News briefs

Step towards local long COVID diagnostics

Researchers from Murdoch University’s Australian National Phenome Centre (ANPC) have developed a new diagnostic tool which may aid the diagnosis of debilitating symptoms of long COVID, which can include severe headaches, extreme exhaustion, heart palpitations and brain fog. Eighteen months ago, the researchers used multimillion dollar nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technology to identify new diagnostic molecular biomarkers that tell if someone has the disease, without the need to detect the disease itself. They then used this work to develop an inexpensive clinical NMR that general practitioners can use to detect vital blood markers to predict the long term effects of the conditions. The technology uses a specially designed set of radio pulses to extract signals from highly specific biomarker signals (from inflammatory glycoprotein markers and fats bound to lipoproteins) that gives a rapid diagnosis in approximately one minute. The findings were recently published in The Analyst. “We only discovered these signals about 18 months ago using a more expensive NMR instrument, but with some pulse sequence modifications, we are now able to get identical results on small machines that costs one‐tenth of the price,” Professor Jeremy Nicholson, Director of the ANPC said. “We think this technology (low field NMR spectroscopy) will probably have many other clinical applications in the future and may be of particular value in monitoring some of the residual effects of long COVID in individual patients.”

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2022/an/d2an01097f

RSV prevention in reach

Immunisation providing protection against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) could be just months away according to research published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. The study, by researchers from Telethon Kids Institute, UNSW Sydney and the University of Western Australia, has revealed a long‐lasting monoclonal antibody treatment for babies is likely to be accessible on the market within 12 months, followed closely by the approval of a maternal vaccine given in pregnancy to provide newborns with protection against the virus. Professor Peter Richmond, Head of the Vaccine Trials Group at the Wesfarmers Centre of Vaccines and Infectious Diseases and a paediatrician at Perth Children’s Hospital, said researchers were now completing the final stages of development for numerous preventive antibody treatments and RSV vaccines. “There are nine potential candidates in phase 3 clinical trials including two antibody immunisation treatments for prevention in babies and two maternal vaccines designed to be given to pregnant mothers,” said Professor Richmond. “We started our first phase 1 and 2 studies looking at RSV vaccines all the way back in 2000 and it has been a long journey to get to this point. In 2016 we began to see positive results for a phase 2 study looking at a monoclonal antibody treatment called niversimab. We recently completed phase 3 studies on niversimab here in Perth, and there have been positive results reported from the northern hemisphere pre‐COVID‐19, so it is expected to be licensed for use as the very first RSV prevention treatment in the USA/Europe by late 2022 or early 2023. [We have begun] a phase 3 study on the second potential antibody treatment, which hopes to provide long‐lasting protection for babies at highest risk of being hospitalised with RSV, including those born prematurely, or those with congenital heart disease or chronic lung disease,” said Professor Richmond.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473‐3099(22)00291‐2/fulltext#%20