MERS Vaccine Candidate Offers Promise, but Questions Remain

MERS Vaccine Candidate Offers Promise, but Questions Remain

Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), a novel human virus that emerged in 2012, has caused significant respiratory disease and kindled fears of a SARS-like epidemic traversing the world (Hilgenfeld and Peiris, 2013). While lacking the rapid human-to-human spread seen with its SARS-CoV cousin, the outbreak of MERS-CoV has continued in the Middle East over the past three years ...

Clozapine is gold standard, but questions remain.

In their recent publication, Frogley and colleagues have reviewed the evidence indicating that clozapine treatment reduces aggressive behaviour in patients with schizophrenia, and perhaps with other disorders as well (Frogley et al. 2012). Although randomized controlled trials testing this anti-aggressive effect are relatively scarce, the evidence based on many studies supports it. There is gen...

Evaluation of candidate vaccine approaches for MERS-CoV

The emergence of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) as a cause of severe respiratory disease highlights the need for effective approaches to CoV vaccine development. Efforts focused solely on the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the viral Spike (S) glycoprotein may not optimize neutralizing antibody (NAb) responses. Here we show that immunogens based on full-length S DNA an...

Cotinine conundrum--a step forward but questions remain.

There is widespread agreement that self-reported smoking quantity, though a convenient and simple measure, is an imprecise assessment of exposure to tobacco smoke and that measuring serum cotinine levels in cigarette smokers provides a more objective estimate of current smoking behavior. Initial genome-wide association studies (1–3) suggested that single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) spanning...

Early T lineage progenitors: new insights, but old questions remain.