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Open source changed the technology industry now imagine what everyone could do if they had open access to editing the human genome at scale …

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled protein design company Profluent has leveraged AI to design an open-source gene editor called OpenCRISPR-1, demonstrating the technology can be used to create molecules with the power to edit human DNA. Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) technology, developed more than a decade ago, allows scientists to modify DNA sequences within living organisms precisely. Potential applications range from treatments for genetic disorders to researching disease mechanisms.

The molecules it designs are fully synthetic and do not exist in nature, in contrast to previous technologies in gene editing, such as CRISPR-Cas9.

The company is open-sourcing OpenCRISPR-1 for free ethical research and commercial use and published the science behind the protein’s development in a preprint publication.

“Attempting to edit human DNA with an AI-designed biological system was a scientific moonshot,” Ali Madani, Profluent cofounder and CEO, said in a statement. “Our success points to a future where AI precisely designs what is needed to create a range of bespoke cures for disease.”

AI was at the heart of this achievement, with the company training Large Language Models (LLMs) on massive scale sequence and biological context. The Profluent team developed a database of 5.1 million Cas9-like proteins, and the AI model was trained on this database to create potential proteins for CRISPR use.

This enabled the LLM to create novel gene editors from scratch as it learned through examples found in nature. After narrowing down the results, they identified OpenCRISPR-1, a protein performing similarly to Cas9 but with far less impact on off-target sites. This makes it more precise and causes minimal damage to DNA.

The goal of open-sourcing OpenCRISPR-1 is to encourage the use of AI for ethical research and commercial use, particularly in developing medicines leveraging CRISPR.

“We believe by doing so, we can help accelerate the pace of discovery and innovation in the field,” Madani said. “Our vision is to move biology from being constrained by what can be achieved in nature to being able to use AI to design new medicines precisely according to our needs.”

He added that the company intends to partner with cutting-edge research institutions and drug developers working across the drug development life cycle to enable CRISPR medicines to become available to a greater number of patients and for a greater number of disorders.

Gene-editing technologies, including SHERLOCK and DETECTR, are transforming digital diagnostics, enabling rapid detection of infectious diseases such as COVID-19.

Companies such as Atomwise, Deep Genomics and Valo are incorporating gene editing into drug discovery processes, revolutionizing treatment development.

Beyond gene editing, AI is powering everything from bone marrow analysis software to drug discovery and platforms to help pair patients with the right cancer-treatment drugs.

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Technology research is pushing our understanding of the term “Robot” and now human cells have been turned into robots.

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Robots. They’re a funny lot – some are made of metal, some are humanoid, some are nano sized, some are made of crystals, ice, or slime, some are conscious, living, and made from frogs. And now some are made from humans, well human cells at least after scientists created tiny living robots from human cells that can move around in a lab dish and may one day be able to help heal wounds or damaged tissue, according to a new study.

A team at Tufts University and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute have dubbed these creations Anthrobots – which are not to be confused with living robots made out of other biological cells, like frog cells, which are called Xenobots.

The research builds on earlier work from some of the same scientists, who made the first living xenobot robots from stem cells sourced from embryos of the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis.

“Some people thought that the features of the xenobots relied a lot on the fact that they are embryonic and amphibian,” said study author Michael Levin, Vannevar Bush professor of biology at Tufts’ School of Arts & Sciences.

“I don’t think this has anything to do with being an embryo. This has nothing to do with being a frog. I think this is a much more general property of living things,” he said. “We don’t realize all the competencies that our own body cells have.”

While alive, the anthrobots were not full-fledged organisms because they didn’t have a full life cycle, Levin said.

“It reminds us that these harsh binary categories that we’ve operated with: Is that a robot, is that an animal, is that a machine? These kinds of things don’t serve us very well. We need to get beyond that.”

The research was published Thursday in the journal Advanced Science.

The scientists used adult human cells from the trachea, or windpipe, from anonymous donors of different ages and sexes. Researchers zeroed in on this type of cell because they’re relatively easy to access due to work on Covid-19 and lung disease and, more importantly, because of a feature the scientists believed would make the cells capable of motion, said study coauthor Gizem Gumuskaya, a doctoral student at Tufts.

