By Nancy Lapid
(Reuters) – The following is a summary of some recent studies on COVID-19. They include research that warrants further study to corroborate the findings and that have yet to be certified by peer review.
Arthritis drug cuts death risk in high-risk patients
Hospitalized COVID-19 patients at high risk for becoming critically ill and dying had significantly better outcomes if they received the anti-inflammatory drug anakinra, researchers have found. To test the drug, sold as Kineret by Sweden’s Sobi Inc, the researchers looked for patients with high blood levels of a protein called suPAR, which is linked to higher odds of needing mechanical breathing assistance and death from COVID-19. The 594-patient trial tested anakinra, which blocks the effects of inflammatory proteins IL-1-alpha and IL-1-beta, against a placebo. The risk of death was 55% lower in patients who received anakinra, and 80% lower for the sickest patients in the trial, the researchers reported in Nature Medicine https://go.nature.com/38SadbN. “The clinical benefit with anakinra treatment was already apparent from day 14, and this is of clinical importance because the first 14 days is the period during which a patient is expected to worsen. Anakinra benefit was maintained until day 28,” they said. They note that measuring suPAR allows for a more personalized treatment approach, but its use to guide COVID-19 treatment could be problematic because the tests are not available in every hospital.
Heart drugs might help prevent COVID-19 blood clots
Drugs that prevent blood clots after procedures to unclog heart arteries might also be useful for clot prevention in patients with COVID-19, new data suggests. The coronavirus is known to affect genes that control platelets, fragments in the blood that form clots. The inflammatory proteins generated by the virus cause platelets to become “hyperreactive” and form clots more easily and more often. In test tube experiments described on Wednesday in Science Advances https://bit.ly/3nnEszT, researchers found that anticoagulants used after coronary stenting – clopidogrel, sold as Plavix by Bristol Myers Squibb and Sanofi, and ticagrelor, sold as Brilinta by AstraZeneca – keep COVID-19 patients’ platelets from becoming over-activated by blocking the P2Y12 protein on their surface. If additional studies confirm their findings, these P2Y12 inhibitors “may represent a particularly attractive therapy” for reducing the risk of inflammation-related blood clots in COVID-19, the authors say.
Mu variant’s escape from antibodies may inform vaccine research
The ability of the Mu variant of the coronavirus to escape from antibodies and vaccines can aid in preparations against other emerging variants, Japanese researchers say. The variant has driven outbreaks in Colombia and is now classified as a “variant of interest” by the World Health Organization, although it appears unlikely to overtake the far more prevalent Delta variant. In test tube experiments, researchers found that Mu is “highly resistant” to antibodies in blood samples from COVID-19 survivors and from people who got the mRNA vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech. In fact, the spike used by the virus to break into cells was more resistant to neutralization than all other currently recognized variants of interest and variants of concern, the researchers reported on Tuesday on bioRxiv https://bit.ly/3yXq4QV ahead of peer review. Dr. Eric Topol of the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California, who was not involved in the research, noted in a tweet https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1435687148246605826 on Wednesday that Delta’s high infectiousness surpasses Mu’s ability to escape from antibodies. Nevertheless, study coauthor Kei Sato of the University of Tokyo said understanding how variations in spike proteins affect the potency of neutralization antibodies is important for developing new vaccines and predicting breakthrough infections.
U.S. data underestimated COVID-19 nursing home deaths U.S. government data underestimated COVID-19 cases and nursing home deaths at the beginning of the pandemic, a new study suggests. A comparison of federal numbers to those tallied by individual states, published on Thursday in JAMA Network Open, finds that the U.S. government missed 43.7% of COVID-19 cases and 40% of deaths in nursing homes early in the health crisis because these figures were not tracked until May 24, 2020. “Because of the delay in federal reporting, roughly 68,000 cases and 16,000 deaths in nursing homes were missed,” said coauthor Karen Shen of Harvard University. Those represent 11.6% of COVID-19 cases and 14.0% of COVID-19 deaths in nursing home residents in 2020, the study estimated. “The catastrophe of being a resident in a long-term care facility with multiple impairments was almost a death sentence” early in the pandemic, said Dr. John Rowe, a professor of health policy and aging at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health who was not involved in the research. “The finding that there were 14% more just underlines that fact.”
Click for a Reuters graphic https://tmsnrt.rs/3c7R3Bl on vaccines in development.
(Reporting by Nancy Lapid, Megan Brooks and Linda Carroll; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
