Medical Genetics Commons^™

Lower Sars-Cov-2 Seroprevalence Among Cancer Patients In Sub-Saharan Africa, For Yue Tso, Salum J. Lidenge, John R. Ngowi, Phoebe B. Peña, Ashley A. Clegg, Owen Ngalamika, Chacha J. Mwita, Julius Mwaiselage, Charles Wood

School of Medicine Faculty Publications

Background: Despite the high COVID-19 morbidity and mortality rates across the world, the reported rates in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), which has a higher burden of other infectious diseases and overwhelmed healthcare systems, remain relatively low. This study aims to better understand the potential factors that contribute to this phenomenon, especially among cancer patients who are considered as a high-risk group for developing severe COVID-19. Methods: Plasma samples collected during the COVID-19 pandemic from SARS-CoV-2 unvaccinated cancer and potential blood donor populations were analyzed for SARS-CoV-2 (spike and nucleocapsid proteins) antibodies by an immunofluorescence assay. The relationships between SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalences and …

Landscape Of Molecular Crosstalk Perturbation Between Lung Cancer And Covid-19, Aditi Kuchi, Jiande Wu, Jyotsna Fuloria, Chindo Hicks

School of Medicine Faculty Publications

Background: Lung cancer patients have the worst outcomes when affected by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The molecular mechanisms underlying the association between lung cancer and COVID-19 remain unknown. The objective of this investigation was to determine whether there is crosstalk in molecular perturbation between COVID-19 and lung cancer, and to identify a molecular signature, molecular networks and signaling pathways shared by the two diseases. Methods: We analyzed publicly available gene expression data from 52 severely affected COVID-19 human lung samples, 594 lung tumor samples and 54 normal disease-free lung samples. We performed network and pathways analysis to identify molecular networks …

Sars-Cov-2 Early Infection Signature Identified Potential Key Infection Mechanisms And Drug Targets, Yue Li, Ashley Duche, Michael R. Sayer, Don Roosan, Farid G. Khalafalla, Rennolds S. Ostrom, Jennifer Totonchy, Moom Roosan

Pharmacy Faculty Articles and Research

Background

The ongoing COVID-19 outbreak has caused devastating mortality and posed a significant threat to public health worldwide. Despite the severity of this illness and 2.3 million worldwide deaths, the disease mechanism is mostly unknown. Previous studies that characterized differential gene expression due to SARS-CoV-2 infection lacked robust validation. Although vaccines are now available, effective treatment options are still out of reach.

Results

To characterize the transcriptional activity of SARS-CoV-2 infection, a gene signature consisting of 25 genes was generated using a publicly available RNA-Sequencing (RNA-Seq) dataset of cultured cells infected with SARS-CoV-2. The signature estimated infection level accurately in …

A Novel Methodology To Identify The Primary Topics Contained Within The Covid-19 Research Corpus, Allen Crane, Brock Freidrich, William Fehlman, Igor Frolow, Daniel W. Engels

SMU Data Science Review

In this paper, we present a novel framework and system for the identification of primary research topics from within a corpus of related publications, the classification of individual publications according to these topics, and the results of the application of our framework and system to the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19). CORD-19 is a corpus of published peer reviewed and pre-peer reviewed articles related to the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Using machine learning techniques, such as Non-negative Matrix Factorization for Natural Language Processing and a Bayesian classifier, we developed a novel framework and system that automatically extracts sparse and meaningful …

Prospects For Rnai Therapy Of Covid-19, Hasan Uludağ, Kylie Parent, Hamidreza Montazeri Aliabadi, Azita Haddadi

Pharmacy Faculty Articles and Research

COVID-19 caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a fast emerging disease with deadly consequences. The pulmonary system and lungs in particular are most prone to damage caused by the SARS-CoV-2 infection, which leaves a destructive footprint in the lung tissue, making it incapable of conducting its respiratory functions and resulting in severe acute respiratory disease and loss of life. There were no drug treatments or vaccines approved for SARS-CoV-2 at the onset of pandemic, necessitating an urgent need to develop effective therapeutics. To this end, the innate RNA interference (RNAi) mechanism can be employed to develop front line therapies against …