Can Water-Only DNA Extraction Reduce the Logistical Footprint of Biosurveillance and Planetary Health Diagnostics? Toward a New Method.

The coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has raised the stakes for planetary health diagnostics. Because pandemics pose enormous burdens on biosurveillance and diagnostics, reduction of the logistical burdens of pandemics and ecological crises is essential. Moreover, the disruptive effects of catastrophic bioevents impact the supply chains in both highly populated urban centers and rural communities. One "upstream" focus of methodological innovation in biosurveillance is the footprint of Nucleic Acid Amplification Test (NAAT)-based assays. We report in this study a water-only DNA extraction, as an initial step in developing future protocols that may require few expendables, and with low environmental footprints, in terms of wet and solid laboratory waste. In the present work, boiling-hot distilled water was used as the main cell lysis agent for direct polymerase chain reactions (PCRs) on crude extracts. After evaluation (1) in blood and mouth swabs for human biomarker genotyping, and (2) in mouth swabs and plant tissue for generic bacterial or fungal detection, and using different combinations of extraction volume, mechanical assistance, and extract dilution, we found the method to be applicable in low-complexity samples, but not in high-complexity ones such as blood and plant tissue. In conclusion, this study examined the doability of a lean approach for template extraction in the case of NAAT-based diagnostics. Testing our approach with different biosamples, PCR settings, and instruments, including portable ones for COVID-19 or dispersed applications, warrant further research. Minimal resources analysis is a concept and practice, vital and timely for biosurveillance, integrative biology, and planetary health in the 21st century.

Discovery of new drug indications for COVID-19: A drug repurposing approach.

MOTIVATION: The outbreak of coronavirus health issues caused by COVID-19(SARS-CoV-2) creates a global threat to public health. Therefore, there is a need for effective remedial measures using existing and approved therapies with proven safety measures has several advantages. Dexamethasone (Pubchem ID: CID0000005743), baricitinib(Pubchem ID: CID44205240), remdesivir (PubchemID: CID121304016) are three generic drugs that have demonstrated in-vitro high antiviral activity against SARS-CoV-2. The present study aims to widen the search and explore the anti-SARS-CoV-2 properties of these potential drugs while looking for new drug indications with optimised benefits via in-silico research. METHOD: Here, we designed a unique drug-similarity model to repurpose existing drugs against SARS-CoV-2, using the anti-Covid properties of dexamethasone, baricitinib, and remdesivir as references. Known chemical-chemical interactions of reference drugs help extract interactive compounds withimprovedanti-SARS-CoV-2 properties. Here, we calculated the likelihood of these drug compounds treating SARS-CoV-2 related symptoms using chemical-protein interactions between the interactive compounds of the reference drugs and SARS-CoV-2 target genes. In particular, we adopted a two-tier clustering approach to generate a drug similarity model for the final selection of potential anti-SARS-CoV-2 drug molecules. Tier-1 clustering was based on t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) and aimed to filter and discard outlier drugs. The tier-2 analysis incorporated two cluster analyses performed in parallel using Ordering Points To Identify the Clustering Structure (OPTICS) and Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering (HAC). As a result, itidentified clusters of drugs with similar actions. In addition, we carried out a docking study for in-silico validation of top candidate drugs. RESULT: Our drug similarity model highlighted ten drugs, including reference drugs that can act as potential therapeutics against SARS-CoV-2. The docking results suggested that doxorubicin showed the least binding energy compared to reference drugs. Their practical utility as anti-SARS-CoV-2 drugs, either individually or in combination, warrants further investigation.

The Role of Oral Antivirals for COVID-19 Treatment in Shaping the Pandemic Landscape.

Several vaccines against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) were developed and made available in a record time, just over a year after the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) [...].

Beyond the Microbiome: Germ-ganism? An Integrative Idea for Microbial Existence, Organization, Growth, Pathogenicity, and Therapeutics.

The advances made by microbiome research call for new vocabulary and expansion of our thinking in microbiology. For example, the life-forms presenting in both unicellular and multicellular formats invite us to rethink microbial existence, organization, growth, pathogenicity, and therapeutics in the 21st century. A view of such populations as parts of single organisms with a loose, distributed multicellular organization, introduced here as a germ-ganism, rather than communities, might open up interesting prospects for diagnostics and therapeutics innovation. This study tested and further contextualized the concept of germ-ganism using solid cultures of bacteria and fungi. Based on our findings and the literature reviewed herein, we propose that germ-ganism has synergy with a systems medicine approach by broadening host-environment interactions from cells and microorganisms to a scale of biological ecosystems. Germ-ganism also brings about the possibility of studying the multilevel impacts of novel therapeutic agents within and across networks of microbial ecosystems. The germ-ganism would lend itself, in the long term, to a veritable biocybernetics system, while in the mid-term, we anticipate it will contribute to new diagnostics and therapeutics. Biosecurity applications would be immensely affected by germ-ganism. Industrial applications of germ-ganism are of interest as a more sustainable alternative to costly solutions such as tampered strains/microorganisms. In conclusion, germ-ganism is informed by lessons from microbiome research and invites rethinking microbial existence, organization, and growth as an organism. Germ-ganism has vast ramifications for understanding pathogenicity, and clinical, biosecurity, and biotechnology applications in the current historical moment of the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Horizon Scanning: Teaching Genomics and Personalized Medicine in the Digital Age.

