Treating those most severely affected by COVID-19 has necessarily taken priority during the pandemic. But could long COVID be the next wave of the crisis?

Among the key findings, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, are: Individuals who have asymptomatic or mild disease show a robust immune response early on during infection. Patients requiring admission to hospital have impaired immune responses and systemic inflammation (that is, chronic inflammation that may affect several organs) from the time of symptom onset. Persistent […]

For patients with the most severe forms of COVID-19, mechanical ventilation is often the only way to keep them alive, as doctors use anti-inflammatory therapies to treat their inflamed lungs. However, these patients are susceptible to further infections from bacteria and fungi that they may acquire while in hospital – so called ‘ventilator-associated pneumonia’. Now, […]

The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been hampered by the lack of effective antiviral drugs against SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease. Scientists had pinned hope on the drug remdesivir, originally developed to treat hepatitis C and subsequently tested against Ebola. However, results from large clinical trials have been inconclusive, and in early […]

2020 will be forever remembered for COVID-19. As the year draws to a close, Dr Estée Török looks back at how colleagues across the NHS and the research community worked tirelessly to fight back.

As HIV copies itself and replicates, it can develop errors, or ‘mutations’, in its genetic code (its RNA). While a drug may initially be able to suppress or even kill the virus, certain mutations can allow the virus to develop resistance to its effects. If a mutated strain begins to spread within a population, it […]

The additional investment will enable COG-UK to grow and strengthen current genomic surveillance efforts spearheaded by the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge, together with the four UK Public Health Agencies and other COG-UK partners, with the aim of increasing sequencing capacity across the national network and reducing turnaround time from patient sample […]

The brain is arguably the most important organ in the body, as it controls most other body systems and enables reasoning, intelligence, and emotion. Humans have evolved a variety of protective measures to prevent physical damage to the brain: it sits in a solid, bony case – the skull – and is wrapped in three […]

Enterococcus faecium is a bacterium commonly found in the gastrointestinal tract, where it usually resides without causing the host problems. However, in immunocompromised patients, it can lead to potentially life-threatening infection. Over the last three decades, strains have emerged that are resistant to frontline antibiotics including ampicillin and vancomycin, limiting treatment options – and particularly […]