Project description:The coronavirus disease?2019 (COVID?19) pandemic, caused by the new coronavirus SARS?CoV?2, has spread around the globe with unprecedented consequences for the health of millions of people. While the pandemic is still in progress, with new incidents being reported every day, the resilience of the global society is constantly being challenged. Under these circumstances, the future seems uncertain. SARS?CoV?2 coronavirus has spread panic among civilians and insecurity at all socio?political and economic levels, dramatically disrupting everyday life, global economy, international travel and trade. The disease has also been linked to the onset of depression in many individuals due to the extreme restriction measures that have been taken for the prevention of the rapid spreading of COVID?19. First, the socio?economic, political and psychological implications of the COVID?19 pandemic were explored. Substantial evidence is provided for the consequences of the pandemic on all aspects of everyday life, while at the same time we unravel the role and the pursuits of national regimes during this unforeseen situation. The second goal of this review is related to the scientific aspect of the pandemic. Hence, we explain why SARS?CoV?2 is not a so?called 'invisible enemy', and also attempt to give insight regarding the origin of the virus, in an effort to reject the conspiracy theories that have arisen during the pandemic. Finally, rational strategies were investigated for successful vaccine development. We are optimistic that this review will complement the knowledge of specialized scientists and inform non?specialized readers on basic scientific questions, and also on the social and economic implications of the COVID?19 pandemic.
Project description:There is no good science in bad models. Cell culture is especially prone to artifacts. A number of novel cell culture technologies have become more broadly available in the 21st century, which allow overcoming limitations of traditional culture and are more physiologically relevant. These include the use of stem-cell derived human cells, cocultures of different cell types, scaffolds and extracellular matrices, perfusion platforms (such as microfluidics), 3D culture, organ-on-chip technologies, tissue architecture, and organ functionality. The physiological relevance of such models is further enhanced by the measurement of biomarkers (e.g., key events of pathways), organ specific functionality, and more comprehensive assessment cell responses by high-content methods. These approaches are still rarely combined to create microphysiological systems. The complexity of the combination of these technologies can generate results closer to the in vivo situation but increases the number of parameters to control, bringing some new challenges. In fact, we do not argue that all cell culture needs to be that sophisticated. The efforts taken are determined by the purpose of our experiments and tests. If only a very specific molecular target to cell response is of interest, a very simple model, which reflects this, might be much more suited to allow standardization and high-throughput. However, the less defined the end point of interest and cellular response are, the better we should approximate organ- or tissue-like culture conditions to make physiological responses more probable. Besides these technologic advances, important progress in the quality assurance and reporting on cell cultures as well as the validation of cellular test systems brings the utility of cell cultures to a new level. The advancement and broader implementation of Good Cell Culture Practice (GCCP) is key here. In toxicology, this is a major prerequisite for meaningful and reliable results, ultimately supporting risk assessment and product development decisions.
Project description:The COVID-19 pandemic threatens to disrupt the provision of mental health services. In response, policymakers, administrators, and providers have taken bold steps toward enabling telepsychiatry to bridge this sudden gap in care for our most vulnerable populations. With rapid deregulation and adoption of this modality of care, careful consideration of issues related to policy and implementation is essential to maximize its effectiveness and mitigate unintended consequences. Though the crisis places the healthcare system under strain, it sets the stage for a lasting shift in not only how care is delivered, but also our beliefs around the system's capacity for rapid, innovative change.
Project description:The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) outbreak began in late 2019 in Wuhan, China, and have since spread globally. Deep sequencing analysis identified the disease within a few weeks, and on February 11, the World Health Organization (WHO) named it "COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2." SARS-CoV-2 was declared a global pandemic by the WHO in March 2020. Coronavirus disease has become a global challenge for researchers and health care workers, affecting over 174 million people and causing over 3 million deaths. Because of the widespread nature, extensive measures are being taken to reduce person-to-person contact, and special precautions are being taken to prevent the transmission of this infection to vulnerable populations such as geriatrics, pediatrics, and health care professionals. We summarized the genesis of COVID-19 spread, its pathology, clinical perspectives, and the use of natural ingredients as a possible cure for COVID-19 in this review. This article has highlighted information about current vaccines approved for emergency use as well as those in various stages of clinical trials. Vaccine availability around the world is a promising development in the fight against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We conducted a narrative review to present the current state and research on this situation, specific diagnosis, clinical manifestation, emergency approaches, herbal-based remedies, and COVID vaccines.
Project description:It has been nearly 50 years since the golden age of antibiotic discovery (1945-1975) ended; yet, we still struggle to identify novel drug targets and to deliver new chemical classes of antibiotics to replace those rendered obsolete by drug resistance. Despite herculean efforts utilizing a wide range of antibiotic discovery platform strategies, including genomics, bioinformatics, systems biology and postgenomic approaches, success has been at best incremental. Obviously, finding new classes of antibiotics is really hard, so repeating the old strategies, while expecting different outcomes, seems to boarder on insanity. The key questions dealt with in this review include: (1) If mutation based drug resistance is the major challenge to any new antibiotic, is it possible to find drug targets and new chemical entities that can escape this outcome; (2) Is the number of novel chemical classes of antibacterials limited by the number of broad spectrum drug targets; and (3) If true, then should we focus efforts on subgroups of pathogens like Gram negative or positive bacteria only, anaerobic bacteria or other group where the range of common essential genes is likely greater?. This review also provides some examples of existing drug targets that appear to escape the specter of mutation based drug resistance, and provides examples of some intermediate spectrum strategies as well as modern molecular and genomic approaches likely to improve the odds of delivering 21st century medicines to combat multidrug resistant pathogens.
Project description:To understand and analyse the global impact of COVID-19 on outpatient services, inpatient care, elective surgery, and perioperative colorectal cancer care, a DElayed COloRectal cancer surgery (DECOR-19) survey was conducted in collaboration with numerous international colorectal societies with the objective of obtaining several learning points from the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on our colorectal cancer patients which will assist us in the ongoing management of our colorectal cancer patients and to provide us safe oncological pathways for future outbreaks.
Project description:Haldane's Rule (HR), which states that 'when in the offspring of two different animal races one sex is absent, rare, or sterile, that sex is the heterozygous (heterogametic) sex', is one of the most general patterns in speciation biology. We review the literature of the past 15 years and find that among the ?85 new studies, many consider taxa that traditionally have not been the focus for HR investigations. The new studies increased to nine, the number of 'phylogenetically independent' groups that comply with HR. They continue to support the dominance and faster-male theories as explanations for HR, although due to increased reliance on indirect data (from, for example, differential introgression of cytoplasmic versus chromosomal loci in natural hybrid zones) unambiguous novel results are rare. We further highlight how research on organisms with sex determination systems different from those traditionally considered may lead to more insight in the underlying causes of HR. In particular, haplodiploid organisms provide opportunities for testing specific predictions of the dominance and faster X chromosome theory, and we present new data that show that the faster-male component of HR is supported in hermaphrodites, suggesting that genes involved in male function may evolve faster than those expressed in the female function.