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188761 tn?1584567620

What's next for the Covid19 virus?

What does the future hold?
Mutations are a natural part of the virus life cycle, this virus is also going to mutate. If and when the vaccine is out, maybe the virus could adapt to it and develop resistance.

E.g. Researchers in Brazil traced the virus, they isolated SARS-CoV-2 from two patients confirmed to have COVID-19. They sequenced the complete genomes of both samples of the virus, not only did they find that genomes differ from each other but also they were totally different from the genomes of the virus samples sequenced in Wuhan, China.

Based on a recent chinese research, Coronavirus has already mutated into two strains the "S" type and the "L" type, the former one being the aggressive type that was found responsible for 70% of the total infection.

There are greater minds at work to find a vaccine to this virus. However, any such treats and advancements can be discussed here on this thread.
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188761 tn?1584567620
Update: Since the structure of coronavirus is similar to that of HIV to some extent, HIV ARV medication - Kaletra, which is a combination of lopinavir and ritonavir is seen to be helpful in curing people from the effects of COVID-19 infection.

Kaletra is a protease inhibitors, it blocks the protease enzyme, a key enzyme that helps the virus to replicate. Previous studies had found that the drug combination was helpful in preventing SARS, also a coronavirus, from maturing and replicating.
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Avatar universal
Well hep b vaccine isnt vulnerable to mutated hep b being hep d so thats not always the case
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188761 tn?1584567620
Update: In view of the humanitarian aspects of the pandemic, it has been decided that India would licence paracetamol and HCQ in appropriate quantities to all our neighbouring countries who are dependent on our capabilities. We will also be supplying these essential drugs to some nations who have been particularly badly affected by the pandemic.

India, last month banned exports of 16 drugs, including hydroxychloroquine and paracetamol has now decided to lift the exports ban after “a comprehensive assessment" of possible requirements under different scenarios.
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188761 tn?1584567620
Update: Scientists at Mt Sinai University in New York have created the first test in the US for detecting coronavirus antibodies in the blood.

https://leapsmag.com/breaking-the-first-u-s-test-to-detect-if-a-person-has-potential-immunity-to-covid-19-was-just-developed/
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In a little more than 30 days from today March 24 Canadian researchers could know whether a dollar-a-day gout drug can prevent the inflammatory storm killing people infected with COVID-19.

In severe cases the pandemic virus can do major damage to the lungs, leading to a potentially fatal complication known as acute respiratory distress syndrome.
cardiologist Dr. Jean-Claude Tardif, director of the Montreal Heart Institute Research Centre.

Tardif is leading a national trial, assembled with lightening speed, that’s testing whether the gout drug colchicine can quell that perfect storm.

Researchers hope to recruit 6,000 people who test positive for COVID-19. The trial is open to people 40 and older who haven’t been hospitalized and who would be willing to take the drug or a placebo daily for 30 days. People can contact their doctor or call a toll-free line at 1-877-536-6837. (Women who are not on birth control, women who are pregnant and women who are breastfeeding aren’t eligible.)  https://nationalpost.com/news/can-a-cheap-gout-drug-slash-covid-19-deaths?video_autoplay=true

“I’ve already been bombarded with emails and contact from several countries,” Tardif said Tuesday.
More than 125 people are involved — nurses, doctors, virologists, microbiologists, intensive care unit doctors, pharmacists. “I can tell you at the human level it is an extraordinary thing that has happened,” Tardif said. They achieved in six days what normally takes six to nine months to launch. Pharmascience Inc. in Montreal manufactured more than 200,000 tablets of colchicine and placebo; CGI developed the online tool for patients. Health Canada reviewed the protocol in 24 hours instead of the usual 30 days, and Tardif said the drug could be shipped rapidly, in as little as hours.

“It’s a bit surreal. Everyone in the health-care system is professional and well-trained. But this is something you see once in a lifetime,” he said.

“We fully realize that the wave is only starting, unfortunately.”
This gout drug trial now also enrolling in NYU. 6,000 participants take tablets over 30 days "who will be followed for 30 days with initial results available a few days after study completion."

https://www.icm-mhi.org/en/new-clinical-trial-treatment-covid-19-positive-patients-start-nyu-grossman-school-medicine
188761 tn?1584567620
Update: France launched an online test to help people that may be worried to have contracted coronavirus, this test will help them to assess their symptoms, and guide them towards next steps.

Website: www.maladiecoronavirus.fr

There is a series of 24 questions specific to common symptoms as experienced by people who have developed the COVID-19 infection.

