Tag: vaccine development

Pandora Report 9.25.2015

by spopescu, posted in News, Pandora Report

You didn’t think a Papal visit would slow us down, did you? Even in the event of a zombie apocalypse, we GMU Biodefense folks would still find a way to get out the weekly report – perhaps pigeon carrier? Until that happens, don’t forget to check us out on Twitter! This week saw a lot of great focus on collaborations to fight public health threats like antimicrobial resistance and epidemics. Schools in Chicago were closed for concerns over Legionnaires’ disease, yours truly provided a piece on Ebola infection prevention, and we have a wonderful opportunity to contribute to World Medical & Health Policy regarding women’s health on a global stage.

Learned Lessons from Ebola in the US
Sylvia Burwell, Secretary of Health & Human Services, discusses the clinical complexity and reality that “our clinical approach to treating Ebola in a hospital setting posed different challenges.” Several key US health experts weighed in on the pivotal first patient, Thomas Duncan, to unknowingly bring Ebola to the US. The implications for healthcare and preparedness sent a tidal wave of response across US hospitals. Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC), also highlights three main lessons from not only the cases in Dallas, but also the Ebola epidemic as a whole. He points to the necessity of a strong surveillance and response system, need for rapid international aid, and better infection control in hospitals….which segues beautifully into our next story.

The Infection Prevention Angle of the 2014 Ebola Crisis
Reports and analyses from a range of responders to the crisis have been trickling out for several months now, but there’s a constant in all of them – infection control. Given my background and experiences in this field, I wanted to take our readers down the rabbit hole of what exactly it was like to be an Infection Preventionist during this time. A hopeful start to a series of pieces on this subject, it will give you a taste of not only the daily struggles, but the brevity of what potential Ebola patients meant for US healthcare preparedness.

Partnerships to Support Antibiotic Development
564px-Penicillin_Past,_Present_and_Future-_the_Development_and_Production_of_Penicillin,_England,_1943_D16963The ASPR’s (Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response) Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) is part of a larger initiative to use Other Transaction Authority (OTA – flexible advanced research and development funding instruments) to start developing business relationships between government and private industry. The relationships are mutually beneficial, allowing both parties to invest and develop products for biodefense and the growing threat of antibiotic resistance. Given the slowing of new antibiotic development, this joint agreement comes at a pivotal time for antimicrobial resistance efforts.

Three Chicago-area Schools Close in Response to Legionnaires’ Disease Concerns
Three schools in the Illinois U-46 district were shut down on Wednesday and Thursday after cooling tower test results showed “higher than normal levels of Legionella bacteria”. The OSHA recommended threshold is no higher than 1,000 CFU/ml (colony-forming units per milliliter) and with the outbreak among residents of the Illinois Veteran’s Home, it’s not surprising to see many water towers being frequently tested, etc. The important thing to note is that Legionella pneumophila infections are a result of the intensity of the exposure and the immune status of the exposed person. Legionella can’t be totally eradicated from the water supply and a majority cooling towers will contain some amount of growth.

Call for Papers – Women’s Health in Global Perspective
Papers sought for a special issue and workshop of World Medical & Health Policy on “Women’s Health in Global Perspective,” to contribute to understanding and improve policy related to women’s health and wellbeing.  Forces ranging from the economic to the climactic have human repercussions whose genesis and solutions demand consideration of their global context.  A wealth of recent research and inquiry has considered the particular plight of women, who often suffer disproportionately from lack of education, compromised nutrition, poverty, violence and lack of job opportunities and personal freedom.  The Workshop on Women’s Health in Global Perspective will consider the broad ranging social determinants of health on a global scale that importantly influence health outcomes for women everywhere, which in turn has implications for economic, political and social development.
Abstract submission deadline (250 words): October 16, 2015 
Contact: Bonnie Stabile, Deputy Editor, bstabile@gmu.edu
Notification of selected abstracts: November 13, 2015
Workshop March 3rd, 2016
Completed papers due: March 11, 2016

Stories You May Have Missed:

