The search for COVID-19 therapies has turned to an antibody that was first identified back in 2003, in a blood sample from a patient who recovered from a similar coronavirus-based disease.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,911
Circa 2010 what someday we could use crispr to develop a biology singularity to find the epigenetics to evolve at lightning speed.
If you’re a sci-fi reader, you are probably familiar with the idea of the “technological singularity”. For the uninitiated, the Singularity is the idea that computational power is increasing so rapidly that soon there will be genuine artificial intelligence that will far surpass humans. Essentially, once you have smarter-than-human computers, they will drive their own advancement and we will no longer be able to comprehend the technology.
We can debate whether the singularity will or will not happen, and what the consequences might be, for a long time, but that’s not the point of this post. This post was inspired by the final chapter in Denialism by Michael Specter. In that chapter, Specter talks about the rapid advancement in biotechnology. Specifically, he points to the rapid increase in computational power and the resulting rapid increase in the speed of genome processing.
Paris (AFP) — An antibody from a patient who recovered from SARS has been shown to block COVID-19 infection in a laboratory setting, researchers said Monday in another potential breakthrough in the search for coronavirus treatment.
Scientists based in Switzerland and the United States previously isolated the antibodies from the patient in 2003, following the SARS outbreak that killed 774 people.
They experimented with 25 different types of antibodies — which target specific protein spikes on viruses — to see if they could prevent cells becoming infected with COVID-19.
In a milestone moment in the race for a coronavirus vaccine, the first results in humans showed Moderna’s vaccine candidate led to antibody responses in a handful of healthy volunteers.
The Massachusetts biotech on Monday described the immune-system responses to the vaccine from this first, small study that was primarily focused on safety. The results don’t yet show whether the vaccine would prevent people from being infected with the novel coronavirus.
Finding an effective coronavirus vaccine has become a global priority in ending the pandemic. US government leaders have put forward the ambitious timeline to have one by the end of 2020. It typically takes several years to develop a vaccine.
Scientists at the University of Buffalo have created mouse embryos that contain a strangely high amount of human cells.
Even as dramatic social change has been imposed by COVID-19, the kinds of fraud attacks companies experience and the biometric authentication technologies they use to prevent them have remained basically the same. What has changed is that online volumes of traffic, transactions and authentications have reached levels they were expected to years in the future, BehavioSec VP of Products Jordan Blake told Biometric Update in an interview.
As a result, he says, “timelines are getting advanced.”
Demand is coming from new verticals, according to Blake, as numerous people begin using the online channel to interact with many organizations they never have dealt with that way before.
This is a guest post by Shahrokh Shahidzadeh, CEO at Acceptto
These past two months have been among the most extraordinary times any of us can remember. The COVID-19 (CV-19) impact is all around us, indiscriminately impacting all of our lives, our work, the economy and for sure we are on the onset of a new normal that we are learning how to deal with daily.
There are always two stages of dealing with a change of this magnitude. First, we react immediately, thinking about what we must do differently now. Soon, we will begin to think in the longer term, reacting to and planning for permanent changes that result from the CV-19 pandemic.
“We’ve wondered if it might be possible to simply rewind the aging clock without inducing pluripotency,” said Vittorio Sebastiano, assistant professor at Stanford University and senior author of the Nature Communications article. “Now we’ve found that tightly controlling the exposure to these proteins can promote rejuvenation in multiple human cell types, including stem cells. This has profound implications for regeneration and restoration of cell functionality of aged tissues.”
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 25, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — A study published in the respected Nature Communications journal highlights the promise of technology being developed by Turn Biotechnologies to treat age-related health conditions.
The study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine found that old human cells can be induced into a more youthful and vigorous state when they are exposed to a rejuvenating treatment that triggers the limited expression of a group of proteins known as Yamanaka factors, which are important to embryonic development.
The most comprehensive national study to date has found that convalescent plasma appears to be safe to use on COVID-19 patients, a promising development in the race to find a treatment for the deadly virus. But the study didn’t determine whether the treatment works.
A team of more than 5,000 doctors from over 2,000 hospitals and laboratories have been testing the experimental therapy, which involves transfusing the antibody-rich blood serum of recovered COVID-19 patients into people who are battling the illness.
The constantly intensifying battle against viruses and antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” isn’t only about finding stronger drugs against infection. The focus is moving to preventing infections in the first place.
That’s why large companies such as Carrefour and a Far East luxury hotel chain are looking at unique germ-vanquishing textiles invented by Jerusalem’s Argaman Technologies and manufactured inside its custom-built factory.
Carrefour Group, a French-based superstore chain with 12,000 retail stores in 30 countries, is testing Argaman’s CottonX — billed as the world’s first bio-inhibitive 100 percent cotton – in a line of uniforms dubbed “The Uniform that Cares.”