Thank to the use of the UISS Immune System Simulator developed by the team of the VPHi member Prof Pappalardo (University of Catania) a disease model of SARS-CoV-2 has been implemented and used to explore the efficacy of human monoclonal antibodies.
A pre-print of the article that will be published in the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics has just been released. The article, written by Giulia Russo, Marzio Pennisi, Marco Viceconti and Francesco Pappalardo, presents how the application of in silico trials can be used for designing and testing medicines against SARS-CoV-2 and speed-up the vaccine discovery pipeline.
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Abstract
"SARS-CoV-2 is a severe respiratory infection that infects humans. Its outburst entitled it as a pandemic emergence. To get a grip on this outbreak, specific preventive and therapeutic interventions are urgently needed. It must be said that, until now, there are no existing vaccines for coronaviruses. To promptly and rapidly respond to pandemic events, the application of in silico trials can be used for designing and testing medicines against SARS-CoV-2 and speed-up the vaccine discovery pipeline, predicting any therapeutic failure and minimizing undesired effects. In this article, we present an in silico platform that showed to be in very good agreement with the latest literature in predicting SARS- CoV-2 dynamics and related immune system host response. Moreover, it has been used to predict the outcome of one of the latest suggested approach to design an effective vaccine, based on monoclonal antibody. Universal Immune System Simulator (UISS) in silico platform is potentially ready to be used as an in silico trial platform to predict the outcome of vaccination strategy against SARS-CoV-2."
The pre-print is available at this link
