It took many months and tens of thousands of volunteers to gather the data showing that the current crop of COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective.
But what if new vaccines are needed to deal with dangerous variants of the coronavirus? Waiting months is not an attractive option.
So researchers are trying to come up with tests that can be performed using a blood sample that will determine not only whether a vaccine will work but also for how long.
O,.o What a cure for cancer! o.o
Researchers are leveraging the messenger RNA (mRNA) technology used to develop the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for possible treatments for a range of other diseases, including HIV and cancer.
This has long been thought possible with mRNA technology, but infectious diseases were something of the low-hanging fruit, and the COVID-19 pandemic drove the innovations.
MRNA technology is a way of exploiting the body’s own genetic blueprints. Traditional vaccines used either living or dead viruses to train the immune system to recognize viruses the next time they encounter them. The COVID-19 mRNA vaccines instead use the genetic code for a piece of the virus—the spike protein—and cause the body to generate the spike proteins, which trains the immune system to recognize the virus.
Pfizer pill to treat COVID symptoms could be ready by year’s end, CEO says.
An oral drug like the one Pfizer is developing could be taken at home and might keep people out of the hospital.
“Particular attention is on the oral because it provides several advantages,” Bourla said. “One of them is that you don’t need to go to the hospital to get the treatment, which is the case with all the injectables so far. You could get it at home, and that could be a game-changer.”
The drug might be effective against the emerging variants, he said. Pfizer is also working on an injectable anti-viral drug.
Trouble thinking, concentrating, and remembering can be among the most debilitating “long haul” #COVID19 symptoms. Here’s what researchers are doing to help combat them.
Disentangling the roots of survivors’ cognitive deficits is no easy task.
Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins has died at the age of 90 after a battle with cancer, his family confirmed Wednesday morning.
Collins was part of the three-man crew that made history with the lunar landing in 1969, but unlike Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, he never walked on the moon.
Fixing traumatic injuries to the skin and bones of the face and skull is difficult because of the many layers of different types of tissues involved, but now, researchers have repaired such defects in a rat model using bioprinting during surgery, and their work may lead to faster and better methods of healing skin and bones.
“This work is clinically significant,” said Ibrahim T. Ozbolat, Hartz Family Career Development Associate Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics, Biomedical Engineering and Neurosurgery, Penn State. “Dealing with composite defects, fixing hard and soft tissues at once, is difficult. And for the craniofacial area, the results have to be esthetically pleasing.”
Currently, fixing a hole in the skull involving both bone and soft tissue requires using bone from another part of the patient’s body or a cadaver. The bone must be covered by soft tissue with blood flow, also harvested from somewhere else, or the bone will die. Then surgeons need to repair the soft tissue and skin.
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Cidara Therapeutics inked a deal worth up to $780 million with Johnson & Johnson to develop and commercialize Cidara’s candidate CD388 for the prevention and treatment of seasonal and pandemic influenza.
San Diego-based Cidara Therapeutics will receive an upfront payment of $27 million from Janssen, a division of J&J for the development of CD388, one of Cidara’s Cloudbreak antiviral conjugates (AVCs). Cidara, which is focusing on the development of therapeutics for serious fungal or viral infections, said CD388 has the potential to be a true universal preventative for the flu, with distinct advantages over vaccines that can be used across all populations, including the young, elderly and immunocompromised. Additionally, the company believed CD388 is capable of providing protection from all influenza strains, including seasonal and pandemic influenza A, influenza B and all major clinically characterized drug resistant influenza strains. Not only that, but Cidara suggests CD388 could provide a therapeutic role, such as the widely-used Tamiflu.
A team from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), the Universitat de València (UV) and the Aiken Ophthalmic Clinic (through its Research Foundation) have designed and assessed in their laboratories a new groundbreaking implant, the only one in its kind, to correct presbyopia. As a result of the work of five years of research, they have created the first trifocal corneal inlay that is also fully transparent. Such an inlay would allow good eyesight to presbyopic people of objects located at several distances: far, intermediate (computer, mobile devices) and near. Their work has been published in Nature group’s Scientific Reports journal.
This inlay could be an alternative for those suffering from presbyopia who would rather not use glasses or contact lenses. Furthermore, it would be fully compatible with laser refractive surgery in myopic and hyperopic patients, as well as possible subsequent cataract interventions. We are suggesting something totally new that is also not incompatible with any other ocular therapy.
After four months of hand-wringing and a deep investigation into how a patient was diagnosed with cancer after getting uniQure’s hemophilia gene therapy, the FDA is allowing the trial to continue.
In December, the FDA put uniQure’s hemophilia B gene therapy on clinical hold in response to a case of hepatocellular carcinoma (a form of liver cancer) in a patient in the pivotal trial of etranacogene dezaparvovec.
UniQure and partner CSL Behring had already completed dosing in the affected studies, but the safety concern threatened the chances of the therapy in an indication targeted by Pfizer and Spark Therapeutics’ fidanacogene elaparvovec.
Why not add a light switch instead?
This month, a team from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) reimagined CRISPR to do just that. Rather than directly acting on genes—irrevocably dicing away or swapping genetic letters— the new CRISPR variant targets the biological machinery that naturally turns genes on or off.
Translation? CRISPR can now “flip a light switch” to control genes—without ever touching them directly. It gets better. The new tool, CRISPRoff, can cause a gene to stay silent for hundreds of generations, even when its host cells morph from stem cells into more mature cells, such as neurons. Once the “sleeping beauty” genes are ready to wake up, a complementary tool, CRISPRon, flips the light switch back on.
