(Reuters) — The U.S. government signed a $450 million contract with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc (REGN.O) for its potential COVID-19 antibody cocktail, the drugmaker said on Tuesday.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 1657
While so many of us are working at home during the coronavirus pandemic, we do worry that serendipitous hallway conversations aren’t happening.
Last year, before the pandemic, it was one of those conversations that led researchers at ETH Zurich to develop a way of making chocolates shimmer with color—without any coloring agents or other additives.
The project, announced in December, involves what the scientists call “structural color”. The team indicated that it creates colors in a way similar to what a chameleon does—that is, using the structure of its skin to scatter a particular wavelength of light. The researchers have yet to release details, but Alissa M. Fitzgerald, founder of MEMS product development firm AMFitzgerald, has a pretty good guess.
The Electrified Brain
Posted in biotech/medical, neuroscience
Summary: Targeted deep brain stimulation may help treat obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Source: Charite
A group of researchers from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin have further refined the use of deep brain stimulation in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder. By accurately localizing electrode placement in the brains of patients, the researchers were able to identify a fiber tract which is associated with the best clinical outcomes following deep brain stimulation. The researchers’ findings, which have been published in Nature Communications, may be used to improve the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Innovation sneaks up on us: There’s a new DNA test that detects more illnesses, earlier.
The papers appear to feature the same pictures as others, raising doubts about the checks on scientific research, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Authorities in the northern Chinese region of Inner Mongolia have issued an early epidemic warning after a resident contracted bubonic plague.
Bubonic plague, known as the ‘Black Death’ in the Middle Ages, is one of the most devastating diseases in history, having killed around 100million people in the 14th century.
The confirmed plague case has sparked fears of a new wave of virus outbreak erupting in China when the country is still battling the coronavirus.
Kate Rubins, the first Napa native to go to space, is entering the final three months of preparation for her return trip to the International Space Station where she served four years ago.
Starting Oct. 14 and continuing for about six months, her schedule will be replete with scientific work 250 miles above the Earth, dealing with materials ranging from supercold gases to stem cells. And unlike during her first stay in 2016, Rubins expects to get to work quickly, without the awkward introduction to moving about in microgravity.
“As a rookie you’re not so good at navigating and flying through the space station, so you tend to crawl hand over hand on the handrails,” the biochemist-turned-space traveler quipped during a NASA news conference last week in Houston, while recalling her original 115-day stint aboard the orbiting space platform.
Once an ecosystem is disturbed, restoring it can be difficult. And when the disturbed ecosystem is a patient’s microbiome, restoring the patient to health can be even more difficult. Just one ecosystem element that proliferates or diminishes beyond bounds may throw multiple elements into disarray, creating a dysbiosis that resists simple remedies.
Because a patient’s microbiome consists of interacting elements—including elements that extend beyond the microbiome itself—these elements cannot be seen in isolation. Rather, they are dynamic parts of a systemic whole. Touch any one of them, and the effects of doing so may ripple outward in unpredictable ways—unless the elements and their interactions are thoroughly understood.
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“We are covered by, and protected by, and interacted with by vast microbial ecosystems,” says Julius Goepp, MD, founder of Scaled Microbiomics. Everywhere the body comes into contact with the outside environment, you’ll find a thriving community of microbes. This includes places that are obviously “external”—like skin and hair (including the skin and hair of underarms and nostrils)—as well as places that we consider to be “internal,” like the gastrointestinal tract.
“The surface of our gut is continuous with the outside world,” Goepp points out. The miracle of our gut, he continues, is that it can transport “two pounds of very nasty material [while keeping] it one cell layer away from our precious, sterile, inside tissue.”
As the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic mounts, scientists worldwide continue their push to develop effective treatments and a vaccine for the highly contagious respiratory virus.
University of South Florida Health (USF Health) Morsani College of Medicine scientists recently worked with colleagues at the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy to identify several existing compounds that block replication of the COVID-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2) within human cells grown in the laboratory. The inhibitors all demonstrated potent chemical and structural interactions with a viral protein critical to the virus’s ability to proliferate.
The research team’s drug discovery study appeared June 15 in Cell Research, a high-impact Nature journal.