March SLAS Discovery Explores COVID-19 Drug Therapies Six Months Later

Oak Brook, IL (March 1, 2021) – The March edition of SLAS Discovery features the cover article, “Therapeutic and Vaccine Options for COVID-19: Status After 6 Months of the Disease Outbreak” by Christian Ogaugwu (Federal University Oye-Ekiti, Ekiti State, Nigeria), Dawid Maciorowski, Subba Rao Durvasula, Ph.D., Ravi Durvasula, M.D., and Adinarayana Kunamneni, Ph.D. (Loyola University Medical Center, Maywood, IL, USA).

This cover article focuses on the therapeutic and vaccine options available against the novel coronavirus, roughly six months after the outbreak; because the COVID-19-related death toll worldwide had reached 500,000 in six months (and ballooned to over 2,000,000 at the time of publishing) the importance of options to temper the disease cannot be overemphasized. The article highlights the available treatment alternatives for mild and serious active cases of COVID-19 infections and explores the vaccine options that should aid to confer immunity to vaccinated individuals. In addition to providing information on available options to tackle COVID-19, this article summarizes global efforts towards bringing an end to this pandemic. The authors have concluded a combinatorial therapy is to be designed with both immunizations, as well as small compounds. Other articles in this issue discuss repurposed therapies used for treatment of COVID-19 cases, as well as promising vaccines at different stages of clinical trials.

The March issue of SLAS Discovery includes nine articles of original research in addition to the cover article. 

Articles of Original Research include:

• CETSA MS Profiling for a Comparative Assessment of FDA-Approved Antivirals Repurposed for COVID-19 Therapy Identifies Trip13 as a Remdesivir Off-Target
• A Scalable Approach Reveals Functional Responses of iPSC Cardiomyocyte 3D Spheroids
• Assessment of Drug Proarrhythmic Potential in Electrically Paced Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell–Derived Ventricular Cardiomyocytes Using Multielectrode Array
• Major Improvements in Robustness and Efficiency during the Screening of Novel Enzyme Effectors by the 3-Point Kinetics Assay
• Optimization of a Colorimetric Assay to Determine Lactate Dehydrogenase B Activity Using Design of Experiments
• AlphaScreen Identifies MSUT2 Inhibitors for Tauopathy-Targeting Therapeutic Discovery
• Leveraging Automation toward Development of a High-Throughput Gene Expression Profiling Platform
• Quantitative Automated Assays in Living Cells to Screen for Inhibitors of Hemichannel Function
• A “Target Class” Screen to Identify Activators of Two-Pore Domain Potassium (K2P) Channels
• Development of a Cell-Based Assay for Identifying KCa3.1 Inhibitors Using Intestinal Epithelial Cell Lines
• Characterizations of the Urate Transporter, GLUT9, and Its Potent Inhibitors by Patch-Clamp Technique

Other articles include:

• Therapeutic and Vaccine Options for COVID-19: Status after Six Months of the Disease Outbreak
• Saporin, a Polynucleotide–Adenosine Nucleosidase, May Be an Efficacious Therapeutic Agent for SARS-CoV-2 Infection
• COMPARE Analysis: A Bioinformatic Approach to Accelerate Drug Repurposing against COVID-19 and Other Emerging Epidemics
• Parallel All-Optical Assay to Study Use-Dependent Functioning of Voltage-Gated Ion Channels in a Miniaturized Format

Access to March’s SLAS Discovery issue is available at https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/jbxb/26/3. For more information about SLAS and its journals, visit www.slas.org/publications. Access a “behind the scenes” look at the latest issue with SLAS Discovery Author Insights podcast. Tune in by visiting https://www.buzzsprout.com/1099559.

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SLAS (Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening) is an international professional society of academic, industry and government life sciences researchers and the developers and providers of laboratory automation technology. The SLAS mission is to bring together researchers in academia, industry and government to advance life sciences discovery and technology via education, knowledge exchange and global community building.

SLAS Discovery: Advancing the Science of Drug Discovery, 2019 Impact Factor 2.195. Editor-in-Chief Robert M. Campbell, Ph.D., Twentyeight-Seven Therapeutics, Boston, MA (USA).

SLAS Technology: Translating Life Sciences Innovation, 2019 Impact Factor 2.174. Editor-in-Chief Edward Kai-Hua Chow, Ph.D., National University of Singapore (Singapore).

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