When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, doctors and researchers rushed to find effective treatments. There was little time to spare. "Making new drugs takes forever," says Caroline Uhler, a computational biologist in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems and Society, and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Although clinical trial data are encouraging, real-world evidence with regard to the COVID-19 vaccine remains scarce. In particular, response to the vaccine among those previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 is still not completely understood.

Researchers from Bar-Ilan University and Ziv Medical Center now report preliminary evidence that people previously infected with the virus responded very strongly to one dose of the Pfizer vaccine, regardless of when they were infected and whether or not they had detectable antibodies against COVID-19 prior to receiving the vaccine.

Treating severe COVID-19 patients with the anticancer drug bevacizumab may reduce mortality and speed up recovery, according to a small clinical study in Italy and China that was led by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden between February and April 2020. On average, blood oxygen levels, body temperature and inflammatory markers significantly improved in patients treated with a single dose of bevacizumab in addition to standard care.

In a recurring pattern of evolution, SARS-CoV-2 evades immune responses by selectively deleting small bits of its genetic sequence, according to new research from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Since these deletions happen in a part of the sequence that encodes for the shape of the spike protein, the formerly neutralizing antibody can't grab hold of the virus, the researchers report today in Science.

Humoral and cellular adaptive immunity are two immune mechanisms that act against pathogens. Humoral immunity is mediated by antibodies, while cellular immunity does not involve antibodies and is, instead, facilitated by T cells. Studying how these immune mechanisms mediate SARS-CoV-2 infections could be beneficial in controlling the progression of the disease.

A study designed to study how the immune system impacts gut bacteria - has led to the extraordinary discovery of two molecules that can not only provide profound protection in experimental models of asthma but can also substantially reduce the severity of an attack.

Neither of these molecules, one of which is already commercially available as a dietary supplement, were previously known to have an effect on asthma - and they also appear, from animal studies, to have a role in treating the respiratory illness that is prevalent, and often fatal, in people with serious COVID-19.

In a Nature Reviews Endocrinology article authors from the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD) highlight the interconnection of obesity and impaired metabolic health with the severity of COVID-19. First, they provide information about the independent relationships of obesity, disproportionate fat distribution and impaired metabolic health with the severity of COVID-19.