IDRI – Cosmic Log

Institute looks into boosting COVID-19 vaccine

Peter Hotez and Maria Elena Bottazzi work in their lab at Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, where their research team developed a vaccine candidate that may be able to protect against COVID-19. (Baylor College of Medicine Photo)

Seattle’s Infectious Disease Research Institute is working with Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine to multiply the doses of a potential COVID-19 vaccine by 30 to 100 times. Other partners in the effort include Seattle-based PATH and Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development.

If the project proceeds as planned, Baylor and its partners could repurpose a vaccine candidate originally created to counter a different coronavirus-based disease known as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, to fight off COVID-19.

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Researchers will try cell therapy for COVID-19

LifeBank cell bank — Celularity’s subsidiary, LifebankUSA, maintains a repository of placental and cord blood, containing stem cells for potential therapeutic use. (LifebankUSA / Robert Hariri via Twitter)

Seattle’s Infectious Disease Research Institute and a New Jersey company called Celularity have been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration to start trials of an experimental cell-based therapy for COVID-19.

The immunotherapy treatment makes use of natural killer cells, or NK cells, which play a key role in the body’s natural defense against viral infections. Celularity’s NK cell product, known as CYNK-001, is derived from placental stem cells for treating viral diseases as well as some types of blood cancers and tumors.

CYNK-001 has been safely given to patients in early trials for treating leukemia and multiple myeloma. Now the FDA has given investigational new drug clearance for its use to be extended to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus outbreak.

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