, etc. 

Also, the story involves the WTO and its TRIPS agreement as well as the "DOHA Declaration on the Trips Agreement and Public Health"

I am too exhausted of this whole thing to do it justice right now.
 Here are some links, these are not light reading.

Arthritic Flexibilities for Accessing Medicines- Analysis of WTO Action Regarding Paragraph 6 of the DOHA Declaration on the Trips Agreement and Public Health
 https://journals.iupui.edu/index.php/iiclr/article/download/17822/17992/

The race to patent the SARS virus: the TRIPS agreement and access to essential medicines (by Matthew Rimmer of QUT, who is very good on IP law issues, his work is quite worth reading, seeking out I mean and reading - this is from 2004)
https://eprints.qut.edu.au/86812/1/86812.pdf
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I found this line of thinking while investigating the surprising broadness of resveratrol's antiviral activity.

Sirtuins Are Evolutionarily Conserved Viral Restriction Factors (mBio-2014-Koyuncu)

https://mbio.asm.org/content/mbio/5/6/e02249-14.full.pdf

--------------------

The below is unrelated but its one of the most informative of the articles Ive read on the neuroinvasive aspect of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Yanchao Li
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-2884-9829
The neuroinvasive potential of SARS-CoV2 may be at least partially responsible for the respiratory failure of COVID-19 patients
Yan-Chao Li 1 *, Wan-Zhu Bai 2 , Tsutomu Hashikawa 3

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32104915
Buriedcode:

--- Quote from: vodka on May 04, 2020, 06:36:26 pm ---First point, the pseudoscience is the wildcard of the officialism,which they feel powerless or jealous, unable to explain a phenomenon what is against of their beliefs or their dogma. On the Medicine history there are many cases, and we have not to go so far at time.
--- End quote ---

It's true its almost modern Science's "Fake news" cry.  But you must remember that it's a broad term that covers everything from quackery/vitalism, to apparent legitimate research that appears to use the scientific method, but falls short to change the outcome of research either by citing poorly designed/executed studies, or straight up fabricating data.  If an experiment creates results that cannot currently be explained, until there is a plausible explanation, then that isn't "science" - thats the start of research.


--- Quote from: vodka on May 04, 2020, 06:36:26 pm ---Second point: The experiment was done with 10 patients among them  there were semi-critics and critics. Nobody DIED, 10 of 10 recovered. Now, if the doctors have achieved to find a secure dosis for healing  .Isn't it valid?
--- End quote ---

Depends on hat you mean by valid.  Ten patients is a tiny sample.  And as far as I am aware, the majority of COVID-19 patients make a full recovery.  How do you know they wouldn't have recovered anyway if there was no intervention?  How were they selected? were they tested but asymptomatic? were they severe cases?  Were they all the same age? 

Something which many seems to skip over is, studies and trials are hard.  The scientific methodology is simple, but designing and running trials takes a lot of time, money and effort. You can never control for all confounding factors, or account for natural variation, it's very easy to completely warp results by excluding or including patients with or without certain criteria.  I would put money on a trial in with 10 COVID-19 patients, all drank a glass of apple juice, and all recovered, it doesn't prove anything really - except perhaps that apple juice isn't lethal.


--- Quote from: vodka on May 04, 2020, 06:36:26 pm ---Third point: The hypothesis of the hemoglobin (curiously censored in youtube): The theory is that the virus interferes with the hemoglobin molecule avoiding the set up of oxigen , provoking the cytokines storm and the inflamations of the organs
--- End quote ---

I have no idea if that is true or not.  I suspect the reason for the censoring on youtube, because there is a LOT of misinformation that authorities are trying to battle - the fact the POTUS recommended injecting disinfectant is the most known, but seriously, social media and youtube is FULL of dangerous quackery about this virus. 

The stupid stuff is obvious, but arguably the more dangerous ideas are the ones with an air of legitimacy - like massive doses of vitamins, or "anti oxidants" that have no evidence supporting their use to "boost immune system (which you dont' want to do anyway, because that can cause cytokine storm).  When people are scared, they tend to abandon critical thinking and go with whatever they feel is best - and hold onto to preconceived notions, like "low vitamins bad, some good, more = better!".

Look at the whole hydroxychloroquine debacle - how many papers have been published about its efficacy recently, and how many actually showed any benefit? None.  It's just because it is mentioned in the news, or because there are ongoing studies into it - people assume it must work.

I'm not sure why interfering with oxygen uptake would "provoke a cytokine storm", I thought that was just an over-reaction of the immune system when a large number of white cells are involved - that can be triggered by many things.  What links the two here? or did you just state that?

[/quote]
dietert1:
Nobody knows what will happen, but sometimes i think corona may be the cure nature invented to protect this planet from another pandemic. What we call human civilization became a plague.

Regards, Dieter
james_s:

--- Quote from: Buriedcode on May 05, 2020, 03:05:20 pm ---Depends on hat you mean by valid.  Ten patients is a tiny sample.  And as far as I am aware, the majority of COVID-19 patients make a full recovery.  How do you know they wouldn't have recovered anyway if there was no intervention?  How were they selected? were they tested but asymptomatic? were they severe cases?  Were they all the same age? 

Something which many seems to skip over is, studies and trials are hard.  The scientific methodology is simple, but designing and running trials takes a lot of time, money and effort. You can never control for all confounding factors, or account for natural variation, it's very easy to completely warp results by excluding or including patients with or without certain criteria.  I would put money on a trial in with 10 COVID-19 patients, all drank a glass of apple juice, and all recovered, it doesn't prove anything really - except perhaps that apple juice isn't lethal.

--- End quote ---


10 participants is nothing, it's below the noise floor. You'd need 100 bare minimum to reach any kind of useful results and even then it would really only tell you whether there was reason to expand the next stage to something like 1,000, then 10,000 would start to get interesting.
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