News from the USA, United States of America

[Sasha]

KUNM: “Researchers from around the world headed to Santa Fe for long COVID conference”

“We really want this to be a milestone and a turning point…”

Interesting that Dr Altmann says that the patients essentially created the field. Just shows the depth of abandonment - all over again.

 

[Mij]

He's back

Vinay Prasad returns to the FDA, weeks after his ouster

He will resume leadership of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research

 

[V.R.T.]

Interesting that Dr Altmann says that the patients essentially created the field. Just shows the depth of abandonment - all over again.

Interesting and perhaps frustrating that he is still hot on antiviral therapies. I'd love to be proved wrong but I just think if that was the answer we would probably know by now.

 

[Dakota15]

'New biomarker may be the first specific and quantifiable indicator for confirming long COVID'

'Researchers from the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), part of City of Hope, and the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center have identified a potential biomarker for long COVID.'

The study results, reported in the journal Infection, detail the detection of SARS-CoV-2 protein fragments within extracellular vesicles (EVs) - tiny, naturally occurring packages that help cells share proteins, metabolites, and other materials. The researchers collected and analyzed blood samples from 14 patients over 12 weeks of aerobic exercise training (56 samples in all) in a clinical trial led by Stringer in long COVID.

The researchers found 65 distinct protein fragments from SARS-CoV-2 inside the EVs. These fragments come from the virus's Pp1ab protein, an RNA Replicase enzyme which is key to how the virus copies itself and makes other viral particles. This protein is found uniquely in SARS-CoV-2, and not in uninfected human cells, noted Asghar Abbasi, Ph.D., a Lundquist Institute investigator and first author of the study.

 

[V.R.T.]

'New biomarker may be the first specific and quantifiable indicator for confirming long COVID'

'Researchers from the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), part of City of Hope, and the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center have identified a potential biomarker for long COVID.'

The study results, reported in the journal Infection, detail the detection of SARS-CoV-2 protein fragments within extracellular vesicles (EVs) - tiny, naturally occurring packages that help cells share proteins, metabolites, and other materials. The researchers collected and analyzed blood samples from 14 patients over 12 weeks of aerobic exercise training (56 samples in all) in a clinical trial led by Stringer in long COVID.

The researchers found 65 distinct protein fragments from SARS-CoV-2 inside the EVs. These fragments come from the virus's Pp1ab protein, an RNA Replicase enzyme which is key to how the virus copies itself and makes other viral particles. This protein is found uniquely in SARS-CoV-2, and not in uninfected human cells, noted Asghar Abbasi, Ph.D., a Lundquist Institute investigator and first author of the study.

I feel like this paragraph definitely puts the dampener on things:

"We haven't run [our tests] on people without long COVID symptoms who are currently, or who were, infected with COVID," said Stringer. "This raises the question: is this just continuing to take out the trash from the COVID infected cell or is this really ongoing replication someplace? I think that's the mechanistic issue that needs to be resolved in future studies."

Lots of people who have had covid have some kind of persistent markers of infection in their blood and no long covid samples. So it stands to reason these post exercise markers could be a similar phenomenon.

Also they gave pwLC 12 weeks of aerobics training? I guess they haven't heard of PEM..