Background In December 2019, a series of pneumonia cases of unknown cause emerged in Wuhan, Hubei, China. In this study, we investigate the clinical and laboratory features and short-term outcomes of patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Methods All patients with COVID-19 admitted to Wuhan University Zhongnan Hospital in Wuhan, China, between 3 January and 1 February 2020 were included. All those patients were with laboratory-confirmed infections. Epidemiological, clinical, and radiological characteristics; underlying diseases; laboratory tests; treatments; complications; and outcomes data were collected. Outcomes were followed up at discharge until 15 February 2020. Results The study cohort included 102 adult patients. The median age was 54 years (interquartile ranger, 37–67 years), and 48.0% were female. A total of 34 patients (33.3%) were exposed to a source of transmission in the hospital setting (as health-care workers, patients, or visitors) and 10 patients (9.8%) had a familial cluster. There were 18 patients (17.6%) who were admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU), and 17 patients died (mortality, 16.7%; 95% confidence interval, 9.4–23.9%). Those patients who survived were younger, were more likely to be health-care workers, and were less likely to suffer from comorbidities. They were also less likely to suffer from complications. There was no difference in drug treatment rates between the survival and nonsurvival groups. Those patients who survived were less likely to require admission to the ICU (14.1% vs 35.3% of those admitted). Chest imaging examinations showed that patients who died were more likely to have ground-glass opacity (41.2% vs 12.9% in survivors). Conclusions The mortality rate was high among the COVID-19 patients described in our cohort who met our criteria for inclusion in this analysis. The patient characteristics seen more frequently in those who died were the development of systemic complications following onset of the illness and a severity of disease requiring admission to the ICU. Our data support those described by others indicating that COVID-19 infection results from human-to-human transmission, including familial clustering of cases, and from nosocomial transmission. There were no differences in mortality among those who did or did not receive antimicrobial or glucocorticoid drug treatments.

The outbreak of 2019 coronavirus disease has been a challenge for hospital laboratories because of the huge number of samples that must be tested for the presence of the causative pathogen, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Simple and rapid immunodiagnostic methods are urgently needed to identify positive cases. Here we report the development of a rapid and sensitive lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA) that uses lanthanide-doped polysterene nanoparticles (LNPs) to detect anti-SARV-CoV-2 IgG in human serum. A recombinant nucleocapsid phosphoprotein of SARS-CoV-2 was dispensed onto a nitrocellulose membrane to capture specific IgG. Mouse anti-human IgG antibody was labeled with self-assembled LNPs that served as a fluorescent reporter. A 100-μL aliquot of serum samples (1:1000 dilution) was used for this assay and the whole detection process took 10 min. The results of the validation experiment met the requirements for clinical diagnostic reagents. A value of 0.0666 was defined as the cutoff value by assaying 51 normal samples. We tested 7 samples that were positive by reversetranscription (RT-)PCR and 12 that were negative but clinically suspicious for the presence of anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG. One of the negative samples was determined to be SARS-CoV-2 IgG positive, while the results for the other samples were consistent with those obtained by RT-PCR. Thus, this assay can achieve rapid and sensitive detection of anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG in human serum and allow positive identification in suspicious cases; it can also be useful for monitoring the progression COVID-19 and evaluating patients' response to treatment.

CircRNAs are a class of endogenous RNA that regulates gene expression at the post-transcriptional or transcriptionallevel through interacting with other molecules or microRNAs. Increasing studies have demonstrated that circRNAs play a crucial role in biology processes. CircRNAs are proved as potentialbiomarkers in many diseases including cancers. However, the role of Cdr1as in Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) remains to be elucidated. We demonstrated that Cdr1as expression was upregulated in HCC tissues compared with the adjacent non-tumor tissues. In addtion, miR-7 expression was downregulated in HCC tissues compared with the adjacent non-tumor tissues. Moreover, the expression level of miR-7 was inversely correlated with that in HCC tissues. Knockdown of Cdr1as suppressed the HCC cell proliferation and invasion. Overexpression of miR-7 inhibited the HCC cell proliferation and invasion. Overexpression of miR-7 could suppress the direct target gene CCNE1 and PIK3CD expression. Knockdown of Cdr1as suppressed the expression of miR-7 and also inhibited the CCNE1 and PIK3CD expression. Furthermore, knockdown of Cdr1as suppressed the HCC cell proliferation and invasion through targeting miR-7. These data suggested that Cdr1as acted as an oncogene partly through targeting miR-7 in HCC.

The RV144 vaccine trial implicated epitopes in the C1 region of gp120 (A32-like epitopes) as targets of potentially protective antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity (ADCC) responses. A32-like epitopes are highly immunogenic, as infected or vaccinated individuals frequently produce antibodies specific for these determinants. Antibody titers, as measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) against these epitopes, however, do not consistently correlate with protection. Here, we report crystal structures of CD4-stabilized gp120 cores complexed with the Fab fragments of two nonneutralizing, A32-like monoclonal antibodies (MAbs), N5-i5 and 2.