SARS is like AIDS, it's a phenotypic description of symptoms. SARS = Severe Accute Respriatory Syndrome. Covid was another example of "holy shit, this shit is crazy" ie 'Severe and Accute'. But covid wasn't the same as the first SARS. So it's just "SARS2". But they are different. The SARS virus creates the SARS symptoms. Covid also creates SARS symptoms, but it's not the SARS virus so you gotta call it something different. So we call it SARS2, but media got confused and heard it called covid-1 (Corona virus (CoV) ID 2019) and ran with it. But it's just another corona virus creating SARS symptoms. SARS2. Both corona viruses though, so similar enough with enough conserved mechanisms that what works for one might(?) work for the other.
But you don't know unless you try. Validating an existing approach that works for one coronavirus to demonstrate it works on the other virus is important.
An assay is just a fixed, routine experiment designed to generate similar repeatable results. Like running an alamar blue assay to return drug toxicity, or a custom assay designed to evaluate drug efficacy by surrogate (entry inhibition, binding inhibition, assembly inhibition, etc). What's important is validating that the results are represntative, that they are likely to reproduce when you go back to a larger model.
As for throughput, simply imagine doing an assay in cell culture with every control, drug, in triplicate, in their own petri dish. Imagine hundreds of dishes filling your hood. Imagine the amount of media that would take, the incubator space, the time to pipette individually moving from one step to the next... and then imagine instead doing so in a 384 well plate with a multi channel pipette. Imagine not needing to involve the sensitive conditions of cells because the assay is de novo. Speed goes up two orders of magnitude, cost goes down an order of magnitude.
But is that de novo assay representative of what you'd have gotten in cell culture? And is the cell culture result representative of what you'd see in animal? And is the animal model representative of what you'll get in humans? This issue is arguably THE issue in medical research, so assessing how representative something is a huge part of the process.
Demonstrating that your animal model reproduces the same pathology as in humans is critical, or what works in animals won't work in humans.
Demonstrating that your cell line can replicate the whole life cycle of the virus with no skipped or altered steps is critical if you're going to test in vitro.
Demonstrating that your high throughput assay replicates the specific isolated mechanism/interaction is critical for testing de novo/in silica.
There's lots of ways to do that. But what machines you use and what you measure depend a lot on what you're doing. Binding assays could be western blot and 384
So lets say you create a binding assay to evaluate how effective drugs are in inhibiting that binding (just an example). How do you test that the binding you're evaluating is the same as the binding the actual virus is involved it? Well, a great way would be to measure a number of variables of your surrogate and compare it to the genuine article. Do they match up, or is something off? And if something is off, what can you change until the surrogate matches the real thing?
But to do that, you need the real thing. Irradiated (inactivated, the gentic material has been destroyed, no risk of infection) to test against. This is a service the CDC provides. It's how labs like mine can work with things like Ebola without risk, without the cost and training that's required in running a BSL-3+ lab with clean rooms and bunny suits.
But the CDC wouldn't even retrun our inquiries. Which is odd. So I never got the samples I needed. So is the assay which is (probably) representative for SARS1 also representative for SARS2? Will the drugs I find in that assay likely to repeat in cell culture, animals, and humans? Well, I can't know. And that's a problem. So if the CDC gave a shit about the drug discovery process for covid, this would be among their priorities. That it ISN'T part of their priorities says everything. They are sufficiently co-opted to just be a vaccine 'health as a subscription service' shill organization.
SARS is like AIDS, it's a phenotypic description of symptoms. SARS = Severe Accute Respriatory Syndrome. Covid was another example of "holy shit, this shit is crazy" ie 'Severe and Accute'. But covid wasn't the same as the first SARS. So it's just "SARS2". But they are different. The SARS virus creates the SARS symptoms. Covid also creates SARS symptoms, but it's not the SARS virus so you gotta call it something different. So we call it SARS2, but media got confused and heard it called covid-1 (Corona virus (CoV) ID 2019) and ran with it. But it's just another corona virus creating SARS symptoms. SARS2. Both corona viruses though, so similar enough with enough conserved mechanisms that what works for one might(?) work for the other.
But you don't know unless you try. Validating an existing approach that works for one coronavirus to demonstrate it works on the other virus is important.
An assay is just a fixed, routine experiment designed to generate similar repeatable results. Like running an alamar blue assay to return drug toxicity, or a custom assay designed to evaluate drug efficacy by surrogate (entry inhibition, binding inhibition, assembly inhibition, etc). What's important is validating that the results are represntative, that they are likely to reproduce when you go back to a larger model.
As for throughput, simply imagine doing an assay in cell culture with every control, drug, in triplicate, in their own petri dish. Imagine hundreds of dishes filling your hood. Imagine the amount of media that would take, the incubator space, the time to pipette individually moving from one step to the next... and then imagine instead doing so in a 384 well plate with a multi channel pipette. Imagine not needing to involve the sensitive conditions of cells because the assay is de novo. Speed goes up two orders of magnitude, cost goes down an order of magnitude.
But is that de novo assay representative of what you'd have gotten in cell culture? And is the cell culture result representative of what you'd see in animal? And is the animal model representative of what you'll get in humans? This issue is arguably THE issue in medical research, so assessing how representative something is a huge part of the process.
Demonstrating that your animal model reproduces the same pathology as in humans is critical, or what works in animals won't work in humans.
Demonstrating that your cell line can replicate the whole life cycle of the virus with no skipped or altered steps is critical if you're going to test in vitro.
Demonstrating that your high throughput assay replicates the specific isolated mechanism/interaction is critical for testing de novo/in silica.
There's lots of ways to do that. But what machines you use and what you measure depend a lot on what you're doing. Binding assays could be western blot and 384
So lets say you create a binding assay to evaluate how effective drugs are in inhibiting that binding (just an example). How do you test that the binding you're evaluating is the same as the binding the actual virus is involved it? Well, a great way would be to measure a number of variables of your surrogate and compare it to the genuine article. Do they match up, or is something off? And if something is off, what can you change until the surrogate matches the real thing?
But to do that, you need the real thing. Irradiated (inactivated, the gentic material has been destroyed, no risk of infection) to test against. This is a service the CDC provides. It's how labs like mine can work with things like Ebola without risk, without the cost and training that's required in running a BSL-3+ lab with clean rooms and bunny suits.
But the CDC wouldn't even retrun our inquiries. Which is odd. So I never got the samples I needed. So is the assay which is (probably) representative for SARS1 also representative for SARS2? Will the drugs I find in that assay likely to repeat in cell culture, animals, and humans? Well, I can't know. And that's a problem. So if the CDC gave a shit about the drug discovery process for covid, this would be among their priorities. That it ISN'T part of their priorities says everything. They are sufficiently co-opted to just be a vaccine 'health as a subscription service' shill organization.