Front Immunol
October 2024
New and emerging pathogens, such as SARS-CoV2 have highlighted the requirement for threat agnostic therapies. Some antibiotics or antivirals can demonstrate broad-spectrum activity against pathogens in the same family or genus but efficacy can quickly reduce due to their specific mechanism of action and for the ability of the disease causing agent to evolve. This has led to the generation of antimicrobial resistant strains, making infectious diseases more difficult to treat.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRapid and demonstrable inactivation of SARS-CoV-2 is crucial to ensure operator safety during high-throughput testing of clinical samples. The inactivation efficacy of SARS-CoV-2 was evaluated using commercially available lysis buffers from three viral RNA extraction kits used on two high-throughput (96-well) RNA extraction platforms (Qiagen QIAcube HT and the Thermo Fisher KingFisher Flex) in combination with thermal treatment. Buffer volumes and sample ratios were chosen for their optimised suitability for RNA extraction rather than inactivation efficacy and tested against a representative sample type: SARS-CoV-2 spiked into viral transport medium (VTM).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMycobacterium bovis BCG-vaccination in the guinea pig model of tuberculosis (TB) is sufficiently protective that candidate TB vaccines are judged against this. Little is understood about how the BCG vaccine works and, in the absence of a definitive correlate of protection, it is difficult to interpret the significance of novel vaccine induced host responses. Here an extended custom-made microarray (86 guinea pig genes) was used to dissect temporal changes in BCG-vaccine induced gene signatures to different mycobacterial antigens.
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