First report of COVID-19 reinfection in a patient with beta thalassemia major

Epidemiological Surveillance of SARSCov2 in β-Thalassemia Patients in the Last Two Years: Reinfection Rate, Insights and Future Challenges

Background: Although the association between comorbidities and the severity of COVID-19 infection has been extensively discussed, data on COVID-19 and hemoglobinopathies are still limited. SARS-Cov2 reinfections with severe acute respiratory syndrome have been described in the general population, usually with a milder outcome compared to the primary infection. The aim of our study was to determine the rate of reinfection and clinical features in a population of β-thalassemia patients. Results: Following the first infection, patients showed an adequate humoral immune response, however, all four patients are considered immune impaired owing to chronic transfusional support coupled with iron chelating treatment and splenectomy in three of the four.  

Platforms for Personalized Polytherapeutics Discovery in COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic entered its third and most intense to date wave of infections in November 2020. This perspective article describes how combination therapies (polytherapeutics) are a needed focus for helping battle the severity of complications from SARS-CoV-2 infection. It outlines the types of systems that are needed for fast and efficient combinatorial assessment of therapeutic candidates. Proposed are micro-physiological systems using human iPSC as a format for tissue-specific modeling of infection, the use of gene-humanized zebrafish and C. elegans for combinatorial drug screens due to the animals being addressable in liquid multi-well formats, and the use of engineered pseudo-typing systems to safely model infection in the transgenic animals and engineered tissue systems.