A team of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh has developed a skin patch that can detect antibodies associated with COVID and flu infections. It's orders of magnitude more sensitive than existing tests, uses just a half volt of electricity, and can return results in 10 minutes.

In patients with Long COVID, a new study has revealed structural association between circulating microclots and neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs). This finding suggests the existence of underlying physiological interactions between microclots and NETS that, when dysregulated, may become pathogenic.

In a paper published in Frontiers of Engineering Mangement, a team of scientists including Qingqi LONG, Xiaobo WU, and Juanjuan PENG present a simulation study on recovery strategies for government-led food supply chains during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study focuses on government-led food supply chains, employs simulations across different pandemic phases, identifies main factors contributing to food shortages such as insufficient transportation capacity, uneven distribution of district warehouses, and production-demand mismatches, and confirms effective recovery strategies like enhancing transportation capacity, establishing new district warehouses, and increasing production capacity, while also finding that some strategies may have unintended negative consequences.

A research team at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, has identified a previously unknown cellular mechanism crucial to the replication of coronaviruses: c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) is activated during infection with human coronavirus HCoV-229E and mediates the phosphorylation of the viral nucleocapsid (N) protein, an integral step in the virus cycle. These results aid in better understanding virus-host interactions and may open new approaches to exploring antiviral strategies in the long term. The team led by Dr. Yannick Brüggemann and Professor Eike Steinmann reports its findings in the journal npj Viruses from September 18, 2025.

A 15-year retrospective study in adults admitted to the intensive care department at Donostia University Hospital has revealed crucial insights into invasive Streptococcus pyogenes (iGAS) infections. While the prevalence of the toxic M1uk strain has grown in Western Europe since the COVID-19 pandemic, mortality rates due to M1uk were not significantly higher. Timely treatment with clindamycin significantly reduced mortality rates, underscoring its importance in containing iGAS.

Summary

Researchers at EMBL-EBI and collaborators have developed SPRTA, a new way to measure confidence in evolutionary family trees at a pandemic scale. 

SPRTA allows scientists to quickly identify which parts of these trees are reliable, where uncertainty remains, and what could be alternative evolutionary histories.

By helping to track how pathogens spread and evolve, SPRTA could improve responses to future pandemics.

The study provides a new perspective: what matters is not only which previous diseases a person has, but also the order in which they appeared and how they interact. This approach makes it possible to identify risk profiles for long COVID that had not been detected until now. The research was conducted within the framework of the COVICAT study, coordinated in collaboration with ISGlobal.