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Category: biotech/medical

Pfizer is investigating an oral antiviral drug that could prevent Covid-19 infection after being exposed to the virus, the company announced Monday, as scientists around the world work to develop new tools to fight Covid-19 and ease the burden on overwhelmed hospitals.

Pfizer said it is launching a mid-to-late-stage clinical trial to test whether the antiviral drug, PF-07321332, can prevent Covid-19 infection in some 2,660 healthy adults living in the same house as someone with a confirmed symptomatic infection.

The trial will test the safety and efficacy of the pill with ritonavir, another antiviral widely used to treat HIV.

Pfizer hopes the pill, taken twice a day, would stop someone from becoming infected with Covid-19.

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A DNA robot that can walk across biological cell membranes is the first one that can control living cells’ behaviour. The researchers who made the robot hope that it could improve cell-based precision medicine.

A team led by Hong-Hui Wang and Zhou Nie from Hunan University, China, has created a synthetic molecular robot that walks along the outer membrane of biological cells. The robot, powered by an enzyme’s catalytic activity, traverses across receptors that act as stepping stones on the cell surface. With each step, the robot activates a signal pathway that regulates cell migration. Driven by the robot’s movement, the cells can reach speeds of 24 μm/hour.

The researchers write that the DNA robot offers, for the first time, an opportunity to accurately and predictably control the nanoscale operations that power a live cell. They suggest that similar molecular machines that guide cell behaviours could play a role in cell-based therapies and regenerative medicine.

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The ZyCoV-D vaccine is also the world’s first DNA vaccine against Covid-19.

Like other vaccines, a DNA vaccine, once administered, teaches the body’s immune system to fight the real virus.

ZyCoV-D uses plasmids — or small rings of DNA that contain genetic information — to deliver the jab between two layers of the skin.

ZyCov-D is also India’s first needle-free Covid-19 jab.

It is administered with a disposable needle-free injector, which uses a narrow stream of the fluid to penetrate the skin and deliver the jab to the proper tissue.

India has given a boost to its vaccination programme by approving its first vaccine for those under 18.

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A new computer model demonstrates that vaccinations have impacts well beyond just preventing disease and death: they can also slow the spread of antimicrobial resistance.

Pneumococcal diseases—which include illnesses ranging from inner ear infections to pneumonia and meningitis—are a leading cause of death globally among children under five. While there are effective vaccines against pneumococcal diseases, access is still a challenge for populations in low-income—and some middle income—countries. And antimicrobial resistance to the antibiotics commonly used to treat these infections is a growing problem.

“We wanted to the value of vaccinating—not only to show that vaccination reduces death or disability from these diseases, but also to quantify whether vaccination can slow antimicrobial resistance,” says Andrew Stringer, an assistant professor of veterinary and global health at NC State.

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The Israeli mask company Sonovia has released a report from a leading Italian textile-testing laboratory showing that its fabric eliminates the COVID-19 Delta variant particles with over 99.95% effectiveness.

The lab is next expected to test the fabric against the MU strain, which carries several mutations to the spike gene, and is labeled a “variant of interest” by the World Health Organization, said Sonovia Chief Technology Officer Liat Goldhammer-Steinberg.

The MU strain has not yet entered Israel, according to any official reports, but Health Ministry officials have warned of its potential negative impact.

VisMederi is a commercial research laboratory located in Italy. It says on its website that the company “currently receives orders worldwide in the field of vaccines, where it conducts analytical testing of biological samples and validation of bioanalytical methods for the pharmaceutical industry.”

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Levine’s Biological age calculator is embedded as an Excel file in this link:
Quantifying Biological Age

Papers referenced in the video:
The baseline levels and risk factors for high-sensitive C-reactive protein in Chinese healthy population.
https://immunityageing.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12979-018-0126-7

Commonly used clinical chemistry tests as mortality predictors: Results from two large cohort studies.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33152050/

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O,.o.

Studying transitions in and out of the altered state of consciousness caused by intravenous (IV) N, N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT — a fast-acting tryptamine psychedelic) offers a safe and powerful means of advancing knowledge on the neurobiology of conscious states. Here we sought to investigate the effects of IV DMT on the power spectrum and signal diversity of human brain activity (6 female, 7 male) recorded via multivariate EEG, and plot relationships between subjective experience, brain activity and drug plasma concentrations across time. Compared with placebo, DMT markedly reduced oscillatory power in the alpha and beta bands and robustly increased spontaneous signal diversity. Time-referenced and neurophenomenological analyses revealed close relationships between changes in various aspects of subjective experience and changes in brain activity.

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An inexpensive oral anti-depressant can save the lives of COVID-19 patients and cut hospital admissions by up to 30 per cent, says a study co-led by McMaster University.

McMaster researcher Ed Mills and his team treated 738 randomly selected Brazilian COVID-19 patients with fluvoxamine, with another 733 received a placebo, between Jan. 20 to Aug. 6 of this year.

Every patient receiving fluvoxamine during the trial is tracked for 28 days to determine their health outcomes and if they still need hospital treatment. They found about a 30% reduction in events among those receiving fluvoxamine and those that did not.

The McMaster Faculty of Health Sciences specializes in health related fields such as: Nursing, Medicine, and Rehabilitation Sciences.

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