The 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has spread globally, while the routes of transmission of this virus are still controversial. We enrolled 33 patients, without any ocular manifestation, with their ocular surface swabs collected for virus detection. RNA was detected strong positive in samples of both eyes from two patients. Therefore, SARS-CoV-2 may exist in the normal ocular surface of COVID-19 patients, suggesting that this virus might be spread through conjunctival contact.

Most solid tumors are comprised of multiple clones that express orthogonal antigens, suggesting that novel strategies must be developed in order to adapt chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies to treat heterogeneous solid tumors.

Because the most reliable therapy for cancer involves quantitative resection of all diseased tissue, considerable effort has been devoted to improving a surgeon's ability to locate and remove all malignant lesions. With the aid of improved optical imaging equipment, we and others have focused on developing tumor-targeted fluorescent dyes to selectively illuminate cancer nodules during surgery. We describe here the design, synthesis, optical properties, in vitro and in vivo tumor specificity/ affinity, pharmacokinetics, preclinical toxicology, and some clinical application of a folate receptor (FR)-targeted NIR dye (OTL38) that concentrates specifically in cancer tissues and clears rapidly from healthy tissues. We demonstrate that OTL38 binds FR-expressing cells with ∼1 nM affinity and eliminates from receptor negative tissues with a half-time of <30 min. We further show that OTL38 enables visualization of malignant lesions at concentrations less than 100-fold those required to elicit signs of toxicity. Since OTL38 also provides excellent tumor contrast in both murine tumor models and human cancer patients, we conclude that OTL38 constitutes an excellent NIR dye for fluorescence-guided resection of malignant lesions in cancer patients.

Starting from December 2019, a novel coronavirus, named 2019-nCoV, was found to cause Severe Acute Respiratory (SARI) symptoms and rapid pandemic in China.With the hope to identify candidate drugs for 2019-nCoV, we adopted a computational approach to screen for available commercial medicines which may function as inhibitors for the M pro of 2019-nCoV. Up to 10 commercial medicines that may form hydrogen bounds to key residues within the binding pocket of 2019-nCoV M pro were identified, which may have higher mutation tolerance than lopinavir/ritonavir and may also function as inhibitors for other coronaviruses with similar M pro binding sites and pocket structures. Coronaviruses, members of the family Coronaviridae and subfamilyCoronavirinae, are enveloped positive-stranded RNA viruses which have spikes of glycoproteins projecting from their viral envelopes, thus exhibit a corona or halo-like appearance (Masters and Perlman, 2013; Cui et al., 2019) Coronaviruses are the causal pathogens for a wide spectrum of respiratory and gastrointestinal diseases in both wild and domestic animals, including birds, pigs, rodents, etc (Dhama et al., 2014). Previous studies have found that six strains of coronaviruses are capable to infect human, author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.