The team reported the isolation of 61 SARS-CoV-2-neutralizing monoclonal antibodies from five infected patients hospitalized with severe disease. Among these are 19 antibodies that potently neutralized the authentic SARS-CoV-2 in vitro, nine of which exhibited exquisite potency.

Patients with cancer are at increased risk for developing severe COVID-19 and clinicians were concerned that continuing to treat these patients with cancer drugs that activate the immune system, such as immune checkpoint inhibitors, could make symptoms of the virus worse by increasing cytokine production.

The research team’s findings suggest that inflammatory proteins produced during COVID-19 infection make platelets hyperreactive and likelier to form blood clots via platelet to platelet and platelet to leukocyte interactions.

The researchers found that population distribution of the disease-associated genetic variants differed depending on a person’s ethnic origin. Some of the variants in the ACE2 gene were linked to cardiovascular and lung conditions, whereas some in the TMPRSS2 gene were linked to different cancers.

Sema4 Signal is a family of products and services providing data-driven precision oncology solutions with advanced analytics, digital tools, and exome-based somatic and hereditary cancer genomic tests.

Moderna disclosed plans for the Phase III trial on Clinicaltrials.gov the same day that researchers from NIAID, Moderna, and their clinical research partners reported that mRNA-1273 induced rapid and strong immune responses against SARS-CoV-2, in an interim analysis of results from their Phase I study.

Scientists in Singapore and China validated the test across two patient cohorts, with a sample size of 250 from China and 375 from Singapore, and found it achieved 99.93% specificity and 95–100% sensitivity and differentiated antibody responses to several human coronaviruses.

Besides addressing the question of infectivity, the new research presents geographic information about the rise of the new variant, G614, and the relative decline of the previously dominant variant, D614, across the globe.

The study combined genome-wide association summary statistics for heart disease, dementia, and cancers and identified 10 genomic loci that appear to influence all three of those phenotypes.