StemCell Therapy

Finding vaccines or drugs against COVID-19 is certainly one of the main current objectives of medical research centers worldwide. At Childrens National Medical Center, researchers are deploying technology tools from Amazon Web Services Inc. to combine hundreds of data sets to identify genes that might be targeted to treat many diseases, including COVID-19.

We know that there are a lot of drugs that target different genes,and we are particularly interested in, for example, can we repurpose some of these drugs to treatdifferent types of viruses, including COVID-19? said Wei Li (pictured), principal investigator at the Center for Genetic Medicine Research & Center for Cancer and Immunology Research at Childrens National Medical Center.

Li spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Medias livestreaming studio, during the AWS Public Sector Summit event. They discussed how the genome project can help combat COVID-19, as well as the role of AWS technology tools in scientific research. (* Disclosure below.)

The Childrens National Medical Center has been using computational biology and gene editing approaches to understand humangenome and disease, and it is particularly interested in a gene-editingtechnology called CRISPR screening, according to Li, who has a research background in computer science.

This is a fascinating technology because it tells you whether one of the 20,000human genes are connected with some certain disease phenotype in one single experiment, he said. We are tryingto, for example, perform machine-learning and data-mining approaches to find new clues of human diseasefrom the original mix and screening big data.

CRISPR screening and other similar screening methods have been widely used in recent years by several research laboratories to study virus infections, such as those related to HIV, Ebola, influenza and now coronavirus, according to Li. Then, the team at the Childrens National Medical Center had an idea: to connect all the sets of screening data related to these viruses to try to extract new information that cannot be identified in a single study.

Can we identify new patterns or new human genes that are commonly responsible for many different virus types? Or can we find some genes that work only from some certain type of viruses? he asked.

Researchers use AWS technology to process and analyze huge amount of data sets, in addition to creating an integrated database in the cloud, so that research results can be freely accessed around the world. It is estimated that AWS technology can reduce the time to process screening data from months to days, according to Li.

Two major benefits are expected from the outcome of this research project.

The first thing is that we hope to find some genes thatcan be potentially drug targets. So, if there are existing drugs that target the genes, then that would be perfect, because we dont need to do anything about this, he explained. And,in the end, we hope that these drugs can have the broad antiviral activity; that means that these drugs can be potentially used to treat COVID-19 and in the future if theres a new virus coming out.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLEs and theCUBEs coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Public Sector Summit Online event. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBEs event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Show your support for our mission with our one-click subscription to our YouTube channel (below). The more subscribers we have, the more YouTube will suggest relevant enterprise and emerging technology content to you. Thanks!

Support our mission: >>>>>> SUBSCRIBE NOW >>>>>> to our YouTube channel.

Wed also like to tell you about our mission and how you can help us fulfill it. SiliconANGLE Media Inc.s business model is based on the intrinsic value of the content, not advertising. Unlike many online publications, we dont have a paywall or run banner advertising, because we want to keep our journalism open, without influence or the need to chase traffic.The journalism, reporting and commentary onSiliconANGLE along with live, unscripted video from our Silicon Valley studio and globe-trotting video teams attheCUBE take a lot of hard work, time and money. Keeping the quality high requires the support of sponsors who are aligned with our vision of ad-free journalism content.

If you like the reporting, video interviews and other ad-free content here,please take a moment to check out a sample of the video content supported by our sponsors,tweet your support, and keep coming back toSiliconANGLE.

Original post:
Children's National Medical Center and AWS partner for genome project targeting COVID-19 - SiliconANGLE

This entry was posted on July 2, 2020 at 1:42 pm and is filed under Genetic medicine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |