Pandemic Drugs at Pandemic Speed: Infrastructure for Accelerating COVID-19 Drug Discovery with Hybrid Machine Learning- and Physics-based Simulations on High Performance Computers

The race to meet the challenges of the global pandemic has served as a reminder that the existing drug discovery process is expensive, inefficient and slow. There is a major bottleneck screening the vast number of potential small molecules to shortlist lead compounds for antiviral drug development. New opportunities to accelerate drug discovery lie at the interface between machine learning methods, in this case, developed for linear accelerators, and physics-based methods. The two in silico methods, each have their own advantages and limitations which, interestingly, complement each other. Here, we present an innovative infrastructural development that combines both approaches to accelerate drug discovery. The scale of the potential resulting workflow is such that it is dependent on supercomputing to achieve extremely high throughput. We have demonstrated the viability of this workflow for the study of inhibitors for four COVID-19 target proteins and our ability to perform the required large-scale calculations to identify lead antiviral compounds through repurposing on a variety of supercomputers

Global reporting of cases of COVID-19 in psoriasis and atopic dermatitis: an opportunity to inform care during a pandemic.

We wish to bring your attention to the PsoPROTECT (Psoriasis Patient Registry for Outcomes, Therapy and Epidemiology of Covid-19 infecTion) and SECURE-AD (Surveillance Epidemiology of Coronavirus Under Research Exclusion-Atopic Dermatitis) registries; two urgent global initiatives that address an unmet need for delineating the determinants of COVID-19 outcomes in the common cutaneous immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (IMIDs) psoriasis and atopic dermatitis

Prevalence and Clinical Relevance of IgE Sensitization to Profilin in Childhood: A Multicenter Study

BACKGROUND: Little is known about the prevalence and clinical relevance of hypersensitivity to the plant panallergen profilin in children. OBJECTIVES: The present study aimed to investigate prevalence, risk factors and clinical relevance of profilin sensitization in a large cohort of Italian children of different ages living in different geographic areas. METHODS: Children with pollen allergy enrolled by 16 pediatric outpatient clinics sited in three main geographic areas of Italy were studied. SPT were carried out with commercial pollen extracts and a commercial purified date palm pollen profilin. IgE specific for allergenic pollen molecules, Phl p 12 (grass profilin) and Pru p 3 (peach lipid transfer protein) were tested by ImmunoCAP FEIA. RESULTS: IgE to Phl p 12 (≥0.35 kU/l) was observed in 296 of the 1,271 participants (23%), including 17 of the 108 (16%) preschool children. Profilin SPT was positive (≥3 mm) in 320/1,271 (25%) participants. The two diagnostic methods were concordant in 1,151 (91%, p < 0.0001) cases. Phl p 12 IgE prevalence declined from northern to southern Italy and was directly associated with IgE to Phl p 1 and/or Phl p 5 and Ole e 1. Among children with IgE to Phl p 12, OAS was provoked by kiwi, melon, watermelon, banana, apricot and cucumber. CONCLUSIONS: Profilin sensitization is very frequent among pollen-allergic children, occurs at a very young age and contributes to the development of childhood OAS with a typical pattern of offending foods. Pediatricians should always consider IgE sensitization to profilin while examining pollen-allergic children, even if they are at preschool age