Rockefeller University experts in infectious disease, immunology, biochemistry, structural biology, and genetics have begun over a dozen projects in recent weeks aimed at better understanding the biology of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is responsible for the current global COVID-19 pandemic...
With green light from the FDA, Rockefeller scientists started human trials this week for a new monoclonal antibody drug as a potential treatment for COVID-19. Monoclonal antibodies are mass-produced replicas of natural antibodies made by the immune system to fight viruses. Designed to prev...
In rare cases, people who have been fully vaccinated against COVID and are immune to the virus can nevertheless develop the disease. New findings from The Rockefeller University now suggest that these so-called breakthrough cases may be driven by rapid evolution of the virus, and that ongo...
...The dysregulation of the contact system is involved in COVID, sickle cell anemia, hereditary angioedema, inflammatory bowel disease, sepsis, lupus, arthritis, and even cancer metastasis,” she says.
...As part of an international study of genetic causes behind severe COVID-19 in young people, Casanova and collaborators have been enrolling these unusual cases since early March, when they were first reported by European doctors. Collaborating with the New York Genome Center and the stat...
...But at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, he diverted his expertise and applied the same methods to instead to see if they could crack the mystery of bats’ exceptional immunity to coronavirus. His group began by sequencing the genome of the horseshoe bat, thought to be the initial hos...
As the number of people who have fought off SARS-CoV-2 climbs ever higher, a critical question has grown in importance: How long will their immunity to the novel coronavirus last? A new Rockefeller study offers an encouraging answer, suggesting that those who recover from COVID-19 are prot...
With promising results from preclinical studies and with human trials now underway, Rockefeller has taken the next step with its novel COVID-19 treatment. The university has entered a licensing agreement with a global pharmaceutical company to advance development of a drug based on two mon...
More than 10 percent of people who develop severe COVID-19 have misguided antibodies that attack not the virus, but the immune system itself, new research shows. Another 3.5 percent, at least, carry a specific kind of genetic mutation. In both groups, the upshot is basically the same: The ...
...Research aimed to understand how COVID-19 wreaks havoc in the lungs, for example, has often been done with miscellaneous lung cancer cells that show crucial differences with the cells targeted by the virus. “There has been too much shifting ground for precise work,” says Ali H. Brivanlo...
...Casanova, along with Helen Su at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases are leading an international project, the COVID Human Genetic Effort, to comb through the genomes of many COVID-19 outliers in search of any rare gene variant that they may share, and that ...
In more ways than one, antibodies could be the key to alleviating the COVID-19 crisis. Hundreds of labs around the world are studying the antibodies people produce in response to SARS-CoV-2 infection in hopes of developing treatments, predicting the efficacy of vaccines, and understanding...
In the few weeks since New York City came to a socially distanced halt, more than 250 COVID-19 survivors have visited Rockefeller’s otherwise quiet campus to contribute their blood to science. Here, a group of immunologists, medical scientists, and virologists is betting that a cure for th...
As the world faces an impending wave of COVID cases due to Omicron, scientists are racing to assess vaccine efficacy against the new variant. In a new study, Rockefeller scientists report on their comprehensive analysis of Omicron’s resistance to antibodies, offering insights about the lev...
...This finding was particularly surprising because, until then, specific defects in cell intrinsic immunity had only been linked to a predisposition to some viral infections, from Covid to herpes to encephalitis. It had never been shown to play a role in bacterial disease. "This is the fi...
...The findings shed new light on how the immune system mounts a response against infections such as COVID and HIV. "Germinal centers are open structures that continuously receive B cells," says Michel C. Nussenzweig, the Zanvil A. Cohn and Ralph M. Steinman Professor at Rockefeller. "As t...
...COVID-19 among infectious diseases. Now, a new study in Nature Microbiology maps the methods by which Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) bacteria shrug off antibiotics, revealing hundreds of drug targets that could strip this pathogen of its notorious resis...
...Immunity in people who fought off COVID last year and later received mRNA vaccines is impressively broad,” says Paul Bieniasz, head of the Laboratory of Retrovirology at Rockefeller. “This tells us that although natural infection or the vaccines lead to immunity, they have in no way com...
According to new research, people who have had COVID enjoy strong immunity against the coronavirus for at least a year after they were initially infected. In analyzing antibodies present in the blood of COVID patients, Rockefeller scientists were able to track the evolution of these...
...In fact, some existing antivirals, as well as several new candidates under investigation specifically for COVID-19 act on RdRp—including remdesivir, which is currently being used in several countries for treatment of severe cases. These antiviral drugs try to lodge into nooks and cranni...
...Now, a study identifies a protein that blocks infection by SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, along with several other types. The protein, known as LY6E, stops the virus from fusing with host cells. Researchers in the lab of Rockefeller’s Charles M. Rice, along with colla...
COVID-19 dominated scientific research this past year, with good reason. When the worst pandemic of the century struck, scientists from all disciplines banded together to fend off a virus that will have claimed at least 1.6 million lives by the new year. But basic science did not come to a...
...The findings play into the larger body of Casanova’s work, which continues to demonstrate that the severity of influenza, tuberculosis, COVID-19, and other diseases, is not solely dependent on the pathogen itself, but on genetics of the host, too.
...Rice, is developing so-called monoclonal antibody treatments in which a potent antibody is identified and mass-produced to be used as medication for COVID-19. To better understand if such interventions will remain effective over time, they examined viral mutation patterns using a stand-...
...Increasingly, scientists have shown that genetics play a central role in determining whether the pathogens that cause a wide range of disease—including influenza, warts, and COVID-19—end up causing serious diseases. The lab of Jean-Laurent Casanova, which has spent 25 years studying the...
What if mathematicians could have seen COVID-19 coming, or could predict the next outbreak? Is it possible that numbers, manipulated by statistics, might warn of future market fluctuations and environmental disasters, or herald vast shifts in finance, trade, and employment? It’s hard to pr...
...Armed with the new data, scientists are now studying genes that render bats immune to COVID-19 and questioning long-standing conventions in basic science, such as whether there are meaningful differences between oxytocin and its receptors found in humans, birds, reptiles, and fish. All ...
...Altogether, this catalogue is a rich resource to for exploring new drug targets for COVID-19 and potential future coronavirus outbreaks.” Surprise protein The genome-wide study also revealed that coronaviruses rely on several proteins whose functions are not fully understood. Among them...
