Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical

To develop its drug, Vir “deliberately isolated an antibody that binds to a part of the virus that is very difficult for the virus to mutate,” he said. That piece of the virus is “conserved, not only in all the variants, but in SARS-1… and in a whole family of coronaviruses.”

Vir knew the variant onslaught was coming, said the company’s executive vice president of research and chief scientific officer, Herbert “Skip” Virgin, M.D., Ph.D. So far, added Scangos, its premise of targeting a conserved site to maintain efficacy against mutations “seems to be holding true.”

Sotrovimab “appears to retain activity against variants of concern” like alpha, beta, gamma, epsilon and iota, the National Institutes of Health noted in recently updated COVID-19 treatment guidelines. Last week, GSK and Vir provided data suggesting that delta also belongs to that list. Updated lab experiment data posted on the preprint repository bioRxiv showed sotrovimab’s activity against 14 variants including the troubling delta variant—which first surfaced in India and appears to spread more rapidly than the already-speedy alpha—was very similar to that against the original SARS-CoV-2 virus.

While several vaccines now stand tall in the fight against COVID-19, therapies—and antibody drugs in particular—have had a decidedly tougher time. Saddled with access issues and beset by fast-emerging variants, firstcomer Eli Lilly has recently been forced to rethink its tactics. Now, GlaxoSmithKline and Vir Biotechnology are applying those lessons to their solo agent sotrovimab.

Backed by promising phase 3 data and lab results showing efficacy against a suite of virus variants including the lurking delta variant, sotrovimab still has a big role to play in the pandemic, executives from GSK and Vir said in a recent joint interview with Fierce Pharma and Fierce Biotech.

Federal officials seem to agree. Late last week, the U.S. paused the distribution of Eli Lilly’s combo of bamlanivimab and etesevimab until further notice, citing the ascent of the gamma and beta variants stateside. With Lilly’s drug struggling to keep pace with mutations, the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness Response and the FDA urged healthcare providers to switch to other authorized antibodies like sotrovimab and Regeneron’s cocktail REGEN-COV, both of which are “likely to retain activity” against the gamma and beta variants, which now make up more than 11% of sequenced U.S. coronavirus cases, ASPR said in a release.

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Humans are integrating with technology. Not in the future – now. With the emergence of custom prosthetics that make us stronger and faster, neural implants that change how our brains work, and new senses and abilities that you’ve never dreamed of having, it’s time to start imagining what a better version of you might look like.

From reality-enhancing implants to brain-controlled exoskeletons, breakthroughs in bio-tech have fuelled a new fusion of machinery and organic matter.

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World Economic Forum Founder Klaus Schwab opens Cyber Polygon 2021 with a warning: “A lack of cybersecurity has become a clear and immediate danger to our society worldwide.”

Giving the welcoming remarks at Cyber Polygon for the second year in a row, Schwab spoke at length about the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) desire to tackle cybersecurity by bringing together a closer merger of corporations, small businesses, and governments.

Last year, Schwab warned, “We all know, but still pay insufficient attention to, the frightening scenario of a comprehensive cyber attack, which would bring a complete halt to the power supply, transportation, hospital services, our society as a whole.”

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Using CRISPR-Cas9, the researchers subsequently removed the one copy of the Ndn gene from the 15q dup mouse model to generate mice with a normalized genomic copy number for this gene (15q dupΔNdn mouse). Using this model, they demonstrated that the abnormalities observed in 15q dup mice (abnormal spine turnover rate and decreased inhibitory synaptic input) could be ameliorated.

A research group including Kobe University’s Professor TAKUMI Toru (also a Senior Visiting Scientist at RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research) and Assistant Professor TAMADA Kota, both of the Physiology Division in the Graduate School of Medicine, has revealed a causal gene (Necdin, NDN) in autism model mice that have the chromosomal abnormality called copy number variation.

The researchers hope to illuminate the NDN gene’s molecular mechanism in order to contribute towards the creation of new treatment strategies for developmental disorders including autism.

These research results were published in Nature Communications on July 1, 2021.

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The overall response rate in the trial population was 40% (95% CI 29%-51%). Median duration of response was 11.1 months (95% CI 6.9-not evaluable), with nearly two-thirds of patients having a duration of response of at least 6 months.

The FDA approved amivantamab-vmjw (Rybrevant) on Friday as the first treatment for patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) harboring EGFR exon 20 insertion mutations.

Amivantamab is a bispecific antibody that targets EGFR and mesenchymal-epithelial transition factor pathways. EGFR exon 20 insertion mutations occur in approximately 2% to 3% of NSCLC patients, and are associated with rapid cell growth.

“Advances in precision oncology continue to facilitate drug development, allowing diseases like lung cancer to be subset into biomarker-defined populations appropriate for targeted therapies,” said Julia Beaver, MD, chief of medical oncology in the FDA’s Oncology Center of Excellence, in a statement. “With today’s approval, for the first time, patients with non-small cell lung cancer with EGFR exon 20 insertion mutations will have a targeted treatment option.”

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Ageing is an incredibly complicated process, so much so that we do not yet understand exactly how complicated it is. It is in fact so complicated, that it could actually be incredibly simple. Confused? Well, imagine if you were a structural engineer who was trying to understand why a building collapsed. From an initial inspection of the rubble, it may be extremely difficult to work out exactly what went wrong. Was the building made from inferior materials? Was it built incorrectly? Was its destruction deliberate? Did it just fall apart due to age? All of these are possible, but what was the true cause for its destruction? Well, that is the same mystery we are trying to solve in longevity research. We can see the damage that is caused by ageing, but what is the cause? Is it a general accumulation of damage, or are there single points of failure which have knock on effects that affect the entire body? A cascade failure if you will.

Of the many different changes that occur during the ageing process, one of the most well-known and understood is the decreased capacity for our body to produced chemical energy, which has a knock-on effect throughout the body. This results in a general decrease in our ability to carry out cellular functions and will therefore effective everything from muscle strength to DNA replication and repair. This decrease in energy output has been linked to defects in our mitochondria, but in addition to these physical defects that occur in these small organisms, we now know that they also suffer a decreased capacity to carry out their function due to lacking a critical coenzyme called Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD). Anyone who has taken a high school level biology class will probably recognise this enzyme as part of the electron transport chain in respiration.

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