Dec 3rd, 2020 - Influenza virus infection causes significant morbidity and mortality worldwide. Humans fail to make a universally protective memory immune response to influenza A. Hemagglutinin and Neuraminidase undergo antigenic drift and shift, resulting in new influenza A strains to which humans are naive. Seasonal vaccines are often ineffective and escape mutants have been reported to all treatments for in...

Dec 3rd, 2020 - COVID-19 vaccines are being rapidly developed and human trials are underway. Almost all of these vaccines have been designed to induce antibodies targeting spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 in expectation of neutralizing activities. However, non-neutralizing antibodies are at risk of causing antibody-dependent enhancement. Further, the longevity of SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies is very short. Theref...

Dec 3rd, 2020 - Infection with SARS-CoV-2 causes corona virus disease (COVID-19). The most standard diagnostic method is reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) on a nasopharyngeal and/or an oropharyngeal swab. The high occurrence of false-negative results due to the non-presence of SARS-CoV-2 in the oropharyngeal environment renders this sampling method not ideal. Therefore, a new sampling de...

Dec 3rd, 2020 - Serologic assays for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) have roles in seroepidemiology, convalescent plasma-testing, antibody durability and vaccine studies. Currently, SARS-CoV-2 serology is performed using serum/plasma collected by venepuncture. Dried bloodspot (DBS) testing offers significant advantages; as it is minimally invasive, avoids venepuncture with specimen...

Dec 2nd, 2020 - In contrast to other respiratory viruses, children have less severe symptoms when infected with the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). In this review, we discuss proposed hypotheses for the age-related difference in severity of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).Factors proposed to explain the difference in severity of COVID-19 in children and adults include th...

Dec 2nd, 2020 - We investigated severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)-specific antibodies and T-cell responses against SARS-CoV-2 and human coronavirus (HCoV) 229E and OC43 in 11 SARS-CoV-2 serodiscordant couples in Strausbourg, France, in which 1 partner had evidence of mild coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and in 10 unexposed healthy controls. Patients with confirmed COVID-19 were consid...

Dec 2nd, 2020 - The present study aimed both to gain knowledge on the distinctive clinical characteristics of older adults with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), in comparison with those of younger patients, and to identify risk factors for mortality. A retrospective observational study was carried out of patients consecutively admitted to Doctor Peset University Hospital, Valencia (Spain) for COVID-19 from...

Dec 2nd, 2020 - The rapid worldwide spread of severe acute respiratory system coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV-2) infection has propelled the rapid development of serological tests that can detect anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. These have been used for studying the prevalence and spread of infection in different populations, helping establish a recent diagnosis of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), and will likely be use...

Dec 1st, 2020 - Modified Vaccinia Ankara (MVA) is a highly attenuated poxvirus vector that is widely used to develop vaccines for infectious diseases and cancer. We demonstrate the construction of a vaccine platform based on a unique three-plasmid system to efficiently generate recombinant MVA vectors from chemically synthesized DNA. In response to the ongoing global pandemic caused by SARS coronavirus-2 (SARS...

Dec 1st, 2020 - BACKGROUND Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has radically changed the world, and promising vaccine trials are currently underway. The immune responses in asymptomatic and symptomatic individuals infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) are still under investigation, and data are evolving. While it is known that humoral and cell-mediated immune responses agai...

Dec 1st, 2020 - Emergence of a new spike protein variant (D614G) with increased infectivity has prompted many to analyze its role in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. There is concern regarding whether an individual exposed to one variant of a virus will have cross-reactive memory to the second. Accordingly, we analyzed the serologic reactivity of both variants, and found that antibodies from 88 donors from a high-inci...

Dec 1st, 2020 - This systematic review summarizes the clinical features and maternal-infant outcomes of 230 pregnant women (154 patients gave birth) infected with COVID-19 and their 156 infants, including the possibility and evidence of vertical transmission. An electronic search of PubMed, Embase, Medline, MedRxiv, CNKI, and the Chinese Medical Journal Full Text Database following PRISMA guidelines was perfor...

Dec 1st, 2020 - At present, no cure is available for COVID-19 but vaccines, antiviral drugs, immunoglobulins, or the combination of immunoglobulins with antiviral drugs have been suggested and are in clinical trials. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of a pharmacokinetic and viral load analysis as a basis for adjusting immunoglobulin dosing to treat COVID-19. We reviewed the pre-clinical and cli...

Dec 1st, 2020 - Hyperimmune plasma from Covid-19 convalescent is a potential treatment for severe Covid-19. We conducted a multicenter one arm proof of concept interventional study. Patients with Covid-19 disease with moderate-to-severe Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, elevated C-reactive Protein and need for mechanical ventilation and/or CPAP were enrolled. One to three 250-300 ml unit of hyperimmune plas...

Dec 1st, 2020 - There has been increasing reports associating the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) with thromboembolic phenomenon including ischemic strokes and venous thromboembolism. Cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) is a rare neurovascular emergency that has been observed in some COVID-19 patients, yet much remains to be learnt of its underlying pathophysiology. We present a case series of local patients ...

Dec 1st, 2020 - The explosively expanding COVID-19 pandemic urges the development of safe, efficacious and fast-acting vaccines. Several vaccine platforms are leveraged for a rapid emergency response1. We describe the discovery of a live virus-vectored SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate using the yellow fever 17D (YF17D) vaccine as vector to express a non-cleavable prefusion form of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike antigen. We ...

Dec 1st, 2020 - Antibodies to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus responsible for COVID-19, appear to decline over time in donated convalescent plasma, according to a study published in Blood. These findings will have implications for the use of convalescent plasma to treat the disease. “If it is shown that COVID-19 convalescent plasma has clinical efficacy and that antibodi...

Nov 30th, 2020 - SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 disease, was first identified in Wuhan, China in December 2019, with subsequent worldwide spread. The first U.S. cases were identified in January 2020. To determine if SARS-CoV-2 reactive antibodies were present in sera prior to the first identified case in the U.S. on January 19, 2020, residual archived samples from 7,389 routine blood donations colle...

Nov 30th, 2020 - To evaluate the progression of the seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 in the pregnant population of the south of Madrid during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Secondarily we aimed to evaluate maternal and perinatal outcomes. Retrospective cohort study conducted at Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre during weeks 10 to 19 of 2020, coinciding with the Spanish lockdown. We tested 769 serum sam...

Nov 30th, 2020 - A seroprevalence study of SARS-CoV-2 was conducted in a high-incidence area located in North-eastern Italy. All citizens above ten years of age resident in 5 municipalities of the Autonomous Province of Trento, with the highest incidence of COVID-19 cases, were invited to participate in the study. Overall, among 6098 participants, 6075 sera and a standardized questionnaire administered face-to-...