South Florida scientists searching for breakthrough in coronavirus fight

As coronavirus cases increasing around the world, right here in South Florida, the race is on to develop a vaccine. The world’s leading virus researchers call our area home. Kevin Ozebek takes us into their laboratories in this evening's 7 Investigates.

In these labs, don’t even consider shaking hands. With the scientists here, its elbow bumps only, because at once, they cannot afford to urge sick.

Scientists can't then focus on coronavirus to support people because, yeah, we're under stress. At Scripps Research Campus in Jupiter, Hyeryun Choe and her partner, Michael Farzan, are experts on virus infection. All scientists are really hard working. We're highly motivated in an exceptionally unmotivated way.

They and lots of other scientists dropped what they were doing to specialize in fighting the coronavirus. Testing is underway on what they call engineered antibodies. They’re man-made proteins that potentially could boost our system to higher defend against the coronavirus.

The pressure is on to search out a breakthrough fast.

A month ago, this was a motivating intellectual problem, ‘Oh, there’s a replacement virus to check,’ but it’s here. It’s in our state, it’s in our country.”

With many Americans already infected, Scripps scientists are digging through their vault of 14,000 drugs already approved for human consumption. The hope is one in all them could ease coronavirus symptoms.

Some researchers zero in on a protein that lies on top of the virus. There’s a protein on the virus whose job is to maneuver the virus into your cells. That protein is the most vital target for a vaccine. Scripps Research laboratories currently have around 100 scientists doing work relating to the coronavirus. Most of them are chemists. Others are biologists. To search out a vaccine, they assert it's crucial their fields close.

Making vaccines requires many alternative disciplines. Everything we do is mixed. Biochemistry, the concept of biochemistry was quite invented at Scripps Research.

Because these are the most effective minds within the best-equipped labs, the burden of the planet is now on these researchers. They work day and night. They merely come back to sleep and are available back. They couldn’t be prouder of the people that are working like sin here. But during this line of labor, it’s not an attempt that counts. It’s formulating vaccines, drugs, and coverings that employment when the planet needs it the foremost.

Two Supplements Proven To Lower Your Risk of Falling Victim To Viral Infections

From shopping malls and grocery stores to train stations and even sidewalks, and other similar areas, we can see a massive throng of people going about their lives. Visiting these locations is almost impossible without bumping into or brushing at someone's body.

KEY POINTS

·                  With coronavirus and other kinds of viral infection around, it is important to keep your body strong

·                  You can do this by ensuring that your body has the right kind of nutrients

·                  One of these important nutrients are zinc

Some of them may be sneezing or just talking to their mates. However, in both cases, when they sneeze or speak, tiny droplets from their mouths or noses can momentarily float into the air. Those small droplets could easily enter your bloodstream if you happen to pass by closely. Now imagine if they're suffering from some kind of viral infection, like coronavirus, and you'll have a pretty good idea of what those droplets can do to you.

A Viral Infection

With coronavirus outbreak, it's vitally important that you lower your risk of catching such a viral infection, especially in today's very dense population. Even without coronavirus, flu and colds are common viral illnesses that cause many symptoms such as headaches, sore throats, and runny noses.

Combating a viral infection can often result in people missing work or spending more time with family and friends. Good thing certain drugs can help reduce the risk of contracting or becoming infected with a virus.

Zinc

A truly remarkable macronutrient, zinc can be extracted from nuts, fish, meat and other food types. This supplement has also become widely accepted as a good option for common colds and flu care.

This popular belief has a scientific basis as several studies have found that zinc lozenges could help lower the duration of flu or cold of a person. Researchers also claim that zinc can help lower upper respiratory infections, especially in children. In addition to combating infections, zinc also helps to hasten wound healing.

Zinc has been used by many to treat colds since 1984, according to the Mayo Clinic, when a report on the mineral found that it could keep people from getting sick.

A recent analysis of several pieces of research showed that zinc syrup or lozenges reduced cold duration by one day, particularly if signs of cold symptoms were taken within the first 24 hours. This has rekindled the argument regarding the effectiveness of zinc in the prevention and treatment of common cold.

The recent study found that there are three times better recovery levels for those taking high doses of zinc daily compared to people who did not take the supplement. Scientists from the University of Helsinki performed this particular study.

