Hitting the Books: How getting your clock cleaned can turn your brain’s first line of immune defense into its own worst enemy.
Regeneron will work with the U.S. government to develop antibody treatments for the new coronavirus from China, disclosing Tuesday an expansion of a partnership that previously yielded an experimental drug cocktail for the Ebola virus.
The Tarrytown, New York-based biotech is one of roughly a dozen drugmakers now working on treatments for the coronavirus that emerged late last year in Wuhan, China. Most are smaller companies unlikely to possess sufficient funds to run large-scale tests, although Johnson & Johnson and Gilead have announced initial efforts in recent weeks.
The biotech hopes to replicate its past success in quickly advancing a treatment for Ebola. But, as that experience showed, proving a new antiviral isn’t easy.
Continue reading “Regeneron partners with US government to develop coronavirus treatment” »
Since the new coronavirus was first identified in Wuhan, China, on Jan. 7, companies and academic groups around the world have been working at breakneck pace to develop new therapies for the virus, now called SARS-CoV-2. This week, two US biotech firms, Moderna and Gilead Sciences, positioned themselves as frontrunners.
The world’s first clinical trial of a vaccine for the novel coronavirus will soon begin in the US. On Feb. 25, Moderna announced that it has shipped its experimental vaccine to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which will conduct the trial. The entire process—from vaccine design to manufacturing to shipment—took only 7 weeks.
Gilead has a head start on an antiviral, while Moderna is pursuing a novel mRNA vaccine.
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The treatment could hold real promise as coronavirus infections and deaths outside of China continue to swell. “There is only one drug right now that we think may have real efficacy and that’s remdesivir,” said WHO assistant director-general Bruce Aylward during a press conference in Beijing on Monday. The drug is already being enlisted in clinical trials in China.
Gilead’s antiviral remdesivir is being used in the first U.S. clinical trial to treat COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.
At a quantum level, the vanishingly tiny particles that make up the building blocks of everything don’t even have a set location, just a smear of possible positions dictated by complex rules of probability.
And theoretical physicist Sean Carroll is entirely happy with that. He says that the fact that tiny particles like electrons and photons don’t have one set place in the universe is evidence that there are many parallel universes.
Boeing, an important player in the US space program for decades, hopes that its Starliner manned spacecraft will deliver astronauts to the International Space Station and the moon.
A software issue that prevented an unmanned test capsule from docking with the space station caused NASA to launch a review; preliminary results highlight serious safety concerns.
Boeing may have to attempt another test launch to meet the requirements of NASA’s Commercial Crew Development Program, which would cost it $410 million.
Scientists have discovered the biggest explosion seen in the universe since the Big Bang, a new study reports. The explosion took place at the center of a galaxy that’s about 390 million light years from Earth.
“We’ve seen outbursts in the centers of galaxies before, but this one is really, really massive,” said study co-author Melanie Johnston-Hollitt of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, in a statement. “And we don’t know why it’s so big.”
She added that the explosion happened very slowly, taking place over hundreds of millions of years. It also released five times more energy than the previous record holder.
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