Researchers investigated whether portable air filtration/UV sterilisation devices could reduce airborne SARS- CoV-2 in general wards that had been repurposed as a COVID ward and a COVID Intensive Care Unit (ICU) or ‘surge wards’.

The team installed a High Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) air filter/UV steriliser in two repurposed COVID-19 units. HEPA filters are made up of thousands of fibres knitted together to form a material that filters out particles above a certain size.

One ward managed patients who required simple oxygen treatment or no respiratory support; the second was a ICU managing patients who required ventilation either through non-invasive mask ventilation or invasive respiratory support, such as involving the use of an invasive tube and tracheostomy.

In the surge ward, during the first week prior to the air filter being activated, the researchers were able to detect SARS-CoV-2 on all sampling days. Once the air filter was switched on and run continuously, the team were unable to detect SARS-CoV-2 on any of the five testing days. They then switched off the machine and repeated the sampling – once again, they were able to detect SARS-CoV-2 on three of the five sampling days.

On the ICU, the team found limited evidence of airborne SARS-CoV-2 in the weeks when the machine was switched off and traces of the virus on one sampling day when the machine was active. Additionally, the air filters significantly reduced levels of bacterial, fungal and other viral bioaerosols on the both the surge ward and the ICU, highlighting an added benefit of the system.

This discovery could have implications for improving the safety of repurposed ‘surge wards’, the researchers say it also opens up the possibility of being able to set standards for cleaner air to reduce the risk of airborne transmission of infections.

This research was supported by the NIHR Cambridge BRC and led by doctors, scientists and engineers at Addenbrooke’s and the University of Cambridge in January 2021, at the height of the second wave of the pandemic.

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Researchers collected clinical and laboratory measures from 28 UK centres every 3 months over a total of 18 months to understand the progression of seropositive rheumatoid arthritis.

It was measured against the 28-joint Disease Activity Score with C-reactive protein (DAS28-CRP) and Simplified Disease Activity Index (SDAI).

Researchers found that collecting biological markers early after diagnosis could help manage the disease.

Read the full paper published in October 2021

A new approach to wake this latent virus and destroy it ‘kick and kill’ was the approach of researchers from Cambridge, Oxford and London. Cambridge developed a novel assay to detect whether the latent virus had been depleted, without which it would be difficult to validate any curative effect.

Clinicians, virologists, immunologists and molecular biologists ran a large clinical trial to try and eradicate HIV from infected patients.

The trial which lasted three years looked at 60 men recently diagnosed with HIV. All of them showed a good response to conventional therapy, however, the ‘kick and kill’ approach was not strong enough to reduce the amount of latent virus as measured by Cambridge researchers, and other, assays.

The study however has provided a benchmark from which to trial different combinations of therapies to tackle HIV and investigate new strategies to destroy dormant virus. Meanwhile patients continue to benefit from advances in suppressive therapy which, when successful is giving them a normal lifespan.

This was the question a mum of a daughter with the rare inflammatory bone disease CRMO asked rheumatologist Dr Jagtar Singh Nijjar at the Rare Disease Day evening lecture, which took place in 2017.

Two years on, Dr Nijjar gave a talk at the 2019 Rare Disease Day evening lecture, hosted by the NIHR BioResource and the Cambridge Rare Disease Network, about what followed from that chance meeting.

Listen to this edited transcript of his talk (3:13 mins). Click to listen to the full lecture.

One of the biggest challenges that doctors face in treating Crohn’s disease is that the behaviour of the disease can vary considerably between people, with some experiencing very aggressive disease and others having a much milder form. It was previously thought that the more variants people had, the more likely they would be to have a more aggressive form of Crohn’s disease, but Cambridge researchers have shown that this is not the case.

By comparing the genomes (the complete set of all the genes) of more than 2,700 people who have either mild or aggressive Crohn’s disease, the researchers showed that while there were variants that influenced prognosis, these were different from the variants that caused the disease to develop in the first place.

Finding that the genes involved in determining disease course differ from those that cause Crohn’s disease to develop has wide-ranging and important implications. It suggests, for example, that the best targets for new therapies might not be the pathways that have previously been thought to be important in Crohn’s disease, but rather new pathways in which the prognosis-associated genes are involved. This work – to better understand how these genes might alter prognosis – is ongoing and should provide better ways of treating Crohn’s disease in the future.

B-cells are a type of white blood cells that can produce harmful auto-antibodies which attack the body tissue. This can lead to conditions such as vasculitis, when the immune system attacks blood vessels and it can be serious in some people.

Cambridge researchers have looked at the effect of depletion of B cells with a drug called Rituximab.

Through pilot and controlled studies, researchers have looked at the long-term benefit of Rituximab and how this drug would suit patients with vasculitis. This has led to rituximab being accepted into the NHS commission guidance and national guidelines.