In the lab, scientists identify possible COVID-19 treatment


Authors: St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital The COVID-19 pandemic continues to cause significant illness and death while treatment options remain limited. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists have discovered a potential strategy to prevent life-threatening inflammation, lung damage and organ failure in patients with COVID-19. The research appeared online in the journal Cell. The scientists identified […]

Accumulating evidence suggests anti-TNF therapy needs to be given trial priority in COVID-19 treatment


Authors: Philip C Robinson, Duncan Richards, Helen L Tanner, Marc Feldmann The COVID-19 pandemic continues to wreak havoc on global health-care systems and to claim an increasing number of lives. Although some treatments have shown promise, including dexamethasone and remdesivir, problems remain with access to medication and high mortality despite treatment. Patient selection also appears […]

TNF Biologics and COVID-19: What Autoimmune Patients Need to Know


Authors: If you’re taking a type of medication known as tumor necrosis factor inhibitors, also called anti-TNF or TNFis, you may be wondering how these drugs could impact your chances of contracting COVID-19, or having more severe complications from it. After all, the common cold or other upper respiratory tract infections can be more common […]

Pathways in the Pathophysiology of Coronavirus 19 Lung Disease Accessible to Prevention and Treatment


Authors: Michael Eisenhut 1, Jae Il Shin 2 Background: In COVID 19 related lung disease, which is a leading cause of death from this disease, cytokines like tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF alpha) may be pivotal in the pathogenesis. TNF alpha reduces fluid absorption due to impairment of sodium and chloride transport required for building an osmotic gradient across epithelial […]

Integrative clinical, genomics and metabolomics data analysis for mainstream precision medicine to investigate COVID-19


Authors: Zeeshan Ahmed, Saman Zeeshan, David J Foran, Lawrence C Kleinman, Fredric E Wondisford,  XinQi Dong Crrespondence to Dr Zeeshan Ahmed, Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901, USA; zahmed@ifh.rutgers.edu Despite significant scientific and medical discoveries, the genetics of novel infectious diseases like COVID-19 remains far from understanding. SARS-CoV-2 […]

8 tools that helped us tackle the coronavirus


Authors: Ryan Cross , Laura Howes , Megha Satyanarayana ADENOVIRAL VECTORS Viruses might be nature’s most efficient gene-delivery vehicles. At its essence, a virus is simply a package that shuttles genes into a host cell, which it then hijacks to make more viruses. About 4 decades ago, scientists started hijacking the viruses themselves in an attempt to make novel vaccines. The […]

Genomics study identifies routes of transmission of coronavirus in care homes


Authors: Craig Brierley, University of Cambridge Genomic surveillance—using information about genetic differences between virus samples—can help identify how SARS-CoV-2 spreads in care home settings, whose residents are at particular risk, according to new research published today. Care homes are at high risk of experiencing outbreaks of COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. Older people and those […]

How genomic epidemiology is tracking the spread of COVID-19 locally and globally


Auhors: Claire Jarvis, special to C&EN n early April, a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) raised the eyebrows of a number of genomic epidemiologists. It suggested that there were three distinct variants of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, spreading in different regions of the […]

A comprehensive map of the SARS-CoV-2 genome


Authors: Anne Trafton | MIT News Office In early 2020, a few months after the Covid-19 pandemic began, scientists were able to sequence the full genome of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the Covid-19 infection. While many of its genes were already known at that point, the full complement of protein-coding genes was unresolved. Now, after performing […]

Genomics Data Lake


The Genomics Data Lake provides various public datasets that you can access for free and integrate into your genomics analysis workflows and applications. The datasets include genome sequences, variant info, and subject/sample metadata in BAM, FASTA, VCF, CSV file formats. The Genomics Data Lake is hosted in the West US 2 and West Central US […]