Medicine & Health

School of Medicine researchers are investigating whether a drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat rare diseases of an overactive immune system could help critically ill patients hospitalized with COVID-19.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have created a COVID-19 vaccine candidate from a replicating virus. This experimental vaccine has proven effective at preventing pneumonia in mice.

New research from Washington University School of Medicine suggests that the immune systems of seriously ill COVID-19 patients can’t do enough to protect them from the virus. The researchers propose that boosting the activity of immune cells may be a good treatment strategy for COVID-19.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine and the Saint Louis University Center for Vaccine Development have joined the effort to find a COVID-19 vaccine that can prevent the illness. Researchers at the universities expect to enroll about 3,000 participants in several COVID-19 vaccine trials.

To help efforts to find drugs and vaccines for COVID-19, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine developed a hybrid virus that will enable more scientists to enter the fight against the pandemic. The researchers genetically modified a mild virus.

A new study from Washington University School of Medicine has found that mice infected with Chikungunya virus get less sick and are less likely to transmit the virus to mosquitoes if they have healthy gut microbiomes.

A team of wildlife biologists and infectious disease experts, including some at the School of Medicine, propose in an article published in Science a decentralized, global wildlife biosurveillance system to identify animal viruses that have the potential to cause human disease – before the next pandemic emerges.

Parasitologist L. David Sibley at the School of Medicine is leading an international effort to find drugs to cure toxoplasmosis, a parasitic disease characterized by vision problems and brain complications.

An experimental drug for a rare, inherited form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) has shown promise in a phase 1/phase 2 clinical trial conducted at Washington University School of Medicine and other sites.

The School of Medicine’s Jennifer A. Philips, MD, PhD, has set up a screening platform to test compounds for activity against the COVID-19 virus. Her lab has screened dozens of compounds and is prepared to accept more suggestions of promising candidate molecules.