The team, led by Dr Andreu Palou, is collaborating with the University Hospitals of Son Espases and Son Llàtzer. It is also working on agreement for a technology user licence with a multinational firm in the coming days to design vaccines for COVID-19
The Nutrigenomics Group at the University of the Balearic Islands is undertaking a collaboration with the university hospitals of Son Espases and Son Llàtzer to find new treatments for COVID-19 based on drugs already approved by health authorities to treat other diseases.
The researchers will study the effects of different authorised drugs on the expression of candidate marker genes involved in the spread of the virus through a system developed by the team led by Dr Andreu Palou, director of the Molecular Biology, Nutrition and Biotechnology Laboratory. This system is based on using peripheral blood cells, which are easy to obtain. They will also study the effects of the drugs and combinations thereof on COVID-19 sufferers, on those candidate marker genes in blood cells and their link to patient characteristics and progress.
The aim is to connect the information of healthy people and isolated cells to the response of patients at different stages of COVID-19 infection in order to determine how the effect of drugs can be predicted based on the expression of these candidate marker genes. The advantage of this connection lies in the fact that multiple combinations and doses can be tested on the cells, with the most effective being selected and contrasted with the expression of candidate marker genes in treated patients and their evolution. In this way, new treatment strategies can be designed.
If this research attains initial potentially useful results around three months after starting, the study may be expanded.
In addition to the researchers from the UIB Nutrigenomics Group, which also includes the IdISBa (Health Research Institute Foundation of the Balearic Islands) and CIBEROBN (Physiopathology of Obesity and Nutrition Networking Biomedical Research Centre), the project also includes clinical researchers from the university hospitals of Son Espases and Son Llàtzer. Moreover, Alimentómica SL, a UIB technology spin-off, is also collaborating through identifying the genomes in the samples.
Speeding up the marketing of a useful technology
The UIB Nutrigenomics Group is currently working on speeding up and agreeing on a user licence from a multinational firm for technology that would be useful in researching COVID-19.
Over the last twenty years, the team led by Dr Andreu Palou has developed experimental models based on the use of ferrets (Mustela putorius furo) to study biochemical mechanisms related to human health. These models have already been successfully used by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the US to research flu vaccines. In addition, the ferrets have been used to study other viral respiratory infections and there has been recent research showing them to be suitable in speeding up vaccine designs.
The tools designed and tested by the UIB Nutrigenomics Group, including transcriptomics where available, may be highly useful for applied research groups focusing on vaccine production for animal and human viruses, which likely include SARS-CoV-2, responsible for the COVID-19 virus.
Publication date: Fri Apr 03 09:42:00 CEST 2020