  • Personal Microbial Cloud – researchers found that a person’s microbiome form a cloud around them, allowing scientists to identify a specific person just by sampling their microbial cloud. Food for thought: would this be our microbial cloud version of a fingerprint?
  • C. Difficile Drug Success – Researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine were successful in their ability to get rid of the deadly gastrointestinal toxin via a drug that didn’t focus on the organism, Clostridium difficile, but rather the toxin itself. C. difficile is responsible for 250,000 hospitalizations and 15,000 deaths per year while costing the US more than $4 billion in healthcare expenses. Yay for successful treatments!
  • EC, EU, and WHO Work To Better Share Private Drug Data – The European Commission, European Medicines Agency, and World Health Organization are working to “step up coordination” on EU medicines regarding safety, quality, and efficacy of new drug candidates. The first step in solving a problem is recognizing you have one, right? The new focus on global public health threats is one we can all appreciate!
  • WHO Makes Changes to Southern Hemisphere Flu Vaccine – The WHO committee recommended changes for two of the three trivalent influenza vaccines for the Southern Hemisphere next year due to changes in the circulating viral strains. They suggested using H1N1, H3N2 an A/Hong Hong/4801/2014-like virus, and for influenza B, the Brisbane/60/2008-like virus. In the quadrivalent vaccine, they recommended adding the influenza B Yamagata lineage component, with the A/H1N1 strain staying.

Plants and Their Growing Role in the Pharmaceutical Industry

by juliadhomstad, posted in News

By Chris Healey

Pharmaceutical production using plants has been in the spotlight after Mapp Pharmaceutical revealed its experimental Ebola serum ZMapp—credited with saving the lives of two Americans—was created using antibodies harvested from genetically-modified tobacco plants.

ZMapp is part of a growing trend of pharmaceuticals created from proteins produced in plants, a practice considered safer, cheaper, and more practical than common production methods.

There has been outcry about claims ZMapp will not be sent to Africa to combat the ongoing Ebola epidemic. Those claims come after the pharmaceutical industry has been slow to adopt plant production methods, despite cost-effectiveness relative to traditional production methods.

Large pharmaceutical powerhouses, such as Pfizer and Merck, have adhered to traditional production methods despite newer and cheaper techniques. However, smaller companies, such as Mapp Pharmaceutical and IBio, have taken advantage of the low cost of plant production to produce their pharmaceutical ingredients.

Transgenic techniques allow scientists to hijack existing cellular processes in plants to produce desired proteins, such as enzymes and antibodies. DNA instructions for a desired protein (also called a gene) can be created in laboratory settings and inserted into a plant cell nucleus. After insertion, the gene instructs the cells how to make the desired proteins.

Once the proteins are produced, scientists can harvest them for use in pharmaceuticals. Transgenic techniques can be repeated and scaled to fit need. There are two methods commonly used to insert genes into plants.

One widely-used transgenic technique involves Agrobacterium tumefaciens bacteria as a gene transportation medium. Scientists introduce a gene into bacteria prior to plant inoculation. Bacteria then release desired DNA into plant cell nuclei and gene expression proceeds normally.

An alternative method, called biolistic transformation, involves the use of a gene gun to launch desired genes at clusters of plant cells. Some of the clusters will land inside cell nuclei, where the introduced DNA will integrate with the plant’s genome for expression.

Regardless of technique, using plants to create proteins eliminates the threat of human pathogen contamination which is possible with animal-derived mediums. Plants and animals do not share common pathogens, so a potential infection present at the time of harvesting will have no effect on protein recipients.

 

Image Credit: HPR2

Pandora Report 8.17.14

by juliadhomstad, posted in Pandora Report

Another 12 hours at Dulles Airport on Friday and, fortunately, no new travel alerts. This week we look at TB detecting rats, an experimental Chikungunya vaccine, and the latest from West Africa.

Giant Rats Trained to Sniff Out Tuberculosis in Africa

APOPO, the Belgian nonprofit organization known for using rats to sniff out land mines, has been training the African giant pouched rat to detect tuberculosis since 2008 in Tanzania and 2013 in Mozambique. The trained rats are used in medical centers in Dar es Salaam and Maputo to double check potential TB samples. The rats are unable to differentiate between standard and drug-resistant strains of the disease however, the cost of training and maintenance of the rats is significantly cheaper than the new GeneXpert rapid diagnostic tests.

National Geographic—“‘What the rats are trained to do is associate the smell of TB with a reward, so it’s what they call operative conditioning,’ [Emilio] Valverde [manager of the APOPO Mozambique TM Program] said.

It is the same principle applied to detecting land mines, only the rats are trained to recognize the scent of specific molecules that reflect the presence of the tuberculosis germ—not the explosive vapor associated with land mines.”

Experimental Chikungunya Vaccine Shows Promise

Chikungunya, of course, is one of the diseases included in the CDC’s travel alerts, and this week we learned of a promising vaccine for the disease that causes fever and intensely painful and severe arthritis. After the vaccine’s first human trials, the next step is to test in more people and more age groups, including populations where the virus is endemic. The trial leader said that it could be more than five years before a finished vaccine could be offered to the public.