The tracheal cells are covered with hairlike projections called cilia that wave back and forth. They usually help the tracheal cells push out tiny particles that find their way into air passages of the lungs. Earlier studies had also shown that the cells can form organoids — clumps of cells widely used for research.

Gumuskaya experimented with the chemical composition of the tracheal cells’ growth conditions and found a way to encourage the cilia to face outward on the organoids. Once she had found the right matrix, the organoids became mobile after a few days, with the cilia acting a bit like oars.

“Nothing happened on day one, day two, day four or five, but as biology usually does, around day seven, there was a rapid transition,” she said. “It was like a blossoming flower. By day seven, the cilia had flipped and were on the outside. “In our method, each anthrobot grows from a single cell.”

It’s this self-assembly that makes them unique. Biological robots have been made by other scientists, but they were constructed by hand by making a mold and seeding cells to live on top of it, Levin said.

Some were spherical and fully covered in cilia, while others were shaped more like a football and covered irregularly with cilia. They also moved in different ways — some in straight lines, some in tight circles, while others sat around and wiggled, according to a news release on the study. They survived up to 60 days in laboratory conditions.

The experiments outlined in this latest study are at an early stage, but the goal is to find out whether the anthrobots could have medical applications, Levin and Gumuskaya said. To see whether such applications might be possible, researchers examined whether the anthrobots were able to move over human neurons grown in a lab dish that had been “scratched” to mimic damage.

They were surprised to see the anthrobots encouraged growth to the damaged region of the neurons, although the researchers don’t yet understand the healing mechanism, the study noted, but the observation could play an important role one day in creating regenerative medicine treatments that let humans grow back damaged tissues and body parts.

Falk Tauber, a group leader at the Freiburg Center for Interactive Materials and Bioinspired Technologies at the University of Freiburg in Germany, said that the study provided a baseline for future efforts to use the bio-bots for different functions and make them in different forms, such as bio-materials.

Tauber, who was not involved in the research, said the anthrobots exhibited “surprising behavior,” in particular when they moved across — and ultimately closed —scratches in the human neurons.

He said the ability to create these structures from a patient’s own cells suggested diverse applications both in the lab and perhaps ultimately within humans.

Levin said he didn’t think the anthrobots posed any ethical or safety concerns. They are not made from human embryos, research that is tightly restricted, or genetically modified in any way, he said.

“They have a very circumscribed environment that they live in, so there’s no possibility that they somehow get out or live outside the lab. They can’t live outside that very specific environment,” he said. “They have a natural life span so after a few weeks, they just seamlessly biodegrade.”

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If we can predict future covid-19 mutations then we could possibly create vaccines ahead of time to create a new era of predictive medicine.

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The COVID-19 pandemic seemed like a never-ending parade of SARS-CoV-2 variants and mutants, each equipped with new ways to evade the human immune system, leaving the world bracing for what would come next. But what if there were a way to make predictions about new viral variants before they actually emerge, and in doing so create new medicines and vaccines before they’re needed to open up a new field of ‘Predictive Medicine’ – not just predictive healthcare, which is slightly different.

Now, following on from an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that could make it easier to predict future COVID-19 mutations that was developed at the height of the pandemic a new tool named EVEscape, developed by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the University of Oxford, can do just that.

The tool has two elements: A model of evolutionary sequences that predicts changes that can occur to a virus, and detailed biological and structural information about the virus. Together, they allow EVEscape to make predictions about the variants most likely to occur as the virus evolves.

In a study published Wednesday in Nature, the researchers show that had it been deployed at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, EVEscape would have predicted the most frequent mutations and identified the most concerning variants for SARS-CoV-2. The tool also made accurate predictions about other viruses, including HIV and influenza.

The researchers are now using EVEscape to look ahead at SARS-CoV-2 and predict future variants of concern; every two weeks, they release a ranking of new variants. Eventually, this information could help scientists develop more effective vaccines and therapies. The team is also broadening the work to include more viruses.

“We want to know if we can anticipate the variation in viruses and forecast new variants — because if we can, that’s going to be extremely important for designing vaccines and therapies,” said senior author Debora Marks, professor of systems biology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS.

The researchers first developed EVE, short for Evolutionary model of Variant Effect, in a different context: gene mutations that cause human diseases. The core of EVE is a generative model that learns to predict the functionality of proteins based on large-scale evolutionary data across species.

