Medical Research
According to an announcement from Russian President Vladimir Putin, the country has registered and approved the world's first Covid-19 vaccine.
Multiple experts have stated that it is still unclear if the vaccine is safe, as phase three clinical trials are still underway. These phase three trials have the goal of determining if the vaccine is safe and works in the general population.
Multiple experts from around the world have voice their concerns and criticism of this rushed approval process including the executive director of the Russian nonprofit Association of Clinical Trials Organizations, Svetlana Zavidova. She has asked "why are all corporations following the rules, but Russian ones aren’t? The rules for conducting clinical trials are written in blood. They can’t be violated" and added that "this is a Pandora’s Box and we don’t know what will happen to people injected with an unproven vaccine".
The Indian company Serum Institute has announced that its Covid-19 vaccine once developed and approved will have a ceiling price of $3 per dose for India and low-and-middle-income countries. Serum is the world's largest manufacturer of vaccines by volume and has now received at-risk funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation. The money will be used to produce possible candidates for vaccines.
Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne have developed the first synthetic blood-thinner. Together with three other laboratories, the Laboratory of Therapeutic Proteins and Peptides of Professor Christian Heinis has developed an inhibitor that stays in the blood plasma for over 120 hours and shows high potency, stability and selectivity.
Together with the University Hospital of Bern (Inselspital) and the University of Bern they've shown that the new blood-thinner can efficiently block coagulation in a thrombosis model without the increased risk of bleeding side effects present in currently used blood-thinners.
Professor Christian Heinis has stated that "our collaboration found that it is possible to achieve bleeding-free anti-coagulation with a synthetic inhibitor". According to him, the "inhibitor is a promising candidate for safe thromboprotection in artificial lungs" and will undergo further studies and optimizations.
Scientists from the Monash University School of Clinical Science, the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, the Chris O'Brien Lifehouse and Predicine, a biotech company from California have developed a blood test for the diagnosis of prostate cancer in men.
The test is able to profile circulating DNA and RNA shed by cancer cells out of 10ml of blood. This procedure gives insight if cancer has developed and how it is composed, enabling conclusions on which treatment could possibly be the best.
The University of Newcastle and Hunter Medical Research Insitute in Australia have tested a modified strain of cannabis for its abilities to kill or inhibit cancer cells.
Dr Matt Dun researched for three years on the potential treatment of cancer with cannabis containing high levels of cannabidiol (CBD), the non-psychoactive component of the plant. The research was in collaboration with the Australian biotech company ANTG (Australian Natural Therapeutics Group).
Dr Dun has states that they "initially used leukaemia cells and were surprised by how sensitive they were" while the substance speared normal bone marrow cells and healthy white blood cells.
Comparing THC and CBD strains Dr Dun stated that "the CBD variety looks to have greater efficacy, low toxicity and fewer side-effects, which potentially makes it an ideal complementary therapy to combine with other anti-cancer compounds".
The officially as first considered German Covid-19 patient stated that he does not carry protecting antibodies in his blood anymore since three months after his infection.
The to this day unnamed man stated in an interview published by his employer Webasto that "Since April I have had no more neutralizing antibodies" but added that he has no long-term effects from the virus and is now at full health again. He had previously spent 19 days in the hospital.
A global team of scientists has researched through one of the largest databases for existing drugs and identified 21 potential substances that could potentially safely induce an antiviral reaction in patients against SARS-CoV-2.
Out of these four substances work synergistically with the already for Covid-19 approved remdesivir drug. Further studies and research are still underway.
Researchers from Oxford have published new results from their ongoing trails of a possible Covid-19 vaccine. During the last trial that involved 1,077 people, it showed that the experimental vaccine not only leads the patients to develop antibodies but also T-cells that are able to fight the virus.
The United Kingdom has already ordered 100 million doses of the vaccine. Further trials are still underway to determine if patients develop a long term immunitiy.
The Spanish Neurology Association (SEN) has evaluated multiple studies conducted on Covid-19 patients in Spain. Following the results of the research registry Albacovid out of 841 patients that had been hospitalized due to Covid-19, 57% have developed one ore multiple neurological symptoms. The most common were myalgia, headaches and dizziness. Almost 20% and mostly elderly people also developed some form of consciousness disorder.
Of all patients 20% developed problems such as psychosis, anxiety and insomnia. Other and more severe symptoms were also developed in a number of patients, such as dysautonomia a dysfunction that affects the autonomic nervous system. According to the studies this research indicates that Covid-19 not only affects the respiratory, but also the nervous system.
The medical and pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson has received approval for their Ebola vaccine by the European Commission.
Both components of the two-dose vaccine for the prevention of the virus have been approved and the company hopes that this will lead to "accelerated registration" in African countries. J&J is the second company to receive approval for an Ebola vaccine after Merck.
In a first phase study, a possible Covid-19 vaccine developed by the biotech company Moderna together with the National Institutes of Health has induced immune responses in all of the patients. While the vaccine had mild side effects such as chills, headache or muscle pain, it is the first vaccine candidate from the United States to be published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.
A large phase three trial will be started this month after which, depending on the results, regulators will decide of it'll made available to the public.
Biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences Inc. announced that trials for its inhaled solution of Remdesivir have begun. The randomised, placebo-controlled trial will be tested on 60 healthy patients between the ages of 18-45 to determine the safety, tolerability and pharmacokinetics of the drug.
"With promising data emerging from the randomized, clinical trials of intravenous remdesivir administered to hospitalized patients, it became clear that efforts were needed to investigate the drug’s potential in the outpatient setting. Significant research efforts have been undertaken to deliver remdesivir in an inhaled, nebulized format," so Chief Medical Officer Dr. Merdad Parsey.
Starting July 1, homeopathic products are only allowed to be marketed as medical products with a therapeutic claim or indication if the effect has been proven in clinical trials in Hungary. This affects 41 homeopathic products as Hungary has no homeopathic product on the market that has proven therapeutic efficiency in clinical trials. If a homeopathic product is not able to prove its efficiency through clinical trials it can be registered as a "high-dilution product" but is not allowed to be marketed with a therapeutic indication.
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci has said that the White House has ordered to cancel funding for the Covid-19 research. Fauci stated "It was cancelled because the NIH was told to cancel it" and clarified to Politico that the White House gave the instructions. The project had been studying how Covid-19 could spread from bats to humans.
Scientists from the Cambridge and Greenwich Universities have stated that their research that focussed on the spread of the Covid-19 suggests that lockdowns alone are not enough to contain the virus from resurging in a second wave. It instead indicates that the widespread use of face masks - even homemade ones - could reduce the transmission rates to a controllable level if enough people wear them.
During an outdoor prayer service with around 130 attendees, Pope Francis has urged politicians to move funds from weapons towards medical research in order to prevent the next pandemic. Most of the invited people were directly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic and most of them wore masks during the prayer service except when leading prayers at the microphone. The Pope himself sat separated from the others and did not wear a mask himself.
France has revoked a decree that authorised the usage of hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 treatments. The move comes after the World Health Organization suspended a global drug trial due to safety concerns. Furthermore, a study by the British medical journal The Lancet found the drug to increase mortality rates and frequency of irregular heartbeats in patients.
In his Sunday briefing, Business Secretary Alok Sharma said clinical trials for the Covid-19 vaccine by the University of Oxford were progressing well. The trial is currently in phase one and all participants have received their doses. Oxford has received over £47 million by the government so far and Sharma announced another £84 million in new funding.
Sharma added: "This means that if the vaccine is successful AstraZeneca (a British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical company) will work to make 30 million doses available by September for the UK as part of an agreement for over 100 million doses in total."
Vitamin D was previously associated with resistance to acute respiratory infections. A new study shows that countries with lower mean vitamin D levels are also having higher infection and mortality rates of coronavirus.
Since 2016 researchers have used over 130 llamas from a research farm in Belgium for antibody research against the MERS and SARS viruses, which are similar to Covid-19. The researchers found that llamas produce a special type of antibodies called nanobodies which are effective against MERS and SARS and suggest that a possible treatment of Covid-19 could also be possible. The researchers from the US and Belgium are currently conducting further research.