When will this shit end?

[Ozanne]

17 minutes ago, steviewevie said:

It makes sense...if they want to have this test/trace thing up and running properly before they start sending kids back to school. It's not as if anyone can go on holiday this year anyway.

I agree but I’m not a parent so aren’t best places to comment. Have the holidays in June and then a longer Autumn terms?

[Toilet Duck]

2 hours ago, stuartbert two hats said:

The 64B$ question - how quickly do you expect this treatment to get through trials + manufacturing?  I.e. when can we start using it?

EDIT:  and how widespread could the use of said drugs be?

Ah it's still very early. It's a promising development, but will take a while. I'd expect it to be added to the arsenal of therapeutic options available to manage patients rather than something that is used for everyone who catches it. Even antibody drugs that are off patent are still expensive, not like generics for small molecules, though there are some that are standard of care for certain types of cancer and everyone gets them, so it's not unprecedented. 

[Waterdeep]

4 hours ago, Toilet Duck said:

Morning folks...latest update in CoV news...Excellent paper from a team at Peking University published a couple of days ago in Cell (for the non-scientists out there, if the New England Journal of Medicine is the pinnacle of Medical research, Cell is top dog for Biology). This one has been peer reviewed (since lack of this has been used as a stick for other studies!). What they have done is characterised neutralising antibodies from convalescing COVID patients. This used to take for ever and was not something that could be done during the early stages of a pandemic, but they have used the advances in single cell sequencing that have become more readily available over the last while to trawl through the bits of B cells that make antibodies and find those that target the virus. They found 14 directed against the ACE2 binding region of the virus, the best of which showed very strong activity in a mouse model (genetically engineered to express the human ACE2 receptor...not a natural model, but better than some other in vitro studies that used non-human cells with "ACE2-like" receptors). When the mice were treated with the antibodies, it reduced viral load by a massive amount. Not only that, but it worked prophylactically too (ie, given before the mice were exposed to the virus, it protected them from infection). They identified a number of antibodies, all directed against the same part of the virus, but to slightly different parts, meaning that combinations them would still kill the virus if the virus mutated bits of itself to avoids being killed by one of them. Early days, but convalescent plasma therapy has been shown to work (just not feasible to get the large amounts of plasma needed to treat everybody), and now that we know what the antibodies themselves look like, manufacturing synthetic ones is possible. The team have pushed this new antibody forward into a clinical trial already (we use antibody-based drugs for loads of diseases, so it's not a new approach, just the target is new this time). 

Would there be much risk of ADE with this do you think?

[Toilet Duck]

2 hours ago, gizmoman said:

Will probably be cheaper than making 8 billion vaccine shots which Bill Gates says is the only answer to this.

Some of the vaccine candidates are using pretty cool technology actually. Micro-needles, so they aren't a shot at all, they are a little patch that you stick on and the vaccine is delivered through the skin. Lots of work been done on this delivery method over the last while (nice if you don't like needles!). To compare the cost of a vaccine and an antibody-based drug, the flu shot costs about £20 a pop, Herceptin (a breast cancer antibody drug that is standard of care) is closer to £20,000 per course per patient. Using Herceptin and another antibody together for breast cancer patients with more advanced disease adds over £150,000 per patient to the cost of treatment...that's a lot of vaccine!

[Toilet Duck]

4 minutes ago, Waterdeep said:

Would there be much risk of ADE with this do you think?

Shouldn't be as the antibodies are neutralising antibodies (i.e., they bind to the bit of the virus that interacts with the ACE2 receptor and stops them from infecting cells). So, it's unlikely that it would make the virus more infectious. The investigators didn't see any of this in the study they did (of note, the Oxford vaccine trial that has its first paper under review also didn't see any evidence of disease enhancement after inoculation). 

[zahidf]

Ha ha ha ha

 

 

[zahidf]

Cummings pushed the early lockdown???

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-04-28/top-aide-to-u-k-s-johnson-pushed-scientists-to-back-lockdown?__twitter_impression=true

[steviewevie]

2 minutes ago, zahidf said:

Cummings pushed the early lockdown???

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-04-28/top-aide-to-u-k-s-johnson-pushed-scientists-to-back-lockdown?__twitter_impression=true

That was a few weeks ago...who knows what is true, Cummings could have briefed it directly or indirectly. But why was Cummings there anyway?

[efcfanwirral]

6 minutes ago, zahidf said:

Cummings pushed the early lockdown???

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-04-28/top-aide-to-u-k-s-johnson-pushed-scientists-to-back-lockdown?__twitter_impression=true

 

I can't believe I've just read an American article saying how the UK's response was anti scientific because they actually locked down. And that Dominic Cummings pushed for it, with the inference that he negatively influenced the scientists who wouldve advised we stay open otherwise (freedom yeah!) 

What an absolute basket case of a country they are. And we'll be aligning ourselves closer with them...

Edited May 19, 2020 by efcfanwirral

[Toilet Duck]

Good overview here of where the most advanced vaccines are in their development if anybody is interested...Hopefully more than one of them works!

[stuartbert two hats]

1 hour ago, Toilet Duck said:

Good overview here of where the most advanced vaccines are in their development if anybody is interested...Hopefully more than one of them works!

CureVac looks very promising:

Quote

Expected to start clinical testing in early summer; company says it could manufacture 10 million doses by that time.

 

[gizmoman]

2 hours ago, Toilet Duck said:

Some of the vaccine candidates are using pretty cool technology actually. Micro-needles, so they aren't a shot at all, they are a little patch that you stick on and the vaccine is delivered through the skin. Lots of work been done on this delivery method over the last while (nice if you don't like needles!). To compare the cost of a vaccine and an antibody-based drug, the flu shot costs about £20 a pop, Herceptin (a breast cancer antibody drug that is standard of care) is closer to £20,000 per course per patient. Using Herceptin and another antibody together for breast cancer patients with more advanced disease adds over £150,000 per patient to the cost of treatment...that's a lot of vaccine!