CBS News—“‘This vaccine was safe and well-tolerated, and we believe that this vaccine makes a type of antibody that is effective against chikungunya,’ said trial leader Dr. Julie Ledgerwood, chief of the clinical trials program at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.”

WHO: Ebola Outbreak Vastly Underestimated

The news from West Africa seems to be getting worse and worse. Earlier in the week there was good news when a new quarantine center opened in Liberia. Then two days later, that same center was destroyed and looted. All of this comes, too, when the World Health Organization has said there is evidence that numbers of cases and deaths are far lower than the actual numbers and MSF has said that the outbreak will take at least six months to get under control.

Al Jazeera—“‘Staff at the outbreak sites see evidence that the numbers of reported cases and deaths vastly underestimate the magnitude of the outbreak,’ the organization said.

‘WHO is coordinating a massive scaling up of the international response, marshaling support from individual countries, disease control agencies, agencies within the United Nations system, and others.’”

Image Credit: James Pursey, APOPO

Pandora Report 6.7.14

by juliadhomstad, posted in Pandora Report

We’re taking the bad news with the good news this week. Highlights include miscalculations in the MERS toll, rising numbers of Ebola deaths, innovations in vaccine delivery using rice, and progress with MRSA. Enjoy your weekend!

Saudi Arabia Reports Big Jump in MERS cases, Including 282 Deaths

On Tuesday, the Saudi Ministry of Health reported that 282 people have died from Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) which is a major increase from the previously known official death toll of 190. The same day as the announcement, Deputy Health Minister Dr. Ziad Memish was “relieved” from his post according to the Saudi Health Minister. No reason was given.

CNN—“MERS is thought to have originated on the Arabian Peninsula in 2012. No one knows exactly where it came from, but evidence implicating camels is emerging. In a recently published study in mBio, researchers said they isolated live MERS virus from two single-humped camels, known as dromedaries. They found multiple substrains in the camel viruses, including one that perfectly matches a substrain isolated from a human patient.”

Resurgence of Ebola Epidemic in West Africa

Though overall the number of new cases of Ebola appears to be declining, new cases have been recently reported in Guinea and Sierra Leone. Doctors Without Borders/ Medecins San Frontieres have been supporting health authorities in both countries, treating patients, and working to put measures in place to control the epidemic. They have sent over 44 tons of equipment and supplies to assist the outbreak which has infected over 300 people and killed at least 125.

Doctors Without Borders—“The rise in cases may be due to a reluctance on the part of patients to go to hospital. The movement of infected people and cadavers is also a major issue. Families frequently transport dead bodies themselves in order to organize funerals in other towns. The multiplication of affected areas makes it difficult to treat patients and control the epidemic.”

Fighting Deadly Disease, With Grains of Rice

In an effort to fight common diarrheal illnesses including cholera and rotavirus, researchers at the University of Tokyo are working on bioenginerring rice in order to turn it into an easy and low-cost storage and delivery medium to combat these common illnesses.  According to the World Health Organization, cholera alone kills as many as 120,000 annually.  Both the cholera vaccine and rotavirus antibody versions of the rice have been tested on laboratory mice with plans to test on humans within the next few years in a country like Bangladesh where cholera is a major public health threat. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well as several pharmaceutical companies have shown interest in developing drugs based on the research.

The New York Times—“Vaccines  or antibodies for both exist but require refrigerated storage, Yoshikazu Yuki, an assistant professor of mucosal immunology, said in an interview. Bioengineering vaccines or antibodies into rice would allow them to be stockpiled easily, without the cost of cold storage, for up to three years at room temperature, he said. The rice could be ingested orally, ground into a paste and drunk, delivering the antibodies to the intestine.”

A New Weapon in the Battle Against MRSA

Among serious concern for the growing levels of antibiotic resistant superbugs, it appears there is some promising news. Durata Therapeutics have developed a new drug, Dalvance, which in clinical trials has proven as effective as vancomycin—another powerful antibiotic—against acute skin and soft tissue infections including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA.) According to Durata, more than 4.8 million people were admitted to hospitals with skin and soft tissue infections between 2005 and 2011 and nearly 60% of these staph infections were the methicillin-resistant variety.

The Washington Post—“The drug, Dalvance, is the first approved by the FDA under the government’s Generating Antibiotic Incentives Now program, its effort to encourage pharmaceutical companies to produce new drugs to combat the growing problem of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Even asthe problem has grown around the world, the number of new drugs in the pipeline has dwindled, with drug companies focused on more profitable medications.”

 

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons