The biology of coronavirus COVID-19 - including research and treatments

Trish

Trish

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I have just listened to a very interesting radio program 'BBC Inside Science: Biology of the new coronavirus'. I don't know whether it's available outside the UK.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000g3gf

Adam Rutherford explores what makes the new coronavirus so effective at making us ill.

Jonathan Ball, Professor of Virology at Nottingham University, explains the structure of the virus and how it gets into our lungs.

Evolutionary virologist at Cambridge University, Dr Charlotte Houldcroft talks to Adam about how labs are detecting the virus and how they are studying the way it mutates to understand how it's moving around the world.

Kate Jones, Professor of Ecology at UCL, tells Adam how bats live with coronaviruses, but they don't get sick. She says the reason they have moved from bats to humans is because we have taken them out of their natural habitat into places like the wet markets of East Asia.

Sarah Gilbert at Oxford University explains how her team is developing vaccines, and Jonathan Ball looks at work to repurpose existing drugs that may be used as treatment for Covid-19.
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I suggest we use this thread to share any articles, audio or video of Virologists explaining what is known so far about this virus.
 
This radio programme is not Covid-19 specific (it was broadcast in 2011), but provides very interesting background information about the evolution of infectious disease in modern societies.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011pldm

BBC Radio 4: ‘In Our Time’ - The Origins of Infectious Disease.

“Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the origins of infectious disease.....”
 
According to the article in this tweet posted by Stanford ME researcher Fereshteh Jahanbani, if I understand correctly, the virus was discovered in bats in 2015 and they realised how bad it would be if it spread to humans.


Paper : A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence
https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985

Abstract
The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV underscores the threat of cross-species transmission events leading to outbreaks in humans.

Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations1.

Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.

The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.

Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis.

Evaluation of available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody and vaccine approaches failed to neutralize and protect from infection with CoVs using the novel spike protein.

On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo.

Our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.
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Gigi300 said:
(Excuse me , I corrige my error of the traduction) Here is my little contribution to this thread. In the press today, this team of researchers from Toronto, Canada, would have isolated the covid-19 virus https://sunnybrook.ca/research/media/item.asp?c=2&i=2069&f=covid-19-isolated-2020
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“Researchers from these world-class institutions came together in a grassroots way to successfully isolate the virus in just a few short weeks,” said Dr. Rob Kozak, clinical microbiologist at Sunnybrook. “It demonstrates the amazing things that can happen when we collaborate.”

I am both incredibly impressed and relieved the research system can work with such successful expediency --- and I'm sooooo pissed off that the same research system is so willfully blind to ME for decades.

WTF.
 
@ScottTriGuy, I totally agree with you. At the same time, the covid-19 crisis is of great magnitude in a short time. So I think it's important to put all this collaboration of researchers to help the crisis. For Me, I know that the disease is serious and has lasted a long time. I always ask myself the question, why is it so long before there are reactions from the medical system? Are they dealing with too complex a disease? (la discussion maybe in another thread...)
 
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I disagree @Gigi300.

There is a long and documented history of the disease being downplayed and deliberately misunderstood.

I agree it is a complex illness, but it certainly isn't the only complex illness. It's just one of the most neglected ones because of politics.

Edit - sorry but I'm way passed making excuses on behalf of those who doomed me to this existence because it suited their own ends. There are extremely good descriptions of the illness and even early references to what looks like PEM going back 30-35 years. No effective treatments & worse still treatments that make us worse.
 
This article has some interesting charts:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/3/12/21172040/coronavirus-covid-19-virus-charts

Chart 6 shows how contagious they think COVID-19 is with respect to some other diseases (less contagious than measles, more than seasonal flu).

Chart 8 compares testing efforts in different countries. Experts say that testing is a key component of managing a pandemic so it's not a good thing when governments are slow to ramp up testing.

Chart 9 is one of the many "flatten the curve" charts that are out there. This one is basic, just shows the general idea I've seen some that are animated and let the user change parameters to see how different actions change the curve - I think there was one on the NY Times website that someone posted)

I hope this is all helpful information! Stay safe, everyone!

We need to take various actions to protect ourselves and others, but we should also try to find ways to manage the natural anxiety that this situation may cause. I hope you can all find some stress relieving activities.

Sending hugs to all :hug::hug:
 
This post has been moved from this thread.

Diasorin, an Italian company says they will have a rapid diagnostic test ready by the end of this month. It will give a result in 60 minutes. It seems to be based on diect PCR amplification.

Meanwhile the British Society for Immunology on the topic of herd immunity:
SARS-CoV-2 is a novel virus in humans and there is still much that we need to learn about how it affects the human immune system. Because it is so new, we do not yet know how long any protection generated through infection will last. Some other viruses in the Coronavirus family, such as those that cause common colds, tend to induce immunity that is relatively short lived, at around three months. However, these viruses have co-evolved with the human immune system over thousands of years meaning they may well have developed methods to manipulate our immune responses. With the novel SARS-CoV-2, the situation may be very different but we urgently need more research looking at the immune responses of people who have recovered from infection to be sure.
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https://www.immunology.org/news/bsi-response-herd-immunity-and-sars-cov-2
 
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Something I’ve been wondering for a while is whether Covid-19 could tell us anything useful about ME/CFS.

If outcomes (eg mortality) following infection were significantly different in people with ME/CFS compared to other groups that would presumably be useful to know, and could possibly give us some clues about the nature of ME/CFS.

Given that some people with ME/CFS seem to be less prone to getting colds etc. while others seem to be more susceptible, it might be necessary to control for these variations, as well as for other variations in severity and symptoms among people with ME/CFS. I doubt this type of detail would be included in general epidemiology studies of Covid-19 but I’m guessing it would be relatively straightforward for an epidemiologist with an interest in ME/CFS to study.

Any thoughts on this? Does anyone know if it has been discussed elsewhere – eg at either of the recent conferences?
 
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strategist said:
Meanwhile the British Society for Immunology on the topic of herd immunity: "Some other viruses in the Coronavirus family, such as those that cause common colds, tend to induce immunity that is relatively short lived, at around three months. However, these viruses have co-evolved with the human immune system over thousands of years meaning they may well have developed methods to manipulate our immune responses."
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Interesting. How do we know that the other common coronaviruses have been circulating in humans for thousands of years? Is that a fact?

If we managed to get through millennia while only acquiring 4 human coronaviruses yet 3 have jumped species in the last 20 years, that's a worrying trend! It's not the bat's fault...
 
Robert 1973 said:
Given that some people with ME/CFS seem to be less prone to getting colds etc. while others seem to be more susceptible,
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That could be just because we have less social contact.

But it is a good question whether there will be any difference in infection rates and clinical responses for ME patients. If so, there may well be clues in it about the underlying pathology of ME.
 
Sean said:
That could be just because we have less social contact.

But it is a good question whether there will be any difference in infection rates and clinical responses for ME patients. If so, there may well be clues in it about the underlying pathology of ME.
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I'm in the group that hardly ever gets a cold. For years I've had one- to-one close contact with snotty, sneezing children and I've touched their germy hands without a thought. My 'colds' are a stuffy nose for half a day.

I was told a very long time ago that I didn't get colds because my immune system was overactive. Is this a genuine state? If so, would covid-19 be stopped in its tracks like a cold, or would my immune system go all out fighting the corona virus and make me very sick? I've read about the latter scenario a few times in the last week.
 
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