The purpose of this test is not for diagnosis, it is only an health assessment to provide people to provide a roadmap.
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188761 tn?1584567620
Update: India goes under complete lockdown to curb COVID-19 spread until March 31.  Section 144 (An order to prohibit the assembly of four or more people in an area. According to the law, every member of such 'unlawful assembly' can be booked for engaging in rioting) imposed.
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2 Comments
Feel free to write about the situation in your country or state in the US, where you are living in.
I live in a state that is under shelter in place laws currently.  I'm fine with that, I don't want this.  I've read they are testing the combination of hydroxyquinoline and azithromycin.  Hoping they have success.  It would be great to believe there was 'something' to help.
188761 tn?1584567620
Update: Russia's FMBA has created three prototypes of the vaccine. These are recombinant proteins based on epitopes of the surface S-protein SARS-CoV-2. Trials are in progress on animals.
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1081992 tn?1389903637
mike_no, I've just seen your status. You're a good man, keep up the good work.
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1081992 tn?1389903637
"with antimalaria medicine called Chloroquine"
Which btw is from the quinine in gin and tonic.
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5 Comments
Ken, you sure love your drinks! We are going to win COVID-19 sooner, it's just matter of time.
Mike, I don't drink at all. But it is an interesting bit of history taking a modern turn. The quinines are also very curiously in the DMARD class of drugs used against inflammatory conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

Another DMARD from a plant is Artemisinin, which is also used against the ARDS from malaria. Who knows, those two might be used against CoV in places where modern drugs aren't available.  

"Acute lung injury and acute respiratory distress syndrome in malaria"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18807374



Ken, that's some great info. I thought you like your drinks from the way you said 'Gin and tonic' sensed a glow. My bad though.
Mike, that's from the history of the British in India around 100 years ago. The story is that they wanted to encourage taking the bitter quinine against malaria every day, so they invented gin and tonic.

As a sort of parallel, I've seen that your own native Neem leaf is used as an antimicrobial in dental surgery there - and it might be more effective than modern drugs.  
You're correct. Neem has a lot of medicinal properties and is regarded as important in Indian ********.
188761 tn?1584567620
Update : Synairgen, UK is ready to trial it's experimental lung drug SNG001 in Covid-19 patients.

This drug has to be inhaled, the original objective of this drug is to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD).
Interferon beta, a naturally occurring protein, is the key component of this drug which enhances the body’s antiviral responses. It will boost the immune system of people infected with COVID-19 for fighting against the infection. 100 infected people to receive this trial next week.
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188761 tn?1584567620
Update: CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT) has tied up with pharmaceutical giant Cipla to work on the development of antiviral drugs to contain Covid-19.

The CSIR-IICT decided to work on three molecules: remdesivir, favipiravir and baloxavir.
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4 Comments
Thanks! I think UCSF is working in Remdesivir trials as well. Another trial is in China with this drug. Some can apply to be treated with the drug for comassionate care.
mkh9
I read somewhere that some one in the USA has shown to recover fully with just this drug. I guess, complete trials would be important to find out if can reduce mortality rates and primarily, the severity of symptoms.
Well, not sure this is actually how it went.  Although people taking medication can recover fully, there is no way to know if the medication had anything to do with it unless you do double blinded studies, and nobody is doing that because it isn't ethical at the moment anyway given the disease can be fatal.  All evidence so far is anecdotal and all over the place.  I'm also wondering about a vaccine.  While they're promising one, don't bet the farm on it.  Although we have a flu vaccine, it actually doesn't work very well because the flu has learned to mutate so much.  Some years it's fairly effective, some years it's hardly effective at all.  We don't know yet if this virus will mutate so much as to make it hard to predict in advance which form to make the vaccine to treat.  Again, time will tell.
Update.  Heard an interview with someone from Johnson and Johnson, and while they're not moving as fast as a couple smaller companies, they virologist sounded very confident they will have a vaccine for covid.
1415174 tn?1453243103
I also heard that the drug for Malaria Chloroquine has had some effectiveness in treating Covid19. It is lessening the symptoms of serious cases.
mkh9
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2 Comments
Opps I saw that someone else mentioned Chloroquine.
mkh9
Hi mkh9, Chloroquine in combination with Kaletra is being used in India to treat Coronavirus infected patients and it is showing promising results in several cases.
188761 tn?1584567620
Update: China begins clinical trials for it's coronavirus vaccine.