Study Reveals How Immune System Handles Fungal and Viral Infections

Researchers have Examined how the human body responds to a viral infection when it already infected by fungi, offering insights into the immune system.

New research has found that the body’s immune response to fungal infections changes when a patient is also infected by a virus. The study carried out by researchers at the University of Birmingham, the Pirbright Institute and University College London, all UK, sheds fresh light on the immune system’s ability to deal with co-infection.

Although clinicians understand that how the immune system responds to fungal and viral infections, much less is known about what happens when both occur together.

Typically, white blood cells will attack pathogens through phagocytosis where a pathogen is engulfed by the white blood cell. In fungal infections, however, sometimes this process ‘reverses’ ejecting the fungus back out of the white blood cell via a process called vomocytosis. The researchers also able to show that this process of expulsion is rapidly accelerated when the white blood cells detect a virus.

The team used for advanced microscopy methods to examine the live white blood cells exposed to two different types of virus, HIV, and measles, alongside the fungal pathogen, Cryptococcus neoformans. This opportunistic pathogen is particularly deadly between HIV+ patients.

Instead of just becoming less able to deal with the fungus, the researchers found that the white blood cells began to kill the fungal cells much quicker.

Lead author, Professor Robin May, Director of the Institute of Microbiology and Infection at the University of Birmingham, explained: “We found the macrophages ejected their prey the fungal cells much more quickly when the virus was present. This was much unexpected but could be an attempt to ‘free up’ those white blood cells to deal with the new viral invaders.”

The researchers concluded, as vomocytosis occurred with both viruses, that the result was likely to be a general reaction to viral co-infection.

Why is the Coronavirus Hitting Men Harder than Women?

Women are building stronger immune responses to infection, scientists say, and in far greater numbers smoke in people. The coronavirus that originated in China has spread anxiety and fear throughout the world. But while the novel virus largely spared one vulnerable group kids it seems to pose a particular threat to middle-aged and older adults, especially men.

The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention conducted the largest study of cases involving coronavirus to date this week. Although men and women were infected in roughly equal numbers, researchers found that the mortality rate among men was 2.8 percent compared to 1.7 percent among women. Men were also disproportionately impacted during outbreaks of SARS and MERS caused by coronaviruses. In Hong Kong in 2003, more women than men were diagnosed with SARS but, according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the mortality rate among men was 50 percent higher.

In the current outbreak, scientists say, there may be a number of factors working against men, including some biological ones, and some lifestyle rooted ones. Men are the weaker group when it comes to building an immune response to infections.

"This is a trend we've seen with other viral respiratory tract infections  men can have worse results," said Sabra Klein, a scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studies sex differences in viral infections and vaccine responses. This is what we have seen with other viruses. Women better fight them off, "she said. Women also produce stronger immune responses after vaccination and have increased immune responses to memory that protect adults from pathogens to which they were exposed to as children.

"There's something more exuberant about the immune system in females," said Dr Janine Clayton, director of the National Institutes of Health's Office of Research on Women's Health.

DID Novel DNA-Sensing Pathway Found in Human Cells, Absent in Mice

Researchers at The University of Washington have discovered a unique novel DNA-sensing the pathway that launches an antiviral response to foreign genetic material in human cells.

Triggered by an enzyme called DNA protein kinase (DNA-PK), and the newly invented pathway is independent of cGAS-STING pathway until now considered as the most regulator of mammalian innate immune responses to DNA and it is missing or inactive in mouse cells. The finding raises a question about the promise of therapies that focus on cGAS-STING for immune modulation, researchers report in Science Immunology.

“It seems like a DNA-sensing a pathway that been completely overlooked—probably because much of the research has been done used murine systems,” says Christian Holm, who researches cGAS-STING at Aarhus University and wasn’t involved within the study. Previous work on antiviral responses has focused exclusively on cGAS-STING, he adds. “Now this comes along and says there’s this other pathway . . . that seems to be completely independent of STING and may be very important.”

It makes perfect sense to have another DNA-sensing mechanism.—Alexiane Decout, EPFL    

First described in 2013, the cGAS-STING pathway plays a critical role within the cell’s innate response to viral infection. Upon detecting cytosolic DNA (usually a tell-tale sign of viral entry), the cGAS enzyme binds to the transmembrane protein STING to trigger the assembly of interferons and other antiviral responses.

