Lifeboat Foundation

There is widespread agreement that the only way to safely reopen the economy is through a massive increase in testing. The US needs to test millions of people per day to effectively track and then contain the covid-19 pandemic.

This is a tall order. The country tested only around 210,000 people per day last week, and the pace is not increasing fast enough to get to millions quickly.

The urgency to do better is overwhelmingly bipartisan, with the most recent legislation adding $25 billion for testing a few days ago. Fears are growing, however, that testing might not scale in time to make a difference. As Senators Lamar Alexander and Roy Blunt wrote last week, “We have been talking with experts across the government and the private sector to find anyone who believes that current technology can produce the tens of millions of tests necessary to put this virus behind us. Unfortunately, we have yet to find anyone to do so.”

The investigators concluded that diffuse bilateral pulmonary inflammation observed in COVID-19 is associated with a novel pulmonary-specific vasculopathy, which is distinct from DIC, and which they’ve termed “pulmonary intravascular coagulopathy (PIC).”

“Understanding how these micro-clots are being formed within the lung is critical so that we can develop more effective treatments for our patients, particularly those in high-risk groups,” O’Donnell commented. “Further studies will be required to investigate whether different blood thinning treatments may have a role in selected high-risk patients in order to reduce the risk of clot formation.”

The authors suggest that larger, controlled studies will be needed to determine whether more intensive anticoagulation and/or targeted anti-inflammatory therapies might help reduce PIC in patients with severe COVID-19. The findings may also be relevant to growing evidence that some ethnicities are more likely to develop serious COVID-19 than others. “Given that thrombotic risk is significantly impacted by race, coupled with the accumulating evidence that coagulopathy is important in COVID-19 pathogenesis, our findings raise the intriguing possibility that pulmonary vasculopathy may contribute to the unexplained differences that are beginning to emerge highlighting racial susceptibility to COVID-19 mortality,” they concluded.

With the trillions of antibodies the human body can make, finding the antibody with the right combination of potency against a target and ease of manufacturing is, at best, an arduous, time-intensive endeavor for drug developers. AbCellera Biologics Inc. has developed a way to dramatically speed that process.

It is using its proprietary AI system to empower the search. It is mining the diversity of antibodies made by the immune system to find the relatively few that are optimized by nature to be well-suited for drug development. “A human makes trillions of different antibodies, but only a small set binds to the target of interest. Of those, only a few can be developed as drugs,” Carl Hansen, Ph.D., CEO of AbCellera, explained.

Hansen sees AbCellera as a “discovery and innovation shop. We identify the properties of antibodies that make them easy to manufacture and potent.”

MilliporeSigma and The Jenner Institute report that the Institute has begun preparations for the large-scale production of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate, ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. With patients enrolled for clinical trials for this vaccine, rapid development of the large-scale manufacturing process is a critical step in quickly and safely delivering it from the lab to patients, according to Udit Batra, CEO, MilliporeSigma.

“We have brought the future of vaccine manufacturing to the present,” said Batra. “This is an important step in treating COVID-19 and other diseases that impact global public health. This work marks a milestone in the vaccine manufacturing development journey, as clinical testing continues to advance.”

Tapping into MilliporeSigma’s previous work provided a head start for plans to scale up the manufacture of Jenner’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate, added Batra. Developing the manufacturing process itself would normally take at least six months to a year, but in just two months’ time, MilliporeSigma supported the Jenner team and their collaborators to evaluate the existing manufacturing platform for use with the new vaccine candidate, and improved critical process steps, he continued.

A guy used Google, and turned his parents’ first floor bedroom into a makeshift hospital ward and saved his dad’s life from coronavirus. In the darkest moments, sometimes a plan of action and a little luck are the only things people have.

…and people keep saying this can not be treated, from day one.

When Suryakant “Suri” Nathwani returned from the hospital, the reserved 81-year-old grabbed his son’s hand and pleaded to be allowed to die at home. “He said, ‘Please promise me one thing: If I’m going to go, I’m going to go here. Do not take me back there,’” his son Raj Nathwani said.

Continue reading “This man came home from the hospital to die. His son found a way to keep him alive” »

In a bid to ensure physical distancing at COVID-19 care facility in Amritsar, a robotic trolley ‘carbeot’ has been deployed to provide essentials like medicines, food to coronavirus patients.

With the Space Launch System’s inaugural test flight now officially delayed to November 2021, NASA says work halted by the coronavirus pandemic will resume within weeks to prepare for the first test-firing of the SLS core stage at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

The last official schedule from NASA had the first SLS test launch in March 2021, but managers have said for months that schedule was no longer achievable. After a thorough review, NASA says the first SLS launch — named Artemis 1 — is now planned in November of next year.

The most powerful launch vehicle since the Apollo-era Saturn 5 moon rocket, the Space Launch System will carry an unpiloted Orion crew capsule into space. The Orion spaceship will orbit the moon to demonstrate the capsule’s capabilities and performance before NASA commits to flying astronauts around the moon on the second SLS/Orion flight in late 2022 or early 2023.

A North Korean defector-turned-South Korea lawmaker claimed Friday he is “99 percent” sure that Kim Jong Un died after surgery — amid swirling speculation about the dictator’s condition.

Ji Seong-ho, who earned a proportional representation seat of a minor party in the country’s April 15 elections, told Yonhap News Agency he believes Kim died after his recent surgery and that North Korea will announce it this weekend.

“I’ve wondered how long he could have endured after cardiovascular surgery. I’ve been informed that Kim died last weekend,” Ji told the outlet. “It is not 100 percent certain, but I can say the possibility is 99 percent. North Korea is believed to be grappling with a complicated succession issue.”

“According to WAM, stem cells are extracted from the patient’s blood and then reintroduced in an “activated” state to the lungs through inhalation after being nebulized into a fine mist.

ADSCC researchers said the mist had a therapeutic effect, helping to regenerate lung cells and alter the response of the immune system to stop it from overreacting to the COVID-19 infection and causing more damage to healthy cells.

The treatment has undergone and successfully passed the first stage of clinical trials with further tests to demonstrate its effectiveness being carried out over the next two weeks.”

Continue reading “Abu Dhabi stem cell center develops ‘promising’ new COVID-19 treatment” »