The treatment for the coronavirus includes blood plasma from recovered patients and traditional Chinese medicine. It's approach is based on the idea that antibodies developed by recovered patients might strengthen the immune system of new patients.
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188761 tn?1584567620
Update : Potential vaccine for COVID-19 is on pilot, first human trial began today in the USA.

Potential vaccine contains genetic material called messenger RNA (mRNA), this was produced in a lab.

The mRNA is a genetic code that tells cells how to make a protein and was found in the outer coat of the new coronavirus, it converts the body's own cellular mechanisms for making proteins to make those that mimic the virus proteins, thereby producing an immune response.
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2 Comments
Does this vaccine also incorporate antigens, or just the mRNA?
I guess just the mRNA, what I understand is that in traditional methods, to control very contagious diseases like measles, it needs to grow large amounts of virus or bacteria, which takes months. The key element in a vaccine is those microbes that grow druing this time,  antigens in this case creates a recognition to the human immune system that some foreign involvement has invaded the body that need to be evicted.

On the other hand, vaccine that was tested today has tried to infuse mRNA, it is essentially the codes for COVID-19 proteins. Once this is injected in the body, immune responses from the lymph can process that mRNA to make the protein in a formidable way for other immune cells to recognize them in order to trigger a response against an actual viral infection, coronavirus in this case. The scalability of this process should be very high tou counter the high risk of mass infection in several countries.



707563 tn?1626361905
Oh that's interesting about the meds. I heard someone mention antivirals for treatment, but I think of antivirals as Valtrex, as in herpes treatment, not ARV (antiretrovirals, for those who don't know), but I may have misheard or he misspoke.

ARVs are notoriously expensive, though. It will be interesting to see how that plays out here in the US.

Good info. Thanks, Mike.
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4 Comments
In China, during the initial stages of the outbreak they were treating COVID-19 infections with antimalaria medicine called Chloroquine and HIV Antiretroviral- Kaletra, they did manage to recover people with this. In India, there are 4 cases of complete recovery with ARV medication.

As I stated above that the structure of Coronavirus resembles that of HIV, this virus to infects humans through releasing their RNA in to human cells.

In HIV infection, the virus fuses with human cells, from there 2 key processes takes place for the virus to further replicate - release of protease enzyme for replication and reverse transcriptase to in order to convert single-stranded RNA into double-stranded cDNA.

Whereas, in herpes infection, it shoots DNA into human cells, therefore, antiherpes drugs inhibit viral replication by serving as competitive substrates for viral DNA polymerase.

Hence, an antiviral medication might not be able to treat COVID-19 infection. Now, that's just my understanding of the whole thing. Perhaps, I could be wrong unless we have a tried and tested vaccine to this virus. At this point, every thing is just a trial and error phase.
I was thinking antivirals like Tamiflu!  I wonder if this is similar to HIV if something like Prep would work to prevent.  
Yes, maybe. Because this med also inhibits neuraminidase in the flu virus, which is essential for it's replication.

Some Chinese researchers are testing combinations of ASC-09 (ARV HIV) and Tamiflu (Oseltamivir), ritonavir (ARV HIV) and Tamiflu and Tamiflu alone.
Again, as I said before, because no double blinded trails have been done or are able to be done ethically, a claim that a drug helped a patient recover is just a claim not backed by evidence.  Doesn't mean it isn't true, doesn't mean it is true, it's anecdotal evidence which is better than no evidence at all, but most people recover from this virus without taking anything so it's likely the people given these drugs would also have recovered without medication.  Until we're beyond the crisis stage I don't think we're going to see double-blinded studies, and the drugs being mentioned have serious side effects for some people that are worse than what covid does to most people.  Now, that's no solace for those who don't recover or who get the worst form of covid, and for those people it's fine to try stuff.  What isn't fine is to say we know the drugs did anything because we don't.  In time we might.  As to the vaccine, if covid turns out to be like the flu, vaccines won't be very effective against it.  The flu vaccine has good years and bad but never perfect years -- it's never worked 100% of the time like many other vaccines we're familiar with.  Again, time will tell.  But mutation isn't necessarily a bad thing even if it does make a vaccine much more difficult to make.  Viruses mutate in order to stay in existence, if they kill every host they die also.  So many viruses mutate to get weaker, which is what happened with the flu, which still kills a ton of people but mostly those who are immune system compromised.  It also happened with the most common corona virus, the cold, which I'm guessing has been around for thousands of years and probably was quite lethal when it first broke out in the human populate but has mutated to a minor illness which nobody is even trying to cure.  Peace, all.
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