The drug screens prompted by the SARS and MERS outbreaks have been useful for quickly identifying drug candidates. But in terms of their epidemiology, “SARS and MERS were different from this coronavirus,” Allison McGeer explained at a Feb. 3 webinar by Evercore ISI.

At this very early point in the emerging 2019-nCoV outbreak, knowledge about the virus is insufficient to predict what shape that outbreak will ultimately take. But knowledge about the virus is accumulating at remarkable speed, and experience with other viruses is helping to shape the response to the newest coronavirus threat. 2019-nCoV, sometimes called Wuhan coronavirus after its source, is the third coronavirus after SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV with the potential to cause serious illness and death that has emerged since the beginning of the 21st century.

BEIJING – The current speed of new developments in the 2019-nCov outbreak is illustrated by a Jan. 28, 2020, press conference in Munich, where Andreas Zapf, head of the infection task force in the Bavarian ministry for health and food safety, briefed reporters on the first confirmed German case.

BioWorld looks at translational medicine, including: Adapting NGS for coronavirus surveillance; Long QT genes mostly short on evidence; Reservoir dogs don’t hunt; Another reason to get a flu shot; Cerebrospinal fluid is early culprit in stroke edema; Different drivers can turn the wheel in glioblastoma’s vicious cycle; From African genomes, big insights with small sample size; Commercial antibodies underwhelm for studies of PP2A; Tau keeps gliomas in check.

BEIJING – The current speed of new developments in the 2019-nCov outbreak is illustrated by a Jan. 28, 2020, press conference in Munich, where Andreas Zapf, head of the infection task force in the Bavarian ministry for health and food safety, briefed reporters on the first confirmed German case.

When developmental neurobiologist Arnold Kriegstein talks about his work, it sounds for all the world like he is talking about the brains of teenagers. They are stressed. Their identity is mixed up. But putting them in a good environment is helpful to their development. Kriegstein, though, was describing brain organoids.