COVID19 Clinical Trials in Baltimore, MD

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has resulted in catastrophic infections and fatalities across the nation. Many older Veterans with comorbidities are especially vulnerable to complications and poor recovery. This award will investigate the effect of a novel, home-based, supervised, group exercise tele-rehabilitation in Veterans recovered from COVID-19 on cardiopulmonary and physical function. Read Less

This research study seeks to establish the effectiveness of a combination of an inhaled corticosteroid and a beta agonist compared to placebo for the prevention of acute respiratory failure (ARF) in hospitalized patients with pneumonia and hypoxemia. Read Less

Emergency study to test the safety of Descartes-30 cells in patients with moderate-to-severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) AND COVID-19 Read Less

This study consists of two parts. Part A (Phase I): A Phase I Double-blind Randomized Placebo-controlled Study in Healthy Subjects to Assess the Safety, Pharmacokinetics, Pharmacodynamics of MRG-001 Part B (Phase 2): A Phase IIa, Adaptive, Double-Blind, Randomized, Placebo-controlled, Multi-center Study in Hospitalized Patients Infected with Severe and Critical SARS-CoV-2 to Assess the Safety, Pharmacokinetics, Pharmacodynamics and Efficacy of MRG-001 Read Less

In this study Investigators propose to administer clazakizumab to patients with life-threatening COVID-19 infection manifest by pulmonary failure and a clinical picture consistent with a cytokine storm syndrome. This is a single-center randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial in which 30 patients will be enrolled and randomly assigned in a 1:1 ratio to two study arms that will receive clazakizumab at a dose of 25 mg or placebo. Read Less

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic presents a great challenge to global health. The first case was identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, China and since has infected nearly 100 million people and claimed almost 2 million lives worldwide. In response, the medical community and scientists have worked hard to develop effective therapies and guidelines to treat a wide range of symptoms including the use of the antiviral drug remdesivir, convalescent plasma, antibiotics, steroids, and anticoagulant therapy. To prevent the spread of the disease, multiple vaccines based on mRNA and DNA technologies that include inactivated viral components have been developed and millions of doses are currently being administered worldwide. Early analysis of data from the phase III Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccine trials suggested the vaccine was more than 90% effective in preventing the illness with a good safety profile (Polack et al., 2020). However, there are still many unknowns regarding the long-term safety of these newer vaccine technologies and the level and duration of immunogenicity. SARS-CoV-2 infection results in seroconversion and production of anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. The antibodies may suppress viral replication through neutralization but might also participate in COVID-19 pathogenesis through a process termed antibody-dependent enhancement (Lu et al., 2020). Rapid progress has been made in the research of antibody response and therapy in COVID-19 patients, including characterization of the clinical features of antibody responses in different populations infected by SARS-CoV-2, treatment of COVID-19 patients with convalescent plasma and intravenous immunoglobin products, isolation and characterization of a large panel of monoclonal neutralizing antibodies and early clinical testing, as well as clinical results from several COVID-19 vaccine candidates. In this study, we plan to assess the effic of both vaccines on the healthcare workers. As healthcare workers begin to receive their first vaccination dosage, we will start looking for traces of antibodies within the blood and saliva. The data provided will help us determine the efficacy of the vaccine over a period of 1 year, identify any difference in efficacy amongst different populations (gender, age, and ethnicities) differences among vaccine types, demographics and follow-up on any potential side effects. We will collaborate with Nirmidas Biotech Inc. based in Palto Alto, California, a Stanford University spinoff on this project. Nirmidas Biotech. Inc is a young diagnostic company that have received several FDA EUA tests for COVID-19. We will perform IgG/IgM antibody detection by the NIRMIDAS MidaSpot™ COVID-19 Antibody Combo Detection Kit approved by FDA EUA for POC testing in our hospital site for qualitative antibody testing. We will then send dry blood spot and saliva to Nirmidas for the pGOLD™ COVID-19 High Accuracy IgG/IgM Assay to quantify antibody levels and avidity, both of which are important to immunity. The pGOLD assay is a novel nanotechnology assay platform capable of quantifying antibody levels and binding affinity to viruses. We collaborated recently with Nirmidas on this platform and published a joint paper in Nature Biomedical Engineering on COVID-19 Ab pGOLD assay (Liu et al., 2020). It is also capable of detecting antibodies in saliva samples and could offer a non-invasive approach to assessing antibody response for vaccination. Read Less