COVID-19

The first effective coronavirus vaccine can prevent more than 90% of people from getting Covid-19, a preliminary analysis has shown. The developers – Pfizer and BioNTech – described it as a “great day for science and humanity”. The analysis evaluated 94 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in trial participants. Daniel Davis, Professor of Immunology at The […]

Pfizer and BioNTech have announced their mRNA-based vaccine candidate, BNT162b2, against SARS-CoV-2 has demonstrated evidence of efficacy against COVID-19 in participants without prior evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection, based on the first interim efficacy analysis conducted on November 8, 2020 by an external, independent Data Monitoring Committee (DMC) from the Phase III clinical study. The analysis […]

Mammoth Biosciences has signed agreements with MilliporeSigma and Hamilton Company targeting commercialisation of a high-throughput CRISPR-based SARS CoV-2 test. The test leverages Mammoth’s DETECTR BOOST platform and will provide a sample-to-answer turnkey solution for commercial laboratories to enable an increase in testing capacity. As laboratories face limited capacity and testing supply shortages amid the pandemic, […]

Brigham and Women’s Hospital researchers analysed patients’ levels of inflammation, known to be associated with severity of illness, by looking at C-reactive protein (CRP) trends in 100 COVID-19 patients admitted to the hospital. They found that a rapid rise in CRP levels during the first 48-to-72 hours of hospitalisation was predictive of subsequent respiratory deterioration […]

By Andrew Myers Throughout the pandemic, infectious disease experts and frontline medical workers have asked for a faster, cheaper and more reliable COVID-19 test. Now, leveraging the so-called “lab on a chip” technology and the cutting-edge genetic editing technique known as CRISPR, researchers at Stanford have created a highly automated device that can identify the […]

University of South Australia cancer researcher, Dr Nirmal Robinson, working with a team in Naples, has found evidence in animal models that the beta-blocker Propranolol helps suppress the spread of cancer in the lung which has an inflammatory profile very similar to COVID-19. The scientists have presented their findings in a paper published in Frontiers […]

University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine scientists have discovered the fastest way to identify potent, neutralising human monoclonal antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The method– as well as a trio of successful animal studies on an antibody called ‘Ab1’– are described today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Ab1 […]

Analysis from virtual clinical development specialist Phesi shows the enrolment and effectiveness of two current COVID-19 vaccine trials conducted by global pharmaceutical development companies. On the surface, both trials appear to be on track to complete enrolment, however, looking deeper, there is a significant difference in the Site Effectiveness Index (SEI) between the two, with […]

A new study from Lawson Health Research Institute, Western University and University of Alberta suggests that COVID-19 affects the human body’s blood concentration levels of specific metabolites – small molecules broken down in the human body through the process of metabolism. Three specific metabolites identified in this study could act as biomarkers and one day […]

The UK BIA Antibody Taskforce, a UK consortium developing antibodies for treating COVID-19 has reached a major milestone – the identification of differentiated antibody combinations that will be taken forward for further development as an antibody ‘cocktail’. The Taskforce developed an accelerated and rigorous multifaceted approach to create a pool of over 600 novel candidates […]