The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, is beginning tests of an antiviral drug on a passenger from the Diamond Princess cruise ship and preparing a new coronavirus vaccine for human testing, according to Time magazine.
The antiviral drug remdesivir, developed for Ebola, is being tested on a patient who was brought to the US from the cruise ship after being infected with the virus. Others diagnosed with COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, will also take part in the study. Remdesivir showed encouraging results among animals infected with two related coronaviruses – those causing severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), according to Time. 691 people were infected with the coronavirus on the Diamond Princess that was docked south of Tokyo, according to Reuters. Four passengers died after being infected.
Volunteers will be randomly assigned to receive either the drug or a placebo intravenously for 10 days and have blood tests and nose and throat swabs taken every two days to track the amount of the virus in their bodies. Even if the drug only shows some efficacy in keeping blood levels of SARS-CoV-2 from growing, it could help contain the spread of the virus. Moderna Therapeutics, a biotech company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has shipped the first batches of its COVID-19 vaccine to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the NIH, which will prepare the vaccine for human testing as early as April, according to Time. The new vaccine was made just 42 days after the genetic sequence of the virus was released by Chinese researchers using a new method allowing for production of the vaccine to be scaled up quickly. The vaccine is filled with mRNA – the genetic material that comes from DNA and makes proteins – that codes for the right coronavirus proteins, which then get injected into the body. Immune cells can process that mRNA and start making the protein in the right way for other immune cells to recognize and mark for destruction. 81,005 confirmed cases of the coronavirus infection have been recorded by Johns Hopkins University, with 2,762 deaths and 30,116 recoveries as of Wednesday morning. Source
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