Digital transformation is currently impacting not only health care but also education curricula for medicine and life sciences. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the deployment of digital technologies such as the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence in diverse fields of biomedicine. Genomics and related fields of inquiry such as pharmacogenomics and personalized medicine have been making important progress over the past decades. However, the genomics knowledge of health care professionals and other stakeholders in society is not commensurate with the current state of progress in these scientific fields. The rise of digital health offers unprecedented opportunities both for health care professionals and the general public to expand their genomics literacy and education. This expert review offers an analysis of the bottlenecks that affect and issues that need to be addressed to catalyze genomics and personalized medicine education in the digital era. In addition, we summarize and critically discuss the various educational and awareness opportunities that presently exist to catalyze the delivery of genomics knowledge in ways closely attuned to the emerging field of digital health.

Fast, Scalable, and Practical: An Alkaline DNA Extraction Pipeline for Emergency Microbiomics Biosurveillance.

Pandemics and environmental crises evident from the first two decades of the 21st century call for methods innovation in biosurveillance and early detection of risk signals in planetary ecosystems. In crises conditions, conventional methods in public health, biosecurity, and environmental surveillance do not work well. In addition, the standard laboratory amenities and procedures may become unavailable, irrelevant, or simply not feasible, for example, owing to disruptions in logistics and process supply chains. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a wakeup call in this sense to reintroduce point-of-need diagnostics with an eye to limited resource settings and biosurveillance solutions. We report here a methodology innovation, a fast, scalable, and alkaline DNA extraction pipeline for emergency microbiomics biosurveillance. We believe that the presented methodology is well poised for effective, resilient, and anticipatory responses to future pandemics and ecological crises while contributing to microbiome science and point-of-need diagnostics in nonelective emergency contexts. The alkaline DNA extraction pipeline can usefully expand the throughput in emergencies by deployment or to allow backup in case of instrumentation failure in vital facilities. The need for distributed public health genomics surveillance is increasingly evident in the 21st century. This study makes a contribution to these ends broadly, and for future pandemic preparedness in particular. We call for innovation in biosurveillance methods that remain important existentially on a planet under pressure from unchecked human growth and breach of the boundaries between human and nonhuman animal habitats.

Inaugural Pharmacogenomics Access and Reimbursement Symposium.

The Pharmacogenomics Access & Reimbursement Symposium, a landmark event presented by the Golden Helix Foundation and the Pharmacogenomics Access & Reimbursement Coalition, was a 1-day interactive meeting comprised of plenary keynotes from thought leaders across healthcare that focused on value-based strategies to improve patient access to personalized medicine. Stakeholders including patients, healthcare providers, industry, government agencies, payer organizations, health systems and health policy organizations convened to define opportunities to improve patient access to personalized medicine through best practices, successful reimbursement models, high quality economic evaluations and strategic alignment. Session topics included health technology assessment, health economics, health policy and value-based payment models and innovation.

Human genetic factors associated with susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 disease severity.

BACKGROUND: The emergence of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, in December 2019 marked the synchronization of the world to a peculiar clock that is counting infected cases and deaths instead of hours and minutes. The pandemic, highly transmissible severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has indeed caused considerable morbidity and mortality and drastically changed our everyday lives. As we continue to become acquainted with the seventh coronavirus known to infect our species, a number of its characteristics keep surprising us. Among those is the wide spectrum of clinical manifestations of the resulting coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which ranges from asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic infections to severe pneumonia, respiratory failure, and death. MAIN BODY: Data, now from patient populations, are beginning to accumulate on human genetic factors that may contribute to the observed diversified disease severity. Therefore, we deemed it prudent to review the associations between specific human genetic variants and clinical disease severity or susceptibility to infection that have been reported in the literature to date (at the time of writing this article in early August 2020 with updates in mid-September). With this work, we hope (i) to assist the fast-paced biomedical research efforts to combat the virus by critically summarizing current knowledge on the potential role of host genetics, and (ii) to help guide current genetics and genomics research towards candidate gene variants that warrant further investigation in larger studies. We found that determinants of differing severity of COVID-19 predominantly include components of the immune response to the virus, while determinants of differing susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 mostly entail genes related to the initial stages of infection (i.e., binding of the cell surface receptor and entry). CONCLUSION: Elucidating the genetic determinants of COVID-19 severity and susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection would allow for the stratification of individuals according to risk so that those at high risk would be prioritized for immunization, for example, if or when safe and effective vaccines are developed. Our enhanced understanding of the underlying biological mechanisms could also guide personalized therapeutics. Such knowledge is already beginning to provide clues that help explain, at least in part, current epidemiologic observations regarding the typically more severe or benign disease course in older males and children, respectively.