COVID-19

The latest DDW Sitting Down With podcast features Guy Goldberg, Chief Business Officer of RedHill Biopharma. RedHill Biopharma  is a biopharmaceutical company that recently announced the dosing of the first patient in its US Phase II/III study of orally-administered RHB-107 (upamostat), an investigational new drug for patients with symptomatic COVID-19 who do not require hospital […]

ILC Therapeutics, a biotech company based in Scotland, is developing a synthetic Interferon which has shown great promise against COVID-19 in laboratory testing and will enter clinical trials later this year. It will be, says the company, the first synthetic Interferon based on the most prominent activities of the natural Interferons. The company believes that […]

Professor Sarah Gilbert, head of the team behind the Oxford AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, has told UK MPs that there is a possibility the vaccine could be taken orally and perhaps also via a nasal spray. Reported in The Guardian newspaper today, she was asked by MP Graham Stringer how the vaccine might be developed in […]

The study is the first to describe across an entire country the effect of the Pfizer and Oxford-AstraZeneca jabs in the community on preventing severe illness resulting in hospitalisation. Previous results about vaccine efficacy have come from clinical trials. Hospitalisation drop By the fourth week after receiving the initial dose, the Pfizer and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines […]

Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) have begun a new Phase II study with 720 volunteers aged 18 and over to select the most appropriate antigen dosage for Phase III evaluation of their adjuvanted recombinant protein COVID-19 vaccine candidate. “Over the past few weeks, our teams have worked to refine the antigen formulation of our recombinant-protein vaccine, […]

RedHill Biopharma, a specialty biopharmaceutical company, has announced that the first patient was dosed in its US Phase II/III study of orally-administered RHB-107 (upamostat)[i], an investigational new drug for patients with symptomatic COVID-19 who do not require hospital care. Dror Ben-Asher, RedHill’s CEO said: “RedHill is rapidly advancing two Phase III-stage, orally-administered, novel molecules for […]

The UK will be the first country in the world to run a COVID-19 human challenge study, following approval from the UK’s clinical trials ethics body. Backed by a £33.6 million UK government investment, the first-of-its-kind study for this virus will involve establishing the smallest amount of virus needed to cause infection, which will give […]

BioIVT, provider of research models and services for drug and diagnostic development, has introduced its COVID-19 Vaccination Panel, composed of pre- and post-vaccination serum or PBMC samples, to enable researchers to study blood donors’ vaccine-generated immune response. BioIVT has been providing more than 300 clients with biospecimens to support the development of COVID-19 diagnostic assays […]

Evonik is investing in the short-term expansion of its specialty lipids production which are essential for mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines. Commercial lipid quantities are to be produced at Evonik’s Hanau and Dossenheim sites in Germany as early as the second half of 2021 as part of a strategic partnership with vaccine manufacturer BioNTech. Evonik is making […]

The World Health Organization (WHO) Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) has produced guidelines for the emergency use of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 coronavirus vaccine developed by the University of Oxford with its partner AstraZeneca. The WHO has recommended that two standard doses of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 be administered at an 8- to 12-week interval in people […]