COVID-19: Early Immune Response
Could Be Causing Respiratory Distress

In a study of COVID-19 patients, a team of Singapore scientists have found that the patients' immune systems showed marked changes in the way they dealt with the invading pathogen. When a virus invades a body, the development of the disease is often determined by how the immune system reacts to the infection. Most of the time it mounts a protective response, but if it kicks into overdrive, it could stimulate the overproduction of cytokines - which can cause inflammation and symptoms such as breathlessness or respiratory distress.

"In this study, we found that the early immune response following the start of symptoms is highly dynamic, which means that research needs to take into account the day-to-day fluctuations in activation or deactivation of immune genes that collectively shape disease severity in COVID-19 patients," said one of the study's lead authors, Associate Professor Jenny Low, a senior consultant at the Department of Infectious Diseases at Singapore General Hospital and co-director of the Viral Research and Experimental Medicine Centre.

Duke-NUS Medical School and Arcturus Therapeutics, a leading messenger RNA medicines company, have partnered to develop a Coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine. The collaboration will make use of Arcturus' STARR technology™, which is expected to produce a vaccine response at much lower doses compared to traditional mRNA vaccines, and will take advantage of a unique platform developed at Duke-NUS allowing rapid screening of vaccines for effectiveness and safety. Read more.