Search

There have been significant collaborative efforts over the past three years to develop therapies against COVID-19. During this journey, there has also been a lot of focus on understanding at-risk groups of patients who either have pre-existing conditions or have developed concomitant health conditions due to the impact of COVID-19 on the immune system. There was a high incidence of COVID-19-induced pulmonary fibrosis (PF) observed in patients. PF can cause significant morbidity and long-term disability and lead to death in the long run. Additionally, being a progressive disease, PF can also impact the patient for a long time after COVID infection and affect the overall quality of life. Although current therapies are being used as the mainstay for treating PF, there is no therapy specifically for COVID-induced PF. As observed in the treatment of other diseases, nanomedicine can show significant promise in overcoming the limitations of current anti-PF therapies. In this review, we summarize the efforts reported by various groups to develop nanomedicine therapeutics to treat COVID-induced PF. These therapies can potentially offer benefits in terms of targeted drug delivery to lungs, reduced toxicity, and ease of administration. Some of the nanotherapeutic approaches may provide benefits in terms of reduced immunogenicity owing to the tailored biological composition of the carrier as per the patient needs. In this review, we discuss cellular membrane-based nanodecoys, extracellular vesicles such as exosomes, and other nanoparticle-based approaches for potential treatment of COVID-induced PF.

In response to FDA's call for Quality by Design (QbD) in biopharmaceutical product development, the biopharmaceutical industry has been developing highly sensitive and specific technologies in the monitoring and controlling of product quality attributes for bioprocesses. We previously published the successful application of an off-line multi-attribute method (MAM) to monitor more than 20 critical quality attributes (CQA) with superior sensitivity for the upstream process. To further remove the hurdles of laborious process sampling and sample preparation associated with the offline method, we present here a fully integrated MAM based online platform for automated real time online process monitoring. This integrated system includes Modular Automated Sampling Technology (MAST) based aseptic sampling, multi-function Sequential Injection Analysis (SIA) sample preparation, UHPLC separation and high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) analysis. Continuous automated daily monitoring of a 17-day cell culture process was successfully demonstrated for a model monoclonal antibody (mAb) molecule with similar specificity and sensitivity as we reported earlier. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of an end-to-end automated online MAM system, which would allow the MAM to be applied to routine bioprocess monitoring, potentially replacing multiple conventional low resolution and low sensitivity off-line methods. The online HPLC or HPLC/MS platform could be easily adapted to support other processing steps such as downstream purification with minimal software re-configuration., (Copyright © 2021 American Pharmacists Association. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)