Hemorrhagic Fever, Crimean

Integral Molecular, a company that develops vaccines and therapeutics, announced a five-year $8 million contract from the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The funding will be used to support the company's continuing research into emerging viruses recognized as potential pandemic threats. This marks the fourth similar contract awarded to the company in 15 years. Prior contracts allowed responses to virus outbreaks such as SARS-CoV-2, Zika, Ebola, dengue and chikungunya. Integral Molecular will utilize its mapping platform to pinpoint antibody binding sites (epitopes) on viruses, characterizing immune responses to viral threats. According to the company, this type of information can help scientists design effective vaccines. Additionally, Integral Molecular's Reporter Virus Particles (RVPs) is expected to play a vital role in the research. In a statement, the company said the non-replicative virus particles allow safe and high-throughput neutralization studies of highly pathogenic viruses with the use of standard laboratory facilities, and RVPs empower researchers to quickly develop vaccines and therapeutics. The NIAID contract will allow Integral Molecular to expand its research on potential pandemic threats, including Rift Valley Fever, Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever and Enterovirus D68 viruses. "We are grateful to NIAID for their continued support and trust in our capabilities," Benjamin Doranz, CEO of Integral Molecular, said in a statement. "Viral threats can emerge quickly and with little warning. This contract enables us to contribute to pandemic preparedness by focusing on understudied viruses identified as potential threats, using our technologies to make virology research more accessible to laboratories around the world." THE LARGER TREND In June, Integral Molecular, received ISO 9001 certification for the quality systems and processes used in their virology offerings. In April, Integral Molecular launched its Virus Neutralization Assay Services, which permitted researchers to rapidly obtain high-quality data to advance their vaccines and therapeutic antibodies. Neutralization Assay Services allow diverse applications including neutralization profiling for antibodies targeting viral proteins. That same month, researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), developed an artificial intelligence tool that predicts whether a patient will respond to cancer-treatment drugs using individual tumor cells, according to a study published in Nature Cancer. Conventional approaches to drug-patient matching center on bulk sequencing of tumor DNA and RNA. The new AI approach, PERCEPTION, takes advantage of single-cell RNA sequencing, which provides better-resolution data to fine-tune predicted drug responses. In 2022, Ro, a direct-to-patient care company, secured an agreement with the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to develop the Registry for Equal Access to Clinical Trials in Alzheimer's Disease (REACT-AD). Ro will employ its telehealth platform to screen and recruit patients who are at a heightened risk for developing Alzheimer's disease or other related dementia to join REACT-AD for potential participation in NIA-conducted and funded clinical trials. The NIA, part of the NIH, was charged with analyzing the data received and supervising the publication of research findings that emanate from REACT-AD.

Recipients of the funding include Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina, Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Washington University in St. Louis, among others. With COVID-19 still spreading and mpox emerging as a public health emergency of international concern, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is upping preparations for future pandemics.The Research and Development of Vaccines and Monoclonal Antibodies for Pandemic Preparedness network (ReVAMPP) will research pathogens that currently lack effective treatments and vaccines, with the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) committing up to $100 million per year to the effort so long as funds are available, the agency announced Sept. 13.“In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases, the need for robust pandemic preparedness is evident,” NIAID Director Jeanne M. Marrazzo, M.D., said in the release. “The ReVAMPP network will enable researchers to fill key knowledge gaps and identify strategies to develop safe and effective medical countermeasures for targeted virus families before the need becomes critical.” The U.S. has long faced criticism over its pandemic preparedness, both before, during and after COVID-19’s first appearance and spread.ReVAMPP will focus on virus families with known troublemakers, the NIH said, including the families that include dengue and yellow fever, measles, polio and chikungunya. The agency says that focusing on representative pathogens known to cause human disease will enable knowledge to be built that can be transferred to related pathogens. Developing new antibodies and vaccines for these diseases, the agency said in the release, will allow the global health community to respond quickly if a new pandemic threat spawns.Recipients of the funding include the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina, the Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Washington University in St. Louis, among others.Albert Einstein’s project is called Prepositioning Optimized Strategies for Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics against Diverse Emerging Infectious Threats (PROVIDENT), and the college will receive $70 million over five years from NIAID, according to a Sept. 13 release. HDT Bio, a biotech focused on RNA vaccines, announced Sept. 17 that it will be joining Albert Einstein’s project, netting $2 million per year to create “road maps” for new RNA-based vaccines of potential pandemic pathogens. "It is currently unknown if the state-of-the-art approaches used to design vaccine antigens for traditional vaccine technologies can simply be co-opted for use in RNA vaccine technologies," Jesse Erasmus, Ph.D., director of virology at HDT Bio, said in the company’s release. "HDT Bio will address this unknown while generating prototype vaccine candidates for 8 different viruses across 3 virus families of pandemic potential, collaborating with other member institutions of PROVIDENT.”HDT Bio is headquartered in Seattle and has numerous vaccines for viral diseases in its pipeline, including for COVID-19, Crimean–Congo hemorrhagic fever and Nipah virus.The Research Triangle Institute will serve the ReVAMPP network as a centralized Coordination and Data Sharing Center, the NIH said in its release.

Researchers have identified how the tick-borne Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus enters our cells. The results are an important step in the development of drugs against the deadly disease. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet, in collaboration with JLP Health and others, have identified how the tick-borne Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus enters our cells. The results are published in Nature Microbiology and are an important step in the development of drugs against the deadly disease. Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus (CCHF virus) is spread through tick bites and can cause haemorrhagic fever. The disease is serious and has a mortality rate of up to 40 per cent depending on the health status of the person infected. Common symptoms include fever, muscle pain, abdominal pain, joint pain, vomiting and haemorrhaging that can cause organ failure. The disease has spread to Europe The virus is present in around 40 countries, including Central Asia, the Middle East and parts of Africa. In recent years, the disease has spread to new geographical areas as a result of climate change, including Spain and France. The tick species that can spread the disease has also been observed in Germany and Sweden. There are currently no effective treatments for the disease. In a new study, researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and others have found that the virus enters our cells via a protein on the cell surface, the so-called LDL receptors that regulate blood cholesterol levels. To identify the protein, the researchers used human mini-organs grown in test tubes and an advanced stem cell library from JLP Health. The same platform has previously been used to identify how the Ebola virus enters cells. The results were also confirmed in tests on mice, which showed that mice lacking the LDL receptor did not get as sick as others. Researchers want to trick the virus The discovery is an important step towards developing drugs for Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever, according to Ali Mirazimi, adjunct professor at the Department of Laboratory Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, and one of the researchers behind the study. "Once we know which receptor the virus uses, we can produce the receptor in test tubes and administer it as a drug," he says. "Then we can trick the virus into binding to those receptors instead of to the cells and thus stop the virus from spreading in our bodies." This knowledge is essential if the disease were to become more common and spread to new areas. Normally it takes many years to develop a drug, but the COVID-19 pandemic and the development of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine showed that it can be done much faster if everyone decides it is a priority. Ticks are spread by migratory birds "This is an important step in our preparedness for the disease," says Ali Mirazimi. "Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever is a disease we would rather not have. The ticks are spread by migratory birds and have already been found in Sweden. If the disease starts appearing in more places, we may already have a drug that we can take into clinical trials." The research was conducted in collaboration with the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, Germany, the National Institutes of Health, USA, and the company JLP Health. It was financed mainly by the Swedish Research Council and the EU. No conflicts of interest have been reported.