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3 medical innovations powered by COVID-19 that will survive the pandemic
Gene-based vaccines were never approved for humans before the coronavirus pandemic. Juan Gaertner / Science Photo Library via Getty ImagesA number of technologies and tools have had a chance to prove themselves for the first time in the context of COVID-19. Three researchers working on gene-based vaccines, wearable diagnostics and drug discovery explain how their work overcame the pandemic challenge and their hopes that each technology is now positioned to continue to make major changes in medicine. Genetic vaccines Deborah Fuller, professor of microbiology at the University of Washington Thirty years ago, researchers first injected mice with genes from a foreign pathogen to produce an immune response. Like many new discoveries, these early gene-based vaccines had their ups and downs. The first mRNA vaccines were difficult to store and did not produce the right type of immunity. DNA vaccines were more stable, but were not efficient at getting into the cell’s nucleus, so they didn’t produce enough immunity. The researchers slowly overcame stability problems by obtaining the genetic instructions where they should be and making them induce more effective immune responses. In 2019, academic laboratories and biotechnology companies around the world had dozens of promising mRNA and DNA vaccines for infectious diseases, as well as for cancer in development or in phase 1 and phase 2 clinical trials in humans. When COVID-19 was hit, the mRNA vaccines in particular were ready to be tested in the real world. The effectiveness of 94% of mRNA vaccines has exceeded the highest expectations of health authorities. DNA and mRNA vaccines offer huge advantages over traditional types of vaccines, since they use only the genetic code of a pathogen – instead of the entire virus or bacteria. Traditional vaccines take months, if not years, to develop. In contrast, once scientists obtain the genetic sequence for a new pathogen, they can design a DNA or mRNA vaccine in days, identify a leading candidate for clinical testing in weeks and have millions of doses manufactured in months. This is basically what happened to the coronavirus. Gene-based vaccines also produce accurate and effective immune responses. They stimulate not only antibodies that block an infection, but also a strong T-cell response that can clear an infection if it occurs. This makes these vaccines more capable of responding to mutations and also means that they can eliminate chronic infections or cancer cells. Hopes that gene-based vaccines will one day provide a malaria or HIV vaccine, cure cancer, replace traditional less effective vaccines or be ready to prevent the next pandemic before it begins are no longer far-fetched. In fact, many DNA and mRNA vaccines against a wide range of infectious diseases, for the treatment of chronic infections and for cancer are already in advanced stages and clinical trials. As someone who has worked with these vaccines for decades, I believe that their proven effectiveness against COVID-19 will usher in a new era of vaccinology with genetic vaccines at the forefront. Smartwatches and other wearable technologies allow users to capture more continuous health data than ever before. Pixabay Wearable tech and early disease detection Albert H. Titus, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, University at Buffalo During the pandemic, researchers took full advantage of the proliferation of smartwatches, smart rings and other wearable health and wellness technologies. These devices can measure a person’s temperature, heart rate, activity level and other biometric data. With this information, the researchers were able to track and detect COVID-19 infections before people even realized they had any symptoms. As the use and adoption of wearables has increased in recent years, researchers have begun to study the ability of these devices to monitor disease. However, while real-time data collection was possible, previous work has focused mainly on chronic diseases. But the pandemic served as a lens to focus many researchers in the field of healthy wearables and offered them an unprecedented opportunity to study infectious disease detection in real time. The number of people potentially affected by a single disease – COVID-19 – at the same time gave researchers a large population to extract and test hypotheses. Combined with the fact that more people than ever are wearing wearables with health monitoring functions and that these devices collect a lot of useful data, the researchers were able to try to diagnose a disease using only wearable data – an experiment with which only they could dream before. Wearables can detect symptoms of COVID-19 or other illnesses before the symptoms are noticeable. Although they have proven to be able to detect diseases early, the symptoms detected by the wearables are not exclusive to COVID-19. These symptoms can be predictive of a range of potential illnesses or other health changes, and it is much more