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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,009

WHO declines comment on remdesivir in COVID-19, hopes for best

The WHO just removed pre made criticism of Gilead’s drug from it’s website. It quoted a flawed Chinese study on the drug, yet somehow the criticism was posted on it’s website. The criticism of the drug has since been removed as data from the Chicago study had not even yet been released, and they recieved strong criticism for it. A group of influential people and organizations have been criticizing every treatment, while at the same time proposing vaccines that do not even exist. Every doctor signs an oath, and you can not just let people die for vested interests, as it is my belief that is what is happening. I could be wrong, so prove me wrong by stopping the deaths with effetive treatment and less disinformation that supports vested interests.

A top World Health Organization official declined comment on Wednesday on reports that Gilead Science’s remdesivir could help treat COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus, but said that further data was needed.

Elon Musk says shelter-in-place orders during COVID-19 are ‘fascist’

Billionaire Rocket Scientist SpaceX CEO Elon Musk: “Give people back their goddamn freedom.”

Elon Musk called the shelter-in-place orders in the San Francisco Bay Area and throughout the US “fascist” actions that are stripping people of their freedom on a Tesla earnings call on Wednesday. Musk’s comments come after a torrent of criticism for remarks he made late Tuesday night on Twitter, in which the billionaire CEO echoed President Trump by writing in all caps, “Free America Now.”

The rant began after Musk said, “We are a bit worried about not being able to resume production in the Bay Area, and that should be identified as a serious risk.” Six Bay Area counties jointly extended the shelter-in-place orders affecting San Francisco, Fremont, and other cities through May 31st, with only some minor relaxing of restrictions.

The US government is helping get cash to private space companies, replacing frozen venture capital

Investment in the fast-growing space industry was booming well into the first quarter of 2020 but private capital has largely frozen as the coronavirus pandemic strikes the U.S., leading both civil and military agencies to step up funding for corporate partners.

“We kicked into high gear as soon as it was apparent a lot of companies were not going to be able to conduct business as usual due to distancing requirements,” Mike Read, International Space Station business and economic development manager at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, told CNBC.

U.S. equity investment in space companies totaled $5.4 billion across 36 deals in the first quarter, according to a report Friday by NYC-based firm Space Capital. But the second quarter is likely to just see a fraction of that investment, according to Space Capital managing partner Chad Anderson, as deal flow in the U.S. will follow China’s path. Chinese investment in space was climbing by record amounts until the first quarter, when “activity in China was basically shut off,” Anderson said.

Stanford University lab repurposes scuba gear into reusable PPE

Bioengineering professor Manu Prakash runs a lab at Stanford University that uses low-cost materials to create effective scientific devices. He returned from a recent vacation with some scuba gear — as well as a cold. While he tested negative for COVID-19, he stayed cautious and self-quarantined for two weeks. During that time, he reworked his snorkel mask into a reusable face shield for healthcare providers by combining it with a medical-grade filter. Dubbed the Pneumask, Prakash and his team tested the device and sent their findings to the FDA, which cleared it as a face shield or surgical mask, but not as a respirator. According to The Washington Post, this decision was made so that the masks could go out to healthcare workers immediately, as clearing the device as a respirator would require more time.

Manu Prakash and his team at Stanford University have turned a standard scuba mask into a reusable medical face mask.

Gut microbes influence how rat brains react to opioids

“Like you often have to do in science, we first hit the problem with a hammer to see how the system breaks, then backtrack from there,” Simpson said.

By that she means that in order to determine if the gut microbiome influenced drug addiction, they first needed to compare an organism with a normal gut microbiome to one without. To do that, the researchers gave some rats antibiotics that depleted 80 percent of their gut microbes. All of the rats — those with and without gut microbes — were dependent on the prescription opioid pain reliever oxycodone. Then some of the rats from each group went into withdrawal.

“To me, the most surprising thing was that the rats all seemed the same on the surface,” George said. “There weren’t any major changes in the pain-relieving effect of opioids, or symptoms of withdrawal or other behavior between the rats with and without gut microbes.”

It wasn’t until the team looked at the rats’ brains that they saw a significant difference. The typical pattern of neuron recruitment to different parts of the brain during intoxication and withdrawal was disrupted in rats that had been treated with antibiotics, and thus lacked most of their gut microbes. Most notably, during intoxication, rats with depleted gut microbes had more activated neurons in the regions of the brain that regulate stress and pain (periaqueductal gray, locus coeruleus) and regions involved in opioid intoxication and withdrawal (central amygdala, basolateral amygdala). During withdrawal, microbe-depleted rats had fewer activated neurons in the central amygdala, as compared to rats with normal gut microbiomes.

“It was many months of counting black dots,” Simpson said. “But in the end it became clear that, at least in rats, gut microbes alter the way the brain responds to drugs.”

That shift could affect behavior, she explained, because a decrease in neurons recruited in the central amygdala could result in fewer withdrawal symptoms, which can in turn lead to a higher risk of drug abuse.

As a now-healthy graduate student, Simpson first worked on techniques to visualize molecules in the brain. But she couldn’t shake her interest in the gut microbiome and its connections to the brain.

Continue reading “Gut microbes influence how rat brains react to opioids” | >

Dr. Fauci backed controversial Wuhan lab with millions of U.S. dollars for risky coronavirus research

“just last year, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the organization led by Dr. Fauci, funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.

In 2019, with the backing of NIAID, the National Institutes of Health committed $3.7 million over six years for research that included some gain-of-function work. The program followed another $3.7 million, 5-year project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, which ended in 2019, bringing the total to $7.4 million.”

Biomedical research ultimately helps protect public health, Fauci argued. The Wuhan lab that received U.S. taxpayer money is suspected of playing a role in starting the Covid-19 pandemic.

238 inmates test positive for coronavirus at Sterling prison, the largest known outbreak in Colorado

A Colorado prison is now the site of the state’s largest confirmed COVID-19 outbreak as mass testing confirms that 238 inmates at Sterling Correctional Facility have the virus.

The number of positive cases at the facility spiked as more results from the 472 tests administered last week became available. Of those tested, half were positive. Sixteen tests were inconclusive, 216 were negative and two were still pending Tuesday afternoon, Colorado Department of Corrections spokeswoman Annie Skinner said in an email.

Four of the sick inmates were in the hospital Tuesday afternoon, Skinner said.