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This is why researchers trained computers to predict what designer drugs will emerge onto the scene before they hit the market, according to a recent study published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

With highly-addictive drugs flooding regions throughout the U.S., this program could save countless lives. But it could also unlock an entire “dark matter” world of unknown psychoactive possibilities.

As the scientists reported Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine, they didn’t find any. Which means that the woman, who they are calling the “Esperanza Patient” to protect her privacy, appears to have eradicated the deadly virus from her body without the help of drugs or a bone marrow transplant — which would make her only the second person believed to have cured herself of HIV, without drugs or any other treatment.

“This gives us hope that the human immune system is powerful enough to control HIV and eliminate all the functional virus,” said Xu Yu, an immunologist at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard and senior author on the new report. “Time will tell, but we believe she has reached a sterilizing cure.” The discovery, which was previously announced at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in March, could help identify possible treatments, researchers said.

Several Covid-19 vaccines under development in Israel hold out promise for their ability to protect against variants of the virus that are challenging existing vaccines.

Back in May 2020, research groups across the world were racing to formulate vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

Realizing it was not going to win that race, Israel purchased millions of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines from the United States and led the world in getting eligible citizens vaccinated.… See more.


Injectable and oral vaccines under development in Israel may prove significant in protecting people from mutations of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

LifeArc scientists, in collaboration with researchers in the UK and Germany, have developed a promising new approach to potentially treat Alzheimer’s disease – and also vaccinate against it.

Both the antibody-based treatment and the protein-based vaccine developed by the team reduced Alzheimer’s symptoms in mouse models of the disease. The research is published today in Molecular Psychiatry.


LifeArc and researchers in the UK & Germany have developed a promising new approach to potentially treat Alzheimer’s.

The last year has been a story of triumph in the vaccine world, with the rapid development of two highly successful vaccines for Covid-19, one developed by Moderna and the other by Pfizer and BioNTech. Now that flu season is approaching, why are we still using 50-year-old technology for the flu vaccine?

The reason the Covid-19 vaccines were developed so quickly is that they used a new, much faster and easier-to-create type of vaccine technology, based on messenger RNA, or mRNA. What’s even more exciting is that we now have an overwhelming amount of evidence, from real-world experience, that these vaccines are remarkably safe and effective.

Now, anti-vaxxers and the “vaccine hesitant” are claiming they don’t trust the vaccine because it was developed too fast. That’s ridiculous: the real reason they don’t trust the vaccine is because they’re consuming a steady diet of anti-vaccine nonsense, promoted by a combination of right-wing media and the Disinformation Dozen (who include left-wing as well as right-wing zealots). But let’s not go down that rabbit hole today.

I may have already posted about this, but this is more data from The Lancet.

Background.

Recent evidence indicates a potential therapeutic role of fluvoxamine for COVID-19. In the TOGETHER trial for acutely symptomatic patients with COVID-19, we aimed to assess the efficacy of fluvoxamine versus placebo in preventing hospitalisation defined as either retention in a COVID-19 emergency setting or transfer to a tertiary hospital due to COVID-19.

Methods.

This placebo-controlled, randomised, adaptive platform trial done among high-risk symptomatic Brazilian adults confirmed positive for SARS-CoV-2 included eligible patients from 11 clinical sites in Brazil with a known risk factor for progression to severe disease. Patients were randomly assigned (1:1) to either fluvoxamine (100 mg twice daily for 10 days) or placebo (or other treatment groups not reported here). The trial team, site staff, and patients were masked to treatment allocation. Our primary outcome was a composite endpoint of hospitalisation defined as either retention in a COVID-19 emergency setting or transfer to tertiary hospital due to COVID-19 up to 28 days post-random assignment on the basis of intention to treat. Modified intention to treat explored patients receiving at least 24 h of treatment before a primary outcome event and per-protocol analysis explored patients with a high level adherence (80%). We used a Bayesian analytic framework to establish the effects along with probability of success of intervention compared with placebo. The trial is registered at ClinicalTrials dot gov (NCT04727424) and is ongoing.