From the journal RSC Chemical Biology Peer review history

06-Jun-2021

Dear Dr Kalyanaraman:

Manuscript ID: CB-REV-03-2021-000042
TITLE: Reactive oxygen species, proinflammatory and immunosuppressive mediators induced in COVID-19: Overlapping biology with cancer and repurposing drugs

Thank you for your submission to RSC Chemical Biology, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. I sent your manuscript to reviewers and I have now received their reports which are copied below.

After careful evaluation of your manuscript and the reviewers’ reports, I will be pleased to accept your manuscript for publication after revisions.

Please revise your manuscript to fully address the reviewers’ comments. When you submit your revised manuscript please include a point by point response to the reviewers’ comments and highlight the changes you have made. Full details of the files you need to submit are listed at the end of this email.

Please submit your revised manuscript as soon as possible using this link :

*** PLEASE NOTE: This is a two-step process. After clicking on the link, you will be directed to a webpage to confirm. ***

https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rsccb?link_removed

(This link goes straight to your account, without the need to log in to the system. For your account security you should not share this link with others.)

Alternatively, you can login to your account (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rsccb) where you will need your case-sensitive USER ID and password.

You should submit your revised manuscript as soon as possible; please note you will receive a series of automatic reminders. If your revisions will take a significant length of time, please contact me. If I do not hear from you, I may withdraw your manuscript from consideration and you will have to resubmit. Any resubmission will receive a new submission date.

Supporting our community through Covid-19
While our publishing services are running as usual, we also know that this is a very challenging time for everyone, for many different reasons. If any aspect of the publishing process is worrying you – for example you think you may struggle to meet a pre-determined deadline – please let us know, and we will work out an answer together.

RSC Chemical Biology strongly encourages authors of research articles to include an ‘Author contributions’ section in their manuscript, for publication in the final article. This should appear immediately above the ‘Conflict of interest’ and ‘Acknowledgement’ sections. I strongly recommend you use CRediT (the Contributor Roles Taxonomy from CASRAI, https://casrai.org/credit/) for standardised contribution descriptions. All authors should have agreed to their individual contributions ahead of submission and these should accurately reflect contributions to the work. Please refer to our general author guidelines http://www.rsc.org/journals-books-databases/journal-authors-reviewers/author-responsibilities/ for more information.

The Royal Society of Chemistry requires all submitting authors to provide their ORCID iD when they submit a revised manuscript. This is quick and easy to do as part of the revised manuscript submission process. We will publish this information with the article, and you may choose to have your ORCID record updated automatically with details of the publication.

Please also encourage your co-authors to sign up for their own ORCID account and associate it with their account on our manuscript submission system. For further information see: https://www.rsc.org/journals-books-databases/journal-authors-reviewers/processes-policies/#attribution-id

Please note: to support increased transparency, RSC Chemical Biology offers authors the option of transparent peer review. If authors choose this option, the reviewers’ comments, authors’ response and editor’s decision letter for all versions of the manuscript are published alongside the article. Reviewers remain anonymous unless they choose to sign their report. We will ask you to confirm whether you would like to take up this option at the revision stages.

I look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Yours sincerely,
Professor Zaneta Nikolovska-Coleska
Associate Editor, RSC Chemical Biology

************

Reviewer 1

It would be interesting to include the role of glucose metabolism in Redox balance via glutathione regulation and how this reducing agent levels determine pathophysiology of Cancer, Covid-19 and inflammation.

Reviewer 2

Dear author,

Thank you for the tremendous and thoughtful piece of work you've put together! Considering the real life application in our current world, this piece has come out in a very timely manner.

There's a couple minor revisions I would recommend to better allow the audience to digest all of the valuable information you've provided. Your thought process is entirely logical, but here are some suggestions to help add clarity. Since immunology is still a newer field, it would be great if you could provide a glossary as an appendix. Additionally, it would be wonderful if you could also include a table with all of the acronyms as a point of reference. These two things would allow the reader to continue engaging with your points, as it's pretty dense and filled with lots of information.

Thank you!

Response to Reviewers

I think the reviewers for the positive feedback about the manuscript. Responses to the individual comments are included in below.


Referee: 1

Comments to the Author
It would be interesting to include the role of glucose metabolism in Redox balance via glutathione regulation and how this reducing agent levels determine pathophysiology of Cancer, Covid-19 and inflammation.

Author response: We have added a section on the effect of 2-DG (an inhibitor of aerobic glycolytic mechanism) and the emerging literature describing the mechanism. Clearly, glutathione regulation plays an important role in understanding the effect of 2-DG. It is particularly interesting and significant, as 2-DG has received an emergency use authorization in moderately and severely ill COVID-19 patients in India. We thank the reviewer for encouraging us to include a section on glucose metabolism.

Referee: 2

Comments to the Author
Dear author,

Thank you for the tremendous and thoughtful piece of work you've put together! Considering the real life application in our current world, this piece has come out in a very timely manner.

There's a couple minor revisions I would recommend to better allow the audience to digest all of the valuable information you've provided. Your thought process is entirely logical, but here are some suggestions to help add clarity. Since immunology is still a newer field, it would be great if you could provide a glossary as an appendix. Additionally, it would be wonderful if you could also include a table with all of the acronyms as a point of reference. These two things would allow the reader to continue engaging with your points, as it's pretty dense and filled with lots of information.

Thank you!

Author response: We are humbled by the kind words and thankful to the reviewer. In response to the reviewer’s suggestion, we have included a table with the acronyms used in the manuscript.

30-Jun-2021

Dear Dr Kalyanaraman:

Manuscript ID: CB-REV-03-2021-000042.R1
TITLE: Reactive oxygen species, proinflammatory and immunosuppressive mediators induced in COVID-19: Overlapping biology with cancer

Thank you for submitting your revised manuscript to RSC Chemical Biology. After considering the changes you have made, I am pleased to accept your manuscript for publication in its current form. I have copied any final comments from the reviewer(s) below.

You will shortly receive a separate email from us requesting you to submit a licence to publish for your article, so that we can proceed with publication of your manuscript.

You can highlight your article and the work of your group on the back cover of RSC Chemical Biology, if you are interested in this opportunity please contact me for more information.

Discover more Royal Society of Chemistry author services and benefits here:

https://www.rsc.org/journals-books-databases/about-journals/benefits-of-publishing-with-us/

Thank you for publishing with RSC Chemical Biology, a journal published by the Royal Society of Chemistry – connecting the world of science to advance chemical knowledge for a better future.

With best wishes,

Professor Zaneta Nikolovska-Coleska
Associate Editor, RSC Chemical Biology

Reviewer 1

Fidelis Toloyi Ndombera