Computational Design of Vaccines and Therapies for Coronavirus 2019-nCoV

7 responses to “Computational Design of Vaccines and Therapies for Coronavirus 2019-nCoV”

1. 

   jurvetson

   Mar 4, 2020 at 1:40 am

   beauty all around usHBD candle for me… with the Bay Bridge giving a great light show. Thanks SethOur prior encounter with David Baker with the Audacious philanthropy program debut Computer design of the first nano-particle vaccine

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2. 

   gsikich1

   Mar 4, 2020 at 2:01 pm

   Posted the Protein Design article to LinkedIn crediting you for posting on Flickr.

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3. 

   jurvetson

   Mar 5, 2020 at 10:59 pm

   thx. P.S. the day after our IPD dinner, with Neil’s nanoparticle vaccine model in hand.POTUS will be giving a speech tonight suggesting people design Coronavirus binders with fold.it

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4. 

   PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE

   Mar 6, 2020 at 5:05 pm

   Merci =) Here is a cool article in connection from the FT :

   Coronavirus and the $2bn race to find a vaccine. The start-up leading the US fight to immunise people will need state backing and up to 18 months to make the venture work : http://www.ft.com/content/e0ecc6b6-5d43-11ea-b0ab-339c2307bcd4

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5. 

   jurvetson

   Mar 6, 2020 at 7:42 pm

   thanks… and here is a perspective from a Harvard Medical School fellow, in Slate:

   "This all suggests that COVID-19 is a relatively benign disease for most young people, and a potentially devastating one for the old and chronically ill, albeit not nearly as risky as reported. Given the low mortality rate among younger patients with coronavirus—zero in children 10 or younger among hundreds of cases in China, and 0.2-0.4 percent in most healthy nongeriatric adults (and this is still before accounting for what is likely to be a high number of undetected asymptomatic cases)—we need to divert our focus away from worrying about preventing systemic spread among healthy people—which is likely either inevitable, or out of our control—and commit most if not all of our resources toward protecting those truly at risk of developing critical illness and even death: everyone over 70, and people who are already at higher risk from this kind of virus.

   Here’s the problem with looking at mortality numbers in a general setting: In China, 9 million people die per year, which comes out to 25,000 people every single day, or around 1.5 million people over the past two months alone. A significant fraction of these deaths results from diseases like emphysema/COPD, lower respiratory infections, and cancers of the lung and airway whose symptoms are clinically indistinguishable from the nonspecific symptoms seen in severe COVID-19 cases. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the death rate from COVID-19 in China spiked precisely among the same age groups in which these chronic diseases first become common. During the peak of the outbreak in China in January and early February, around 25 patients per day were dying with SARS-CoV-2. Most were older patients in whom the chronic diseases listed above are prevalent. Most deaths occurred in Hubei province, an area in which lung cancer and emphysema/COPD are significantly higher than national averages in China, a country where half of all men smoke. How were doctors supposed to sort out which of those 25 out of 25,000 daily deaths were solely due to coronavirus, and which were more complicated? What we need to know is how many excess deaths this virus causes.

   This is where the Diamond Princess data provides important insight. Of the 3,711 people on board, at least 705 have tested positive for the virus (which, considering the confines, conditions, and how contagious this virus appears to be, is surprisingly low). Of those, more than half are asymptomatic, while very few asymptomatic people were detected in China. This alone suggests a halving of the virus’s true fatality rate.

   On the Diamond Princess, six deaths have occurred among the passengers, constituting a case fatality rate of 0.85 percent. Unlike the data from China and elsewhere, where sorting out why a patient died is extremely difficult, we can assume that these are excess fatalities—they wouldn’t have occurred but for SARS-CoV-2. The most important insight is that all six fatalities occurred in patients who are more than 70 years old. Not a single Diamond Princess patient under age 70 has died.”

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6. 

   oklo

   Mar 8, 2020 at 8:50 pm

   Metaculus has set up a domain pandemic.metaculus.com/questions/ to host a proliferating set of quantitative predictions on questions related to COVID-19. In the comment sections for the questions, there’s quite a bit of well-informed discussion of issues such as the infection-fatality ratio, where the current PDF for the ratio is bimodal with a median value of 0.016…

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7. 

   jurvetson

   May 28, 2021 at 5:59 pm

   Update: Fauci was talking about their nanoparticle vaccine to congress a couple days ago. Their universal flu vaccine has just begun Phase 1 clinical trials. It should provide better protection than traditional flu shots, and may even protect against novel flu strains that have the potential to become future pandemics. Separately, the IPD’s COVID-19 vaccine developed in Neil King’s lab is advancing to Phase 3 clinical trials.

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