Medical Research

After the success of the Covid vaccine developed jointly with Biontech, US pharma giant Pfizer wants to further expand its vaccine business - possibly even without its German partner. "We're happy to work with Biontech, but we don't have to work with Biontech," Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told the Wall Street Journal.

The novel mRNA technology has "dramatic potential" and Pfizer is confident it can now develop mRNA vaccines on its own, Bourla said, according to the editorial version distributed on the newspaper's website. "We have developed our own expertise." The two companies would continue to cooperate on Covid-19 vaccines.

After her mother was vaccinated against Covid-19, a baby girl was born with antibodies that fight the coronavirus in Florida in the eastern United States.

The girl's mother was 36 weeks pregnant when she received the first dose of the antidote developed by the Moderna laboratory, to which she agreed because she was on the front line of the fight against the pandemic. The baby girl was born three weeks later, in late January.

"As far as we know, this is the world's first reported case of a baby born with covid-19 antibodies after her mother's vaccination," said Paul Gilbert, a pediatrician. Gilbert and Chad Rudnick, also a pediatrician, will publish a scientific paper on the matter, they said in an interview with Palm Beach television station WBPF.

A 40-year-old man from London is believed to have become the second person in the world to be cured of HIV.

Adam Castillejo remains free of the virus 30 months after he stopped anti-retroviral therapy, doctors said. A stem-cell treatment he underwent for cancer also cured him of HIV, according to a study published in the medical journal The Lancet.

Lead researcher Professor Ravindra Kumar Gupta of the University of Cambridge told BBC News: "This represents HIV cure with almost certainty. "Our findings show that the success of stem-cell transplantation as a cure for HIV, first reported nine years ago in the Berlin patient, can be replicated."

The new technique relies on plastic tubes with insecticide, inserted in holes on house walls. It has been tested over 2 years in 40 villages within Ivory Coast, in combination with bed nets.

French President Emmanuel Macron is urging the United States and European countries to allocate up to 5% of Coronavirus vaccine supplies to poor and developing countries.

Macron: “If we allow to take root the idea that hundreds of millions of vaccines are made in rich countries and that we don’t start in poor countries, that idea is unsustainable.”

In about half (48 percent) of the adults who said they tested positive for Covid-19 before the start of the study, no so-called neutralizing antibodies were detectable. This is shown by new data from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI). The result once again speaks in favor of vaccination, said RKI President Lothar Wieler. It is generally not atypical for coronaviruses to lose their antibody protection more quickly than other viruses.

A research team from London now writes that apple cider vinegar can also eliminate antibiotic-resistant germs. The researchers have carried out tests with resistant staphylococci and e-coli bacteria. In the tests, the apple cider vinegar penetrated the bacterial cells and stopped the growth processes there. According to the researchers, the effect is comparable to that of certain antibiotics, which are no longer effective against these germs.

A study by Rockefeller University suggests that patients who recovered from a Covid-19 infection were immune to the virus for at least six months. Participants showed an improvement of antibodies even after the infection has waned and an increased ability to block various Covid-19 mutations.

"This is really exciting news. The type of immune response we see here could potentially provide protection for quite some time, by enabling the body to mount a rapid and effective response to the virus upon re-exposure," says Michel C. Nussenzweig, the Zanvil A. Cohn and Ralph M. Steinman Professor and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Immunology

An international study also states that Englishmen and Scotsmen got seriously drunk most often in 2019.

With 33.8 times in a year, the Scots were slightly ahead of the English (33.7) on average, according to the Global Drug Survey. More than 90,000 people in more than 25 countries were surveyed at the end of 2019 for the survey, which was published Monday. Getting drunk was defined in the survey like this: So much alcohol was drunk that physical and mental abilities were massively impaired - including, for example, sense of balance or speech.

A study by the University of Southern California has found that "due to COVID-19 deaths last year, life expectancy at birth for Americans will shorten by 1.13 years to 77.48 years" – the largest single-year decline in four decades. The research found that life expectancy was further reduced among the Black and Latino populations in the US, with a reduction of 2.10 years to 72.78 years for Black people and 3.05 years to 78.77 years for Latinos, compared to a reduction of 0.68 years to 77.84 years for white people.

"Our study analyzes the effect of this exceptional number of deaths on life expectancy for the entire nation, as well as the consequences for marginalized groups," said study author Theresa Andrasfay, a postdoctoral fellow at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. "The COVID-19 pandemic's disproportionate effect on the life expectancy of Black and Latino Americans likely has to do with their greater exposure through their workplace or extended family contacts, in addition to receiving poorer health care, leading to more infections and worse outcomes."

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved cabotegravir and rilpivirine injection – called Cabenuva – as a long-acting treatment for HIV-1 infections in adults. The new treatment is the first injectable treatment that has to be administered on a monthly basis, replacing daily pill medications to control the infection of the AIDS virus.

Researchers at the University of Pretoria in South Africa report that they have found substances that could prevent tmalaria ransmission. They write in the journal Nature Communications that two substances that have been studied for their effectiveness against tuberculosis and cancer can kill malaria parasites - even when it is infectious. For the past year, the WHO fears even more victims because many prevention measures could not be implemented due to the Corona pandemic.

Mainz-based BioNTech is working on an mRNA-based vaccine against multiple sclerosis. The first preclinical studies are promising; the vaccine approach was able to prevent MS disease in mice, and in mice that were already mildly ill, it was able to prevent the disease from progressing and motor functions could even be restored. The study on the mice is so promising that the start of clinical trials on humans is now the next goal, although these cannot begin for at least two years, as the approach must first be tested on human cells in the laboratory.

The newly discovered South African variant of Covid-19 seems to be "more effective at spreading" and might be slightly more resistant to vaccines, South African scientists believe.

"Putting our data together with that in the UK, this [South African] variant is a bit more effective at spreading from person to person and that is not good. It means we have to get a bit better at stopping it," so Dr. Richard Lessells who is one of the specialists leading the research into the new mutation. "Ours raises a few more concerns for a vaccine [than the UK variant] … Another worry is reinfection. We are currently doing the careful, methodical work in the laboratory to answer all the questions we have and that takes time."

The Vatican said that it is "morally acceptable" to receive a Coronavirus vaccine even if cell lines from tissues of aborted fetuses were used in its production. The Vatican stated that the use of such vaccines "does not in itself constitute a legitimation, even indirect, of the practice of abortion".

The Imperial College London's Centre for Psychedelic Research will run the first clinical trial of depression treatment with the psychedelic and illegal substance dimethyltryptamine (DMT). It will be held in in collaboration with Small Pharma, with a neuropharmaceutical company.

Small Pharma stated that the approval is a "truly ground-breaking moment" in the treatment of depression and the chief medical and scientific officer at the company, Carol Routledge, has added that she believes that "Psychedelic assisted therapy will revolutionise the treatment of depression because it gets right to the root cause of the illness".

In order to allow wider use of marijuana for medical purposes, Thailand's Narcotics Control Board has voted to remove cannabis plants from the list of Category 5 narcotics.

However, growing marijuana is only allowed if a permit is granted by the FDA to ensure alignment with government agencies.

DeepMind has presented an AI application that makes it possible to predict protein structure with high accuracy. According to John Moult, a biologist at the University of Maryland, it is the first application of artificial intelligence "that has solved a serious problem".

Independent scientists said the breakthrough would help researchers tease apart the mechanisms that drive some diseases and pave the way for designer medicines, more nutritious crops, and “green enzymes” that can break down plastic pollution.

The European Court of Justice in its current decision stated that CBD not an addictive drug in the sense of the UN Single Convention. The court argued with the current state of science that CBD has no harmful effects on human health (ECJ C-663/18 of 19.11.2020).

This decision is contrary stance of the EU Commission which argued that CBD is an addictive drug.

Worldwide 38 million people are infected with HIV and despite the long fight against the virus and education about it, there are still 1.7 million newly infected people every year. With drugs for HIV prevention, attempts are being made to reduce this number. In clinical studies, the new drug Cabotegravir has now proven to be particularly effective.

It only needs to be injected every eight weeks instead of having to be taken daily in pills as before. Especially for women, the drug is more effective than the previously available pill Truvada, but the new drug is also more effective for men and transwomen