Volume 26 Issue 9, September 2020

Africa’s health-research landscape has been steadily growing, but the COVID-19 pandemic might accelerate the continent’s research-capacity building.

Being a parent scientist can feel like a catch-22, feeling guilty for both the time spent away from the children and the time spent away from the bench. Embracing healthy boundaries can be liberating but will only go so far if childcare remains unaffordable.

A patient partner provides perspectives on the development of the SPIRIT-AI and CONSORT-AI guidelines.

With only a limited number of clinical trials of artificial intelligence in medicine thus far, the first guidelines for protocols and reporting arrive at an opportune time. Better protocol design, along with consistent and complete data presentation, will greatly facilitate interpretation and validation of these trials, and will help the field to move forward.

Here we present the MI-CLAIM checklist, a tool intended to improve transparent reporting of AI algorithms in medicine.

Familiar concepts from research ethics can guide the meaningful and rigorous translation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools into clinical practice.

Many widely used health algorithms have been shown to encode and reinforce racial health inequities, prioritizing the needs of white patients over those of patients of color. Because automated systems are becoming so crucial to access to health, researchers in the field of artificial intelligence must become actively anti-racist. Here we list some concrete steps to enable anti-racist practices in medical research and practice.

In the current COVID-19 pandemic, many researchers are applying to research ethics committees for deferred-consent procedures for protocols that aim either to test treatments or to obtain tissue or samples from research participants. However, the deferred-consent procedure has not been developed for pandemics. In this Comment, we interpret existing guidance documents and argue when and under which conditions deferred consent can be considered ethically acceptable in a pandemic.

In a study of 96,476 participants from the UK Biobank cohort who had their physical activity objectively measured by accelerometer, both the volume of physical activity and its intensity were associated with risk of mortality.

Modeling the impact of COVID-19-mitigation strategies on malarial case management and prevention by health services in sub-Saharan Africa predicts 81,000 additional deaths in Nigeria and 769,000 in sub-Saharan Africa in 2020.

Vaccines directed against SARS-CoV-2 have been administered to healthy volunteers and have been shown to stimulate a brisk humoral and cellular immune response. All vaccines were generally well tolerated with mostly mild to moderate local and systemic reactions.

A strategy for assessing the effectiveness of different strategies for HIV cure is presented.

The CONSORT-AI and SPIRIT-AI extensions improve the transparency of clinical trial design and trial protocol reporting for artificial intelligence interventions.

The CONSORT-AI and SPIRIT-AI extensions improve the transparency of clinical trial design and trial protocol reporting for artificial intelligence interventions.

Integration of large datasets of familial whole-exome sequencing, neurodevelopmental gene expression, electronic health records and healthcare claims led to the identification of a subtype of autism spectrum disorder that is associated with lipid dysregulation.

The randomized-controlled trial ADVICE4U demonstrates non-inferiority of an automated AI-based decision support system compared with advice from expert physicians for optimal insulin dosing in youths with type 1 diabetes.

Analysis of UK Biobank participants with wearable physical activity monitors demonstrates that high-volume physical activity and high-intensity activity are associated with reduced mortality.

Whole-exome sequencing is not sensitive or specific enough to replace the gold standard of tandem mass spectrometry screening of rare inborn errors of metabolism, but can help to reduce false positives and facilitate the timely resolution of ambiguous cases.

The combination of nearly real-time genome sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 in infected patients during the first 10 weeks of COVID-19 containment in Australia and epidemiological modeling is helping in understanding the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic and potentially guiding public health decisions.

The combination of near to real-time whole-genome sequence analysis and epidemiology resulted in reliable assessments of the extent of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the community, facilitating early decision-making to control local transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in the Netherlands.

Transmission dynamics models of COVID-19 and malaria reveal how different scenarios of COVID-19 spread and varying levels of interruption to antimalarial programs could result in increased deaths in sub-Saharan Africa.

A new study that models the COVID-19 epidemic in France suggests that although a second peak is likely unavoidable, maintaining social distancing and wearing masks when lockdown restrictions are lifted, as well as continuing to shelter vulnerable individuals, will reduce mortality and avoid overwhelming ICU facilities.

A platform for rapid antibody discovery enabled the isolation of hundreds of human monoclonal antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 and the prioritization of potent antibody candidates for clinical trials in patients with COVID-19.

In a cohort of recovered patients with COVID-19, virus spike-specific antibodies were consistently elicited, but neutralizing activity was highly variable and inversely correlated with the proportion of CCR6⁺CXCR3⁻ spike-specific circulating follicular helper T cells.

Culturable Mycobacterium tuberculosis can be detected in cough aerosol from a high proportion of individuals infected with drug-resistant M. tuberculosis and correlate with a strong cough and low symptom score, indicating the need to focus on targeted interventions.

An antisense oligonucleotide induces exon skipping in cell lines derived from patients with CLN3 Batten disease, and reduces lysosomal impairment and ameliorates neurological phenotypes in a mouse model of the disease.

By reprogramming innate immune cells to an immunosuppressive phenotype, myocardial infarction accelerates breast cancer progression in mice, and the clinical relevance of these findings was demonstrated in individuals with early-stage breast cancer who experienced cardiovascular events after cancer diagnosis.

A phase 1 dose-escalating trial evaluating CD70 inhibition in combination with hypomethylating therapy results in the elimination of leukemia stem cells and achieves clinical activity in untreated patients with acute myeloid leukemia.

In a phase II clinical trial of patients with classical Hodgkin lymphoma, peripheral CD4⁺ T cell receptor diversity and the abundance of mature natural killer cells and CD3⁻CD68⁺CD4⁺GrB⁺ innate cells were associated with favorable responses to anti-PD-1 monotherapy.

Multimodal single-cell profiling reveals heterogeneity of colonic CD8⁺ T cells in patients with ulcerative colitis, including expansion of a chronically activated IL-26-expressing subpopulation with innate-like features.