No wonder the NHS is always skint! Why are the costs so high? is it the true cost of production or are the drug companies making a killing because they have the patent?

[fred quimby]

5 minutes ago, gizmoman said:

No wonder the NHS is always skint! Why are the costs so high? is it the true cost of production or are the drug companies making a killing because they have the patent?

Probably a little bit of both. They also have to spend millions on all those trials of drugs that go nowhere and have to cover that. Sure there are other costs. Some do make a fortune though

[Deaf Nobby Burton]

Six Premier League players tested positive from three teams!

[zahidf]

3 minutes ago, Deaf Nobby Burton said:

Six Premier League players tested positive from three teams!

All 3 teams at the bottom of the table? Or Kyle Walker?....

[Ozanne]

22 minutes ago, Deaf Nobby Burton said:

Six Premier League players tested positive from three teams!

I wonder what this means for their plans, if anything. It’s just come about through their mass testing program so at least it’s not due to the virus being spread around training. 

[Toilet Duck]

28 minutes ago, gizmoman said:

No wonder the NHS is always skint! Why are the costs so high? is it the true cost of production or are the drug companies making a killing because they have the patent?

The first batch of the drug costs anything up to a billion quid, after that, the production costs go down massively (these are complex drugs though, even the copies of them that are made after the patent runs out can only be made by major Pharma/Biotech companies). Drug companies also insist that not only do they have to pay for the drugs that work, but also the ones that don't (and these still cost a lot of money, many get to phase 3 trials before they get binned due to not working properly, which is an expensive place to fail). There's a degree of truth in all this, but they also spend a fortune on marketing to get people to use their drugs. They also make a lot of money (some of the more rogue ones corner the market in certain drugs and then drive the price up, but that's another discussion entirely...those companies rarely do much if any R&D, they are just complete cowboys). Basically, the cost is whatever people are willing to pay for it. If it's too expensive, no-one will use it, so the health economics arms of different healthcare providers will negotiate with the drug company on price and then make it available for patients. 

[Crazyfool01]

3 minutes ago, Ozanne said:

I wonder what this means for their plans, if anything. It’s just come about through their mass testing program so at least it’s not due to the virus being spread around training. 

I would have thought thats the point of the testing now ... get all those players isolated ... all teams will have had a chance for injured players to recover during the enforced absence , hopefully they all recover and haven't been mixing with team mates outside so it doesnt become a massive issue with whole teams 

[Deaf Nobby Burton]

9 minutes ago, Ozanne said:

I wonder what this means for their plans, if anything. It’s just come about through their mass testing program so at least it’s not due to the virus being spread around training. 

I guess at this stage it won’t necessarily make a difference as they were only due back to training today, it also doesn’t actually specify if they were players, they could’ve been staff. Each club could test up to 40 people. Germany had a few positive tests not long ago before they resumed and it still didn’t stop them from going ahead. It makes you wonder though, in theory our case numbers should be close to the lowest levels now, and we’re also more or less still in lockdown. So if they’ve found 6 players now, then in a month/6 weeks when games could in theory be back up and running presumably more will be testing positive, that’s of course if further easing of lockdown does send cases back up though.

Another thought is that it’s interesting that they’ve tested pretty much all their players and staff and in that snapshot 1% have got the virus, presumably all asymptomatic as well as they’re all only self isolating for 7 days. Again given the low level of cases now, it does potentially suggest a lot of people have had it.

Edited May 19, 2020 by Deaf Nobby Burton

[Ozanne]

25 minutes ago, Deaf Nobby Burton said:

I guess at this stage it won’t necessarily make a difference as they were only due back to training today, it also doesn’t actually specify if they were players, they could’ve been staff. Each club could test up to 40 people. Germany had a few positive tests not long ago before they resumed and it still didn’t stop them from going ahead. It makes you wonder though, in theory our case numbers should be close to the lowest levels now, and we’re also more or less still in lockdown. So if they’ve found 6 players now, then in a month/6 weeks when games could in theory be back up and running presumably more will be testing positive, that’s of course if further easing of lockdown does send cases back up though.

Another thought is that it’s interesting that they’ve tested pretty much all their players and staff and in that snapshot 1% have got the virus, presumably all asymptomatic as well as they’re all only self isolating for 7 days. Again given the low level of cases now, it does potentially suggest a lot of people have had it.

Or it suggests lockdown has been very effective in meaning people aren’t as exposed to to the virus?

[Ozanne]

Very tense briefing today regarding the decision to pause trace and tracking of cases. The medical advisor to the MOD was getting more and more annoyed. 

[Crazyfool01]

How can they make up some test numbers  to hit that 200,000 target when they are barely hitting 100,000 .... I don’t think even they will manage to spin this 

[zahidf]

In london. Nature is healing.

[stuartbert two hats]

Why on earth was the penny farthing ever designed?  By all accounts it's terrible to ride, what made somebody think "I know, let's make one massive wheel and one tiny one", that'll be good!

I presume there was some engineering reason, based on current available technology, or maybe it was just someone being a bit daft?

[philipsteak]

8 minutes ago, stuartbert two hats said:

Why on earth was the penny farthing ever designed?  By all accounts it's terrible to ride, what made somebody think "I know, let's make one massive wheel and one tiny one", that'll be good!

I presume there was some engineering reason, based on current available technology, or maybe it was just someone being a bit daft?

one revolution of the pedals move you forwards the distance of one revolution of the (bigger) wheel 

Edited May 19, 2020 by philipsteak