Editor's Note The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on June 10 released a COVID-19 update announcing the following actions taken in its response to the pandemic: The FDA and National Institutes of Health have updated the CURE ID crowd-sourcing app to make it easier for healthcare providers to share their…

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Editor's Note The Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) have both retracted COVID-19 treatment studies because of concerns about the validity of the data and how the research was conducted by Chicago-based Surgisphere Corp, the June 4 Medscape Medical News reports. Authors of the Lancet study, which was…

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Editor's Note The fatality rate in the US for those infected with SARS-CoV-2 who show symptoms is 1.3%, this study from the University of Washington finds. To build county-by-county models, the researchers used publicly reported national COVID-19 data for 116 counties in 33 states. A rate variable was constructed by…

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Editor's Note In this study, researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston demonstrated that six candidate DNA vaccines induced neutralizing antibody responses and protected against SARS-CoV-2 in rhesus monkeys. For the study, researchers immunized 25 adult rhesus monkeys with the investigational vaccines, and 10 animals received a sham…

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Editor's Note An international study will include more than 30,000 front-line healthcare workers to assess whether chloroquine can prevent COVID-19 or decrease its severity. Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis is the clinical coordinating center for the study. Healthcare workers will be divided randomly into four groups. Three…

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Editor's Note The National Institutes of Health (NIH) on May 14 announced that it is enrolling adults with mild to moderate COVID-19 in a study of treatment with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. The Phase 2b trial is enrolling around 2,000 adults across the US. Participants must have confirmed infection with SARS-CoV-2…

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Editor's Note The University of Kentucky (UK) announced May 11 that researchers have begun antibody testing that will help to understand what immunity to COVID-19 really means. Several research labs within the UK College of Medicine and Pharmacy will be testing antibodies of recovered COVID-19 patients to see how long…

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Editor's Note This study from Stanford University tests five methods for disinfecting N95 masks and finds that heating them preserves their filtration efficiency for 50 cycles of disinfection. In the study, instead of analyzing N95 masks, which were needed by healthcare workers, the researchers examined pieces of the fabric used…

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Editor's Note Researchers at Northwestern University in Chicago are using artificial intelligence (AI) to expedite the search for COVID-19 treatments and vaccines by shortening the expert review period. The AI tool prioritizes research that has the most potential to produce real solutions and ignores research that is unlikely to yield…

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Editor's Note Cornell University researchers studying the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 virus have found a unique feature that could explain why it is so transmissible between humans. The researchers identified a structural loop in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (ie, the area of the virus that facilitates entry into a cell)…

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