ABSTRACT
Remarkable progress has been made in developing intramuscular vaccines against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2); however, they are limited with respect to eliciting local immunity in the respiratory tract, which is the primary infection site for SARS-CoV-2. To overcome the limitations of intramuscular vaccines, we constructed a nasal vaccine candidate based on an influenza vector by inserting a gene encoding the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, named CA4-dNS1-nCoV-RBD (dNS1-RBD). A preclinical study showed that in hamsters challenged 1 day and 7 days after single-dose vaccination or 6 months after booster vaccination, dNS1-RBD largely mitigated lung pathology, with no loss of body weight, caused by either the prototype-like strain or beta variant of SARS-CoV-2. Lasted data showed that the animals could be well protected against beta variant challenge 9 months after vaccination. Notably, the weight loss and lung pathological changes of hamsters could still be significantly reduced when the hamster was vaccinated 24 h after challenge. Moreover, such cellular immunity is relatively unimpaired for the most concerning SARS-CoV-2 variants. The protective immune mechanism of dNS1-RBD could be attributed to the innate immune response in the nasal epithelium, local RBD-specific T cell response in the lung, and RBD-specific IgA and IgG response. Thus, this study demonstrates that the intranasally delivered dNS1-RBD vaccine candidate may offer an important addition to fight against the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, compensating limitations of current intramuscular vaccines, particularly at the start of an outbreak.
Subject(s)
Coronavirus Infections , Weight Loss , COVID-19ABSTRACT
In recent years, human beings have been suffering from diseases caused by various viruses. In particular, COVID-19 has seriously affected the economy, society, and people?s health of the world. Reliable detection, diagnosis, and treatment technologies and products are needed to address the epidemic and possible future public health events. Nucleic acid aptamers, as antibody-like recognition molecules, will play a role as new molecular tools in these aspects, especially in virus detection. More information can be found in the Minireview by Liyun Zhang et?al.
ABSTRACT
Objective: this study aimed to explore the impacts of myocardial injury on the clinical severity and outcomes in patients with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19).Methods: we analyzed the electronic medical records of 1646 COVID-19 inpatients in Wuhan Huoshenshan Hospital. Results: 327 (19.9%) developed into severe cases, 23 (1.4%) died. In comparison to common cases, severe cases showed older age, more comorbidities, abnormal immune responses, as well as liver, renal, cardiac and coagulation disorders. Multivariable logistic regression identified that older age , combining with arrhythmia, abnormal lymphocyte percentage, elevated hypersensitive C reactive protein (hs-CRP) and myocardial injury were the independent risk factors for the incidence of severe cases. Moreover, Kaplan-Meier survival analysis showed that patients with myocardial injury had increasing risks of mortality, incidence of severe cases, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), and intensive care unit (ICU) admission. Particularly, myocardial injury patients co-existed with any other risk factor further deteriorated the clinical outcomes.Conclusion: The presence of myocardial injury and its co-existing with older age, arrhythmia, abnormal lymphocyte percentage, or elevated hs-CRP were greatly associated with the incidence of severe patients and poor clinical outcomes.