ABSTRACT
Background: It is of vital importance to determine the safety of drugs. Pregnant women, as a special group, need to evaluate the effects of drugs on pregnant women as well as the fetus. The use of drugs during pregnancy may be subject to fetal toxicity, thus affecting the development of the fetus or even leading to stillbirth. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a toxicity rating for drugs used during pregnancy in 1979. These toxicity ratings are denoted by the letters A, B, C, D, and X. However, the query of drug pregnancy category has yet to be well established as electronic service. Results: Here, we presented PregTox, a publicly accessible resource for pregnancy category information of 1114 drugs. The PregTox database also included chemical structures, important physico-chemical properties, protein targets, and relevant signaling pathways. An advantage of the database is multiple search options which allow systematic analyses. In a case study, we demonstrated that a set of chemical descriptors could effectively discriminate high-risk drugs from others (area under ROC curve reached 0.81). Conclusions: PregTox can serve as a unique drug safety data source for drug development and pharmacological research.
Subject(s)
Drug-Related Side Effects and Adverse Reactions , Female , Fetus , Humans , Pharmaceutical Preparations , Pregnancy , Prenatal Care , StillbirthABSTRACT
The prevention of the COVID-19 pandemic is highly complicated by the prevalence of asymptomatic and recurrent infection. Many previous immunological studies have focused on symptomatic and convalescent patients, while the immune responses in asymptomatic patients and re-detectable positive cases remain unclear. Here we comprehensively analyzed the peripheral T-cell receptor (TCR) repertoire of 54 COVID-19 patients in different courses, including asymptomatic, symptomatic, convalescent, and re-detectable positive cases. We identified a set of V-J gene combinations characterizing the upward immune responses through asymptomatic and symptomatic courses. Furthermore, some of these V-J combinations could be awakened in the re-detectable positive cases, which may help predict the risk of recurrent infection. Therefore, TCR repertoire examination has the potential to strengthen the clinical surveillance and the immunotherapy development for COVID-19.
Subject(s)
COVID-19/pathology , Immunoglobulin J-Chains/genetics , Immunoglobulin Variable Region/genetics , Receptors, Antigen, T-Cell/genetics , SARS-CoV-2/immunology , T-Lymphocytes/immunology , Adaptive Immunity/genetics , Adaptive Immunity/immunology , Adult , Aged , Asymptomatic Infections , COVID-19/immunology , Female , Gene Expression/genetics , Histocompatibility Antigens Class I/genetics , Humans , Male , Middle Aged , Receptors, Antigen, T-Cell/immunology , Severity of Illness Index , Young AdultABSTRACT
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-2019) that emerged in Wuhan, China, has rapidly spread to many countries across all six WHO regions. However, its pathobiology remains incompletely understood and many efforts are underway to study it worldwide. To clarify its pathogenesis to some extent, it will inevitably require lots of COVID-2019-associated pathological autopsies. Pathologists from all over the world have raised concerns with pathological autopsy relating to COVID-2019. The issue of whether a person died from COVID-2019 infection or not is always an ambiguous problem in some cases, and ongoing epidemiology from China may shed light on it. This review retrospectively summarizes the research status of pathological autopsy for COVID-2019 deaths in China, which will be important for the cause of death, prevention, control and clinical strategies of COVID-2019. Moreover, it points out several challenges at autopsy. We believe pathological studies from China enable to correlate clinical symptoms and pathological features of COVID-2019 for doctors and provide an insight into COVID-2019 disease.