
New insights into “bradykinin storms” suggest potential therapies for Covid-19 - MindGods
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/computing/hardware/has-the-summit-supercomputer-cracked-the-covid-code
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ljf
Very interesting reading this and comparing to my wife's experience (5 months
since she had covid for less than two weeks - not a terrible case of it, and
was up and about towards the end of the 2 weeks even heading out for walks.
Very quickly after that she went down hill and been terribly ill ever since).

Many of the symptoms they described match her journey. Her latest diagnosis
from a cardiologist is PoTS - but it could well be the bradykinin issues
causing very similar symptoms. Interestingly many people on her groups who
have been as ill or iller than her, have made almost spontaneous recoveries. I
hope she recovers soon.

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coldcode
Sometimes with enough data and powerful enough computers you can brute force
ideas that otherwise might take forever to examine. If you can identify the
reasons why certain symptoms appear, you can begin to format potential
solutions faster. In programming terms once you understand why something is
broken, it's much easier to fix.

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zaroth
These are two very cool findings about the genetic mechanisms which might be
at work provoking specific lethal symptoms that are pretty unique to COVID.

This is such a great use of the world’s second fastest supercomputer and a
fascinating discovery achieved through genetic data mining!

It might be the coolest thing you read today and even if it doesn’t
immediately lead to a treatment breakthrough, it’s at least heartening to know
our world’s best resources are being deployed in this fashion.

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gregoronio
Grateful for anyone that studies this but there has been so much false hope in
the past six months that I came to ignore all these findings.

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tremon
What kind of hope were you holding if I may ask, that it's been crushed that
many times already? My government (NL) has always been very clear that a
vaccine would not be expected until late 2020/early 2021 at the earliest, and
that we would have to cope until then.

Also, we haven't been treating the disease yet. We have gotten better at
managing/alleviating the symptoms and relying on the body's own immune system
to clear the infection. If this discovery allows for a more targeted treatment
of the infection itself rather than its symptoms, it's actually very good
news. But even then, it's going to take months before we can validate the
efficacy of such a treatment.

~~~
paganel
> What kind of hope were you holding if I may ask, that it's been crushed that
> many times already?

Not the OP but the expectations were that in 6 months' time we would have
gotten better at treating at least "some" of the disease. No-one knowledgeable
enough expected a vaccine by this autumn but some people were hoping for a
greatly increased standard of covid care in August 2020 compared to February
2020.

Re: the vaccine thing, I don't think that's logistically possible to give the
vaccine to billions of people in less than a year (even a 50% covid
vaccination rate for our species would mean administering 3.5-4 billion
vaccines), so 2022 at the earliest looks like our best bet (hoping that we'd
actually have the vaccine by early 2021). Looking at past vaccination
campaigns I personally think that even a 3-5 year timeframe looks optimistic,
but that's just me.

~~~
randallsquared
March or April compared to now seem to indicate we _do_ have a greatly
increased standard of care, resulting in a much higher infections per death
ratio.

~~~
uw_rob
This isn't necessarily true - there is a implied assumption that the
infections are still following the same distribution among people with
different risk factors, but that isn't necessarily the case.

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sradman
The original paper _A mechanistic model and therapeutic interventions for
COVID-19 involving a RAS-mediated bradykinin storm_ [1]:

> ...our results indicate that the pathology of COVID-19 is likely the result
> of Bradykinin Storms rather than cytokine storms (although given the
> induction of IL2 by BK, the two may be intricately linked).

> Several interventional points (most of them already FDA-approved
> pharmaceuticals) could be explored with the goal of increasing ACE,
> decreasing BK, or blocking BK2 receptors (Table 1).

[1]
[https://elifesciences.org/articles/59177](https://elifesciences.org/articles/59177)

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wombatmobile
“We have to get this message out,” Jacobson said. “We have started to be
contacted by people. But … clinical partners and funding agencies who will
hopefully support this work is the next step that needs to happen.”

Yes! Clinical trials are required to isolate bradykinin dysregulation as a
primary cause of COVID-19 morbidity. If that happens, the good news is that
drug therapies already exist, which means the death toll from the virus could
be cut dramatically in a short time.

It's bizarre that the chief scientist for computational systems biology at a
prestigious government research facility such as Oak Ridge National Labs
doesn't already have connections to facilitate clinical trials in advance.

This is the true cost of the crony capitalism that has seen sham treatments
such as hydroxychloroquine dominate clinical opportunities and administrative
bandwidth of the pandemic response.

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pvaldes
With ebola was standard the use of blood transfusions from people that
developped antibodies against it. This path is not being explored here, and
sometimes I wonder why. We have plenty of people that recovered

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blacksmith_tb
It is happening, on quite a large scale too, e.g. [1]

1: [https://www.redcrossblood.org/donate-blood/dlp/plasma-
donati...](https://www.redcrossblood.org/donate-blood/dlp/plasma-donations-
from-recovered-covid-19-patients.html)

~~~
pvaldes
Looks like a good idea, but It seems that neither Europe nor the official
healthcare US system is adopting or giving a lot of credit to that.

So maybe is basically a PR and blood donor campaign from the american
redcross, a charity managing several private hospitals.

I had seen several strange measures adopted with the excuse of COVID. From
ozone machines to, for example, the university requiring than students for the
next year tie their hair when in the faculties. I can't see any relationship
between having long hair and having COVID...

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roenxi
We're well past the time when good ideas were needed. Our biggest problems at
the moment are proving ideas up and logistics.

I have a fairly rosy outlook; we're starting to enter the phase of this where
the scientists will have useful observations to make. One of my reasonable
worst-case scenarios for the next 12 months is someone develops a $5 5 minute
coronavirus test and central health agencies don't notice/delay the
rollout/start throwing out arbitrary sensitivity & specificity threshold
roadblocks so the pandemic continues for stupid reasons.

~~~
elric
It looks like this isn't going away any time soon. Good ideas may not make a
difference in the short term (though with medications already approved for
other uses, maybe this one will), but they might reduce the burden of this
disease in the medium-long term.

As for the testing, I would be thrilled if there were home covid-19 tests that
were as fast and reliable as home pregnancy tests. Spit/pee/whatever on a
stick, wait a couple of minutes, get a result. But I don't think anyone is
working on something like this, and I suspect it's not as easy as it sounds.

~~~
T-A
[https://www.colorado.edu/today/2020/07/22/new-
covid-19-test-...](https://www.colorado.edu/today/2020/07/22/new-
covid-19-test-returns-results-45-minutes-without-nasal-swab)

~~~
elric
45 minutes is pretty good. People might be able to integrate that into their
morning routine (assuming it's cheap enough and easy enough to use). Wake up.
Spit. Eat. Get dressed. Check results before heading out.