difficult to say what illness a person has than to simply say that he is sick with something. Moving into the post-pandemic world, it is likely that more people will incorporate wearables into their lives and that devices will only get better. I hope that the knowledge that researchers acquired during the pandemic on how to use wearables to monitor health will form a starting point for dealing with future outbreaks – not just of viral pandemics, but potentially of other events, such as outbreaks of food poisoning and episodes of seasonal flu. But, since the wearable technology is concentrated in groups of wealthier and younger populations, the research community and society as a whole must simultaneously deal with the existing disparities. Each place where a coronavirus protein interacts with a human protein is a potentially drug-resistant location. QBI Coronavirus Research Group, CC BY-ND A new way to discover drugs Nevan Krogan, Professor of Cellular Molecular Pharmacology and Director of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute, University of California, San Francisco Proteins are the molecular machines that make your cells work. When proteins malfunction or are hijacked by a pathogen, you usually get the disease. Most drugs work by interrupting the action of one or more of these defective or sequestered proteins. Therefore, a logical way to look for new drugs to treat a specific disease is to study individual genes and proteins that are directly affected by that disease. For example, researchers know that the BRCA gene – a gene that protects DNA from damage – is closely related to the development of breast and ovarian cancer. Therefore, a lot of work has focused on finding drugs that affect the function of the BRCA protein. However, isolated proteins working alone are generally not the only ones responsible for the disease. The genes and proteins they encode are part of complicated networks – the BRCA protein interacts with dozens to hundreds of other proteins that help it perform its cellular functions. My colleagues and I are part of a small but growing field of researchers who study these connections and interactions between proteins – what we call protein networks. For a number of years, my colleagues and I have been exploring the potential of these networks to find more ways for drugs to improve disease. When the coronavirus pandemic occurred, we knew that we had to try this approach and see if it could be used to quickly find a treatment for this emerging threat. We immediately started to map the extensive network of human proteins that SARS-CoV-2 hijacks so that it can replicate. As soon as we built this map, we identified human proteins in the network that drugs could easily target. We found 69 compounds that influence the proteins in the coronavirus network. 29 of them are already FDA approved treatments for other diseases. On January 25, we published an article showing that one of the drugs, Aplidin (Plitidepsin), currently in use to treat cancer, is 27.5 times more potent than remdesivir in the treatment of COVID-19, including one of the new variants . approved for phase 3 clinical trials in 12 countries as treatment for the new coronavirus. But this idea of mapping disease protein interactions to look for new drug targets doesn’t just apply to the coronavirus. We now use this approach in other pathogens, as well as in other diseases, including cancer, neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders. These maps are allowing us to connect the dots between many seemingly disparate aspects of isolated diseases and to discover new ways that drugs can treat them. We hope that this approach will enable us and researchers in other areas of medicine to discover new therapeutic strategies and also to see if any old drugs can be reused to treat other conditions. [Understand new developments in science, health and technology, each week. Subscribe to The Conversation’s science newsletter.]This article was republished from The Conversation, a non-profit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Deborah Fuller, University of Washington; Albert H. Titus, University at Buffalo, and Nevan Krogan, University of California, San Francisco. Read more: We found and tested 47 old drugs that can treat coronavirus: The results show promising leads and a whole new way to fight COVID-19. Can vaccinated people still spread the coronavirus? Deborah Fuller is a co-founder of Orlance, Inc, which is developing a needle-free technology for delivering DNA and RNA vaccines. She received funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense and the Washington Research Foundation. Albert H. Titus received research funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense. He also received funding for research in this area from Garwood Medical Devices. He is a member of the National Academy of Inventors, a senior member of the IEEE, a member of the BMES, ASEE and a member of the BME Council of Chairs. Nevan Krogan works for the Gladstone Institutes. He receives funding from NIH, DARPA and Roche Pharmaceuticals.