€7.4 billion was raised at the Coronavirus Global Response pledging event on 4 May to kick-start an unprecedented global cooperation between scientists and regulators, industry and governments, international organisations, foundations and health care professionals to ensure the collaborative development and universal deployment of diagnostics, treatments and vaccines against coronavirus.
The pledging event was co-convened by the European Union, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom. It builds on the commitment made by G20 leaders on 26 March and follows a call by the WHO on 24 April for a global collaboration for the accelerated development, production and equitable global access to new coronavirus essential health technologies.
Commenting on the success of the event, President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said: “The world showed extraordinary unity for the common good. Governments and global health organisations joined forces against coronavirus. With such commitment, we are on track for developing, producing and deploying a vaccine for all. However, this is only the beginning. We need to sustain the effort and to stand ready to contribute more. The pledging marathon will continue. After governments, civil society and people worldwide need to join in, in a global mobilisation of hope and resolve.”
The funds raised will be channelled primarily through recognised global health organisations such as CEPI, Gavi, the Vaccines Alliance, as well as the Global Fund and Unitaid into developing and deploying as quickly as possible, for as many as possible, the diagnostics, treatments and vaccines that will help the world overcome the pandemic.
The Coronavirus Global Response Initiative is comprised of three partnerships for testing, treating and preventing underpinned by health systems strengthening. The three partnerships will work as autonomously as possible, with a transversal work stream on enhancing the capacity of health systems and knowledge and data sharing.
The European Commission will register and keep track of pledges up until end of May but will not receive any payments into its accounts. Funds go directly to the recipients. Recipients will, however, not decide alone on the use of the donation, but deploy it in concert with the partnership. The commitment is for all new vaccines, diagnostics and treatments against coronavirus to be made available globally for an affordable price, regardless of where they were developed.
The Global Vaccines Summit that Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, will organise on 4 June will mobilise additional funding to protect the next generation with vaccines. As the world relies on Gavi’s work for making vaccination available everywhere, the success of Gavi’s replenishment will be crucial to the success of the Coronavirus Global Response.
In an Op-ed ahead of the pledging event, co-authored by Giuseppe Conte, President of the Government of the Italian Republic, Emmanuel Macron, President of the French Republic, Angela Merkel, Federal Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Charles Michel, President of the European Council, Erna Solberg, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Norway, Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada and Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, they said: “None of us is immune to the pandemic and none of us can beat the virus alone. In fact, we will not truly be safe until all of us are safe – across every village, city, region and country in the world. In our interconnected world, the global health system is as strong as its weakest part. We will need to protect each other to protect ourselves.
“This poses a unique and truly global challenge. And it makes it imperative that we give ourselves the best chance to defeat it. This means bringing together the world’s best – and most prepared – minds to find the vaccines, treatments and therapies we need to make our world healthy again
“This is our generation’s duty and we know we can make this happen. High quality and low-cost health technologies are not a daydream. And we have seen how public-private partnerships have managed to make many life-saving vaccines available to the poorest people on earth over the last two decades.
“This is a defining moment for the global community. By rallying around science and solidarity today we will sow the seeds for greater unity tomorrow. Guided by the Sustainable Development Goals, we can redesign the power of community, society and global collaboration, to make sure that nobody is left behind.”
Coronavirus Global Response https://global-response.europa.eu

A multicentre international study has demonstrated for the first time that diagnosis of obstructive coronary artery disease can be improved by using deep learning analysis of upright and supine single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI).
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronary artery disease is the most common type of heart disease, killing more than 370,000 people in the United States annually. SPECT MPI, which is widely used for its diagnosis, shows how well the heart muscle is pumping and examines blood flow through the heart during exercise and at rest. On new cameras with a patient imaged in sitting position, two positions (semi-upright and supine) are routinely used to mitigate attenuation artifacts. The current quantitative standard for analysing MPI data is to calculate the combined total perfusion deficit (TPD) from these 2 positions. Visually, physicians need to reconcile information available from 2 views. 
