More on Screening For Coronavirus Therapies
Time for a word about screening for new coronavirus drugs. Things have gone on long enough for quite a few groups to produce supplies of the various viral proteins and set up small-molecule screens...
View ArticleWhat Do the New Remdesivir Data Mean?
A report has come out in the NEJM on the experience with “compassionate use” (off-label or not yet approved) of the Gilead drug remdesivir in the Covid-19 epidemic. Here are the inclusion criteria:...
View ArticleThe Latest Hydroxychloroquine Data, As of April 11
We have new data on hydroxychloroquine therapy to discuss. The numbers will not clear anything up. First off is an abstract from the Marseilles IHU group of Dr. Didier Raoult. It presents 1061 patients...
View ArticleOmeprazole As An Additive For Coronavirus Therapy
One of the notable things about the current pandemic is the way that all our modern biology and analytical techniques are on display. Molecular biology, structural biology, bioinformatics, technologies...
View ArticleCoronavirus Vaccine Prospects
Time for another look at the coronavirus vaccine front, since we have several recent news items. Word has come from GSK and Sanofi that they are going to collaborate on vaccine development, which...
View ArticleWhat’s Happening With Remdesivir?
Well, everyone was just dealing with the news that Gilead’s antiviral remdesivir had had two trials suspended in China, when Stat‘s Adam Feuerstein and Matthew Herper broke news last night about a...
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Watching For Mutations in the Coronavirus
The coronavirus outbreak has been accompanied by a huge amount of sequencing data, as well it should be. Nextstrain.org is a great place to see this in action: region by region, the spread of the...
View ArticleThe Politics of Hydroxychloroquine
I had not been planning to return to the topic of hydroxychloroquine so soon, but here we are. This will not be a calm, measured blog post – fair warning. Yesterday, Dr. Rick Bright was pushed out of...
View ArticleA Close Look at the Frontrunning Coronavirus Vaccines As of April 23
There’s plenty of news on the coronavirus vaccine front, so let’s have a look. If you need some details on the different sorts of vaccines in general, here’s the background post, which should help this...
View ArticleAnti IL-6 For Coronavirus Patients: Does It Work, or Not?
It’s been looking for some time as if these coronavirus infections need a biphasic approach to therapy – an antiviral approach earlier on, and for those in serious trouble, perhaps a shift to immune...
View ArticleMonoclonal Antibodies for the Coronavirus
Antibodies as a therapy Let’s have a look at what is (in my opinion) probably our best shot at a reasonably short-term targeted therapy against the COVID-19 epidemic: the possibility of using...
View ArticleAbout Remdesivir and About “Game-Changers”
We’ve had several releases of remdesivir data, and this was not exactly one of those controlled-release formulations. No, this was more in the “chaotic mess” category, with news items coming from...
View ArticleMore Chinese Traditional Medicine, Unfortunately
I mentioned the other day that what was reported as a hydroxychloroquine trial in China may well have been (or at least begun as) a trial of “traditional Chinese medicine” (TCM). It doesn’t take much...
View ArticleTaking Hydroxychloroquine (May 19 Update)
I was not planning to revisit this topic just yet, but President Trump has forced the issue with his mention yesterday that he’s taking hydroxychloroquine. Let’s try to keep this short: does any...
View ArticleSome Commentary
It feels strange to be writing about biomedicine, even about a terrible pandemic, under the current circumstances. I was six years old in 1968 and was thus largely spared that year’s events, so 2020 is...
View ArticleSurgisphere and Their Data
So we have a very strange situation with some recent publications, one that deserves a closer look. The ones I refer to are the recent Lancet retrospective study on hydroxychloroquine use (blogged...
View ArticleNot Winning Friends, Not Influencing People
Many chemists will by now be aware of the brief, but very loud, incident with Angewandte Chemie and a paper by Tomas Hudlicky that appeared there. Well, it didn’t appear for long – within hours, the...
View ArticleAfrica, African-Americans, and the Coronavirus Vaccines
I mentioned yesterday in my post about anti-vaccine arguments that there seemed to be suspicions on social media platforms about vaccine testing in Africa. I’ve been looking around for more of that,...
View ArticleA Brief Note on Immigration and American Science
There’s an article out today from John Maraganore (CEO of Alnylam, immediate past chair of the BIO industry group) and his successor at BIO, Jeremy Levin (CEO of Ovid Therapeutics). They’re making the...
View ArticleThe President’s Coronavirus Treatment
I’ve had emails asking me what I think about President Trump’s illness and the course of treatment that he’s under. To be honest, this wasn’t a subject that I really felt like writing about – every...
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