May 2020

A recent tour de force of our current knowledge of immunity elicited by SARS-CoV-2 and progression to COVID-19 severe disease is given in a recent Immunity article. The authors review…

Chloroquine and it’s analogue hydrochloroquine were proposed as candidate therapeutics against COVID-19, and were one of the drug regiments tested in the World Health Organisation (WHO) Solidarity Trial. However, on…

A cohort study published in JAMA Network Open found that SARS-CoV-2 can be present in the semen of patients with COVID-19 and may still be detected in the semen of…

Recent pre-peer manuscript, a study examined 10 terminally-ill, critical COVID-19 patients treated with to identify which cytokines and potential therapies could be applied to prevent this cytokine release syndrome (CRS).…

21th MayDid you watch the IUIS Webinar on Adaptive Immunity: Memory, Protection and Immunopathology in COVID-19 by Professor Andreas Radbruch (Director of the  German Rheumatism  Research  Centre Berlin). Prof Radbruch presented…

In a pre-peer reviewed bioRxiv manuscript, authors show that the adenovirus-vectored vaccine ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, encoding the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, is immunogenic in mice, showing a robust humoral and cell-mediated…

It has been well described how SARS-CoV-2 infects lung tissue and causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, but now there is evidence to emerge that the intestine may also be involved…

Munster, et al. showed that SARS-CoV-2 causes respiratory disease in infected rhesus macaques, with disease lasting 8-16 days. Pulmonary infiltrates, a hallmark of human disease, were visible in lung radiographs…

In a recent article by Song et al., titled “Expression of ACE2, the SARS-CoV-2 receptor, and TMPRSS2 in prostate epithelial cells” analysed publicly available single-cell RNA sequencing dataset and identified…

Which proteins do IgM and IgG Abs recognise on the SARS-CoV-2 virus? Can these Abs provide protection or facilitate inflammation and disease progression? The simple answer is that we don’t…

Effective host immune responses are required for optimum viral control. Immune reactions to a viral threat, on the contrary, could also be harmful to the host if the response is…

In a recent pre-peer reviewed bioRxiv manuscript, Bette Korber and colleagues have used a newly developed analysis pipeline to track mutations in the Spike protein; being the target of drug…

IUIS Webinar on Interferons as 1st responders by Professor Eleanor Fish (University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada)."Can antivirals that target the host and not the virus improve outcomes for COVID-19 patients?"Highlights…

Study by Kiesha Prem and colleagues (1) indicate the effects of extending or relaxing physical distancing control measures on the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in Wuhan, China. They use…

Investigators in a brief communication in Nature Medicine utilised the Covid19 cell atlas database to identify gene expression of the SARS-CoV-2 entry receptor ACE2 and other genes potentially associated with…

A recent commentary in Nature Reviews Immunology cites the role of complement in acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and that possibly targeting the inhibition of the complement cascade may be…