Deep convolutional neural networks, often referred to as deep learning (DL), go beyond machine learning using algorithms. They directly analyse visual data, learn from them, and make intelligent findings based on the image information.
For this study, DL analysis of data from the two-position stress MPI was compared with the standard TPD analysis of 1,160 patients without known coronary artery disease. Patients underwent stress MPI with the nuclear medicine radiotracer technetium (99mTc) sestamibi. New-generation solid-state SPECT scanners in four different centres were used, and images were quantified at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles, California. All patients had on-site clinical reads and invasive coronary angiography correlations within six months of MPI.
Obstructive disease was defined as at least 70 percent narrowing of the three major coronary arteries and at least 50 percent for the left main coronary artery. During the validation procedure, four different DL models were trained (each using data from three centers) and then were evaluated on the one center left aside. Predictions for 4 centers were merged to have an overall estimation of the multicenter performance.
The study revealed that 718 (62 percent) patients and 1,272 of 3,480 (37 percent) arteries had obstructive disease. Per-patient sensitivity improved from 61.8 percent with TPD to 65.6 percent with DL, and per-vessel sensitivity improved from 54.6 percent with TPD to 59.1 percent with DL. In addition, DL had a sensitivity of 84.8 percent, versus 82.6 percent for an on-site clinical read.
The results clearly show that DL improves MPI interpretation over current methods.
“These findings were demonstrated for the first time in a rigorous, repeated external validation,” points out Piotr J. Slomka, PhD, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, affirming that “the latest developments in artificial intelligence can be efficiently leveraged to enhance the accuracy of existing nuclear medicine techniques.”
Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging https://tinyurl.com/y5q537lm

Reversibly paralysing and heavily sedating hospitalized patients with severe breathing problems do not improve outcomes in most cases, according to a National Institutes of Health-funded clinical trial conducted at dozens of North American hospitals and led by clinician-scientists at the University of Pittsburgh and University of Colorado schools of medicine.
The trial—which was stopped early due to futility—settles a long-standing debate in the critical care medicine community about whether it is better to paralyse and sedate patients in acute respiratory distress to aid mechanical ventilation or avoid heavy sedation to improve recovery.
“It’s been a conundrum—on the one hand, really well-done studies have shown that temporarily paralysing the patient to improve mechanical breathing saves lives. But you can’t paralyse without heavy sedation, and studies also show heavy sedation results in worse recovery. You can’t have both—so what’s a clinician to do?” said senior author Derek Angus, M.D., M.P.H., who holds the Mitchell P. Fink Endowed Chair of the Pitt School of Medicine’s Department of Critical Care Medicine. “Our trial finally settles it—light sedation with intermittent, short-term paralysis if necessary is as good as deep sedation with continuous paralysis.”
The Re-evaluation Of Systemic Early neuromuscular blockade (ROSE) trial is the first of the new National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s (NHLBI) Prevention & Early Treatment of Acute Lung Injury (PETAL) Network. PETAL develops and conducts randomized controlled clinical trials to prevent or treat patients who have, or who are at risk for, acute lung injury or acute respiratory distress syndrome. The trial network places particular emphasis on early detection by requiring every network member institute include both critical care and emergency medicine, acute care or trauma principal investigators to ensure that critical health issues are recognized and triaged as fast as possible to improve patients’ odds of recovery before they are even transferred to the intensive care unit.
Angus, who also directs Pitt’s Clinical Research, Investigation, and Systems Modeling of Acute Illness (CRISMA) Center, said the trial results make him confident when he says that avoiding paralysis and deep sedation is the best practice for most patients hospitalized with breathing problems. However, he notes that future trials will be needed to tease out whether there is a subpopulation of patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome who still benefit from neuromuscular blockade.
UPMChttps://tinyurl.com/yxc95rrl