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Published on August 14, 2020
Thermo Fisher Scientific today terminated its agreement to acquire QIAGEN after the would-be buyer failed to persuade enough QIAGEN shareholders to approve the potentially $12.5 billion deal. Shareholders with only 47% of outstanding QIAGEN shares agreed to support the acquisition deal, which required approval by owners of 66.67% of those…
Published on July 24, 2020
The ADA2 gene provides instructions for making an enzyme called adenosine deaminase 2. ADA2’s function has been poorly understood. Previous studies suggest that the enzyme acts as a growth factor. The enzyme also appears to be involved in the growth and development of certain immune system cells including macrophages, which…
Published on July 22, 2020
A team from Columbia University Irving Medical Center report that they have isolated antibodies from several COVID-19 patients that are, to date, among the most potent in neutralizing the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Their work is published today in Nature in a paper titled, “Potent neutralizing antibodies directed to multiple epitopes on SARS-CoV-2 spike.”…
Published on June 19, 2020
The difference in the severity of COVID-19 from one patient to the next is a matter of intense research. Some hypotheses (none of which have been proven) focus on the amount of virus one initially comes into contact with, potential immunity from previous infections with similar coronaviruses, age and previous…
Published on June 16, 2020
The FDA on Monday repealed the emergency use authorization (EUA) it granted in March to anti-malarial drugs chloroquine phosphate and its less toxic metabolite hydroxychloroquine sulfate as treatments for COVID-19. The agency citing a lack of consistent replication of earlier promising results and a randomized controlled clinical trial that showed…
Published on June 15, 2020
While the clinical world has just begun to realize the promise of genomics to inform more precise care for individual patients, scientists also are pushing ahead with the development of clinical tools using other ’omics. The studies of proteins and metabolites—proteomics and metabolomics, respectively—offer considerable promise. In most cases, though,…
Published on June 15, 2020
Molecular diagnostics for everything from cancer testing to what medications doctors should prescribe—or not prescribe—for heart disease, mental health and a host of other conditions have been steadily increasing their share of the diagnostics pie over the past five years. That was until COVID-19 and the subsequent, ongoing global pandemic…
Published on June 9, 2020
With more than 134,000 diagnosed cases of COVID-19 to date, California trails only New York and New Jersey of the most cases in the U.S. Now, small-scale investigation into the epidemiological origins of SARS-CoV-2 in northern California suggests that, distinct from virus transmission patterns identified elsewhere, the virus arrived in…
Published on June 2, 2020
Maintaining a balance between patient data-sharing and patient privacy has always been tricky. Laws and hospital policy require that any shared patient information should be protected from a variety of identifying information given the exquisitely personal nature of health data. Yet, that very same information represents a rich store of…
Published on May 21, 2020
Has Abbott announced a government contract to supply millions of its laboratory-based IgG antibody tests to National Health Service (NHS) laboratories across the U.K. over the coming months. Abbott has capacity to provide significant numbers of tests to the UK and has already shipped 800,000 antibody tests this week to…
Published on May 7, 2020
Vaccine trials for SARS-CoV-2 are underway in the United States with NYU Grossman School of Medicine and the University of Maryland as the first centers to enroll patients. The randomized Phase I/II clinical trial will seek to enroll healthy patients to receive either one or two doses of one of…
Published on May 6, 2020
UK-based Iceni Diagnostics is developing a home-use SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic using glycan biology with the goal of having the test validated by autumn. Development of the hand-held device is being conducted at the University of East Anglia & John Innes Centre (JIC) spinout and supported by scientists at the Manchester Institute…
Published on May 5, 2020
An international team of researchers announced Monday that they have identified a fully human monoclonal antibody that prevents SARS-CoV-2 from infecting cultured cells. Discovery of the antibody, which also neutralizes the related SARS-CoV coronavirus, by scientists from Utrecht University, Erasmus Medical Center, and Harbour BioMed (HBM) represents an initial step…
Published on April 23, 2020
A clinical trial for a coronavirus vaccine candidate developed by researchers at the University of Oxford will begin today in the U.K., the first trial of its kind in the country, said U.K. Health Secretary Matt Hancock in a recent press briefing. The U.K. government has pledged to support the…
Published on April 20, 2020
The unfortunate reality for most cancer patients is that they will face resistance to one or more chemotherapeutic agents prescribed to eliminate their disease. Even more problematic, once a patient’s tumor is resistant to one type of chemotherapy, it is much more likely to be resistant to other chemotherapies as…