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Covid-19 Small Molecule Therapies Reviewed
Let’s take inventory on the therapies that are being developed for the coronavirus epidemic. Here is a very thorough list of at Biocentury, and I should note that (like Stat and several other...
View ArticleCovid-19 Biologic Therapies Reviewed
Friday I looked over the small-molecule landscape in this post, which has been updated and will continue to be as more news comes along. Today let’s look at the biologics landscape. One thing that I...
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Time Scales, Viral and Human
I can tell that the current events are getting a bit overwhelming by the difficulty of writing about other topics here! I’m not specifically on a coronavirus topic today, but rather on what some of the...
View ArticleReal Information: A Public Good
I think I’m going to be dividing the blog posts into two categories for the time being: coronavirus-related ones and completely nonrelated ones. It’s the biggest medical story right now – this one’s...
View ArticleThe Curious Case of CureVac
The German newspaper Welt am Sonntag has reported that the Trump administration has been making overtures to the German vaccine company Curevac. Here’s the part that’s really making headlines (my...
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Angiotensin and the Coronavirus
There’s quite a bit of confusion around the ACE proteins and coronavirus infection, and I can see why. The names in this area are pretty confusing, for one thing, and if you’re not familiar with the...
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Coronavirus: Some Clinical Trial Data
We’re starting to see some clinical trial data on possible Covid-19 therapies, specifically some of the ones mentioned in this earlier post on small-molecule approaches. First, the bad news (although I...
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Chloroquine, Past and Present
Now that chloroquine is in the news everywhere, I thought it might be interesting to have a closer look at the compound. The first part of this post will be chemistry-heavy, further down we’ll get into...
View ArticleUsing the Time
I’ve come to accept that the site is going to be pretty much all-corona-all-the-time during this crisis. I’ll try to do the occasional post on something else, but there’s so much news on the epidemic,...
View ArticleFogging the Air
I wrote a post a while back on what I saw as “decontamination theater”: the shots (originally from China) of people fogging buildings and outdoor scenes with what was often described as some sort of...
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The Latest Coronavirus Clinical Trials
Time to catch up with the latest clinical news in the field. The big story this morning is apparently some real data out of a controlled trial of chloroquine from China. There have been anecdotal...
View ArticleWhat the Coronavirus Proteins Are Targeting
I wanted to mention this paper, which is one of the more comprehensive ones on the idea of repurposing existing drugs against the coronavirus. It’s a large multicenter team that clearly did a lot of...
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More on Chloroquine/Azithromycin. And On Dr. Raoult.
Dr. Didier Raoult of Marseilles and his co-workers have published another preprint on clinical results with the chloroquine/azithromycin combination that their earlier work has made famous. And I still...
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Comparing HydroxyChloroquine Trials
One minor side effect of the pandemic is that perhaps more people will learn about what drug research and clinical trials can really be like. Today’s example: we have a clinical trial of...
View ArticleCovid-19, Blood Pressure Medication, and Ibuprofen
One of the questions that shows up often in the comments to the various Covid-19 posts here (especially this one) and very often in my own emails is whether people who are taking hypertension...
View ArticleAntibody Tests for the Coronavirus
Let’s talk antibodies. Mounting an antibody response is crucial for anyone to overcome a challenge from an infectious pathogen, and the immunity that can result is crucial for entire communities and...
View ArticleHydroxychloroquine Update For April 6
There’s a lot of news to catch up on, and to keep things straight I’ll divide the hydroxychloroquine part out into this post, and cover others in the next one. My previous reviews of the clinical data...
View ArticleAngiotensin and Coronavirus Infection: The Latest as of April 7
I wrote here the other day on the recent recommendation that people taking either ACE (angiotensin-converting enzyme) inhibitors or ARBs (angiotensin receptor blockers) should not alter their treatment...
View ArticleCovid-19 Antibody Update for April 8
Let’s do an update on the antibody situation in this epidemic (a bit of antibody/immunology background here if you would like some). The word is today that the CDC is starting several efforts to do...
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