The pathway has become a well-liked target in drug development, with researchers trying to harness STING’s activity for cancer immunotherapy or to calm it in autoimmune diseases within which innate immune responses are overactive.

The University of Washington’s Dan Stetson tells Scientist that he and his team were studying with the effects of tumor-promoting viruses on cGAS-STING once they stumbled across the novel pathway. Graduate Katelyn Burleigh generated human cell lines lacking STING, he says, and located that they are still produced interferons when transfected with foreign DNA. Further assays using various human cell types and chemical inhibitors indicated that DNA-PK, an enzyme known for its role in detecting and responding to DNA damages within the nucleus were sensing that foreign DNA within the cell cytoplasm and launching its own, STING-independent response.

It’s not the primary time DNA-PK has been implicated in antiviral defenses. The University of Cambridge’s Geoffrey Smith and Brian Ferguson declared in 2012 that DNA-PK in mouse and human cells will promote interferon production in response to transfection with foreign DNA. However, that study concluded that DNA-PK probably triggered the response through STING, not independently of it.

“It’s nice to check that another group has found a crucial role for DNA-PK in sensing foreign DNA,” Smith tells The Scientist, adding that the Washington team’s paper presents The data concerned "considers STING-independent new pathway.

He notes that assays the team carried out using DNA-PK inhibitors perceived to influence antiviral responses differently depending on cell type—a result that Stetson says might need to do with interactions between the DNA-PK and gCAS-STING pathways within the various cell lines the team used. In some cases, “the two pathways may antagonize each other,” Stetson writes an email to The Scientist. “It is something we are interested in pursuing.”

Examining other mammalian cell lines, Stetson’s team founded evidence of the novel DNA-PK pathway in non-human primate cells and in rat cells. However, researchers were unable to identify the pathway in mouse cells, where most preclinical research on cGAS-STING therapy the research was conducted.

Alexiane Decout, a research scientist studying STING at EPFL in Switzerland who saw a preprint of the paper on bioRxiv, last year says she’s unsurprised by the finding because previous studies have already shown variations between human and mouse antiviral responses. “The mouse cGAS-STING pathway is far more easily activated then the human one,” she says as a result of that pathway’s lower activation in human cells, “it makes perfect sense [that those cells] have another DNA-sensing mechanism.”

This seems to be a largely neglected DNA-sensing pathway, Christian Holm, University of Aarhus.

The presence of this second the mechanism could have implications for efforts to modulate innate immune responses in patients with an autoimmune disorder. Stetson and colleagues propose in their paper that drugs designed to dampen cGAS-STING activity might be got to be paired with DNA-PK inhibitors (many of these are in clinical development) to be effective although, given an additional role in DNA repair, it is not clear how feasible such inhibition would be.

There also are potential applications for the novel DNA-sensing pathway in immunotherapy, notes Leticia Corrales, who has patent applications on STING-targeting compounds for cancer treatment and works at the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim in Vienna.

She says that improving the innate immune response through DNA-PK may help to promote antitumor immunity. However, “first we have to verify that in humans this pathway has relevancy for antitumor immune responses,” she says, adding that researchers would need to be “very cautious about the toxicity aspects of using this approach.”

Stetson, who incorporates a patent-pending on DNA-PK modulation for disease treatment, says that his team is now exploring whether the newly discovered pathway promotes immunity to viral infection, and how the DNA-PK enzyme manages its dual roles of promoting repair of DNA damage within the nucleus and triggering responses to foreign DNA within the cytoplasm. 

For therapeutic purposes, “The long-term goal should be worked out a way to manipulate that,” he says, “and deliberately turn into what normally would be repaired into an extremely potent innate immune response.”

Previously demonstrated that the viral oncogenes of the DNA tumor viruses are potent antagonists of the cGAS-STING DNA sensing pathway, here, as per the report unexpected finding that the E1A oncogene of human adenovirus 5 blocks two distinct intracellular DNA sensing pathways in human cells: the well-known cGAS-STING pathway and a second, STING-independent DNA sensing pathway (SIDSP). Human cells have a second intracellular DNA pathway of sensing with implications for host defense, autoimmunity, and antitumor immunity.