In a previous study, EVE allowed researchers to discern disease-causing from benign mutations in genes implicated in various conditions, including cancers and heart rhythm disorders.

“You can use these generative models to learn amazing things from evolutionary information — the data have hidden secrets that you can reveal,” Marks said.

As the COVID-19 pandemic hit and progressed, the world was caught off guard by SARS-CoV-2’s impressive ability to evolve. The virus kept morphing, changing its structure in ways subtle and substantial to slip past vaccines and therapies designed to defeat it.

“We underestimate the ability of things to mutate when they’re under pressure and have a large population in which to do so,” Marks said. “Viruses are flexible — it’s almost like they’ve evolved to evolve.”

Watching the pandemic unfold, Marks and her team saw an opportunity to help: They rebuilt EVE into a new tool called EVEscape for the purpose of predicting viral variants.

They took the generative model from EVE — which can predict mutations in viral proteins that won’t interfere with the virus’s function — and added biological and structural details about the virus, including information about regions most easily targeted by the immune system.

“We’re taking biological information about how the immune system works and layering it on our learnings from the broader evolutionary history of the virus,” explained co-lead author Nicole Thadani, a former research fellow in the Marks lab.

Such an approach, Marks emphasized, means that EVEscape has a flexible framework that can be easily adapted to any virus.

In the new study, the team turned the clock back to January 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic started. Then they asked EVEscape to predict what would happen with SARS-CoV-2.

“It’s as if you have a time machine. You go back to day one, and you say, I only have that data, what am I going to say is happening?” Marks said.

The tool was able to sift through the tens of thousands of new SARS-CoV-2 variants produced each week and identify the ones most likely to become problematic.

EVEscape predicted which SARS-CoV-2 mutations would occur during the pandemic with accuracy similar to this of experimental approaches that test the virus’ ability to bind to antibodies made by the immune system. EVEscape outperformed experimental approaches in predicting which of those mutations would be most prevalent. More importantly, EVEscape could make its predictions more quickly and efficiently than lab-based testing since it didn’t need to wait for relevant antibodies to arise in the population and become available for testing.

Additionally, EVEscape predicted which antibody-based therapies would lose their efficacy as the pandemic progressed and the virus developed mutations to escape these treatments.

The tool was also able to sift through the tens of thousands of new SARS-CoV-2 variants produced each week and identify the ones most likely to become problematic.

“By rapidly determining the threat level of new variants, we can help inform earlier public health decisions,” said co-lead author Sarah Gurev, a graduate student in the Marks lab from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science program at MIT.

In a final step, the team demonstrated that EVEscape could be generalized to other common viruses, including HIV and influenza.

The team is now applying EVEscape to SARS-CoV-2 in real time, using all of the information available to make predictions about how it might evolve next.

The researchers publish a biweekly ranking of new SARS-CoV-2 variants on their website and share this information with entities such as the World Health Organization. The complete code for EVEscape is also freely available online.

They are also testing EVEscape on understudied viruses such as Lassa and Nipah, two pathogens of pandemic potential for which relatively little information exists. Such less-studied viruses can have a huge impact on human health across the globe, the researchers noted.

Another important application of EVEscape would be to evaluate vaccines and therapies against current and future viral variants. The ability to do so can help scientists design treatments that are able to withstand the escape mechanisms a virus acquires.

“Historically, vaccine and therapeutic design has been retrospective, slow, and tied to the exact sequences known about a given virus,” Thadani said.

Noor Youssef, a research fellow in the Marks lab, added, “We want to figure out how we can actually design vaccines and therapies that are future-proof.”

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If you’d like to know if there are any pathogens in the air around you then this is the tech for you.

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A little while ago researchers at MIT unveiled a new bio-optical sensor that when put into a standard face mask would make it glow if it came into contact with the COVID-19 virus in the air – which, let’s face it, would be damn handy right now. And now researchers at Rice University have received funding for up to $1 million to develop a similar real-time sensor system able to detect minute amounts of the airborne virus that causes COVID-19 infection.

The researchers at Rice will team with William Lawrence, a microbiologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston to develop a thin film electronic device that senses as few as eight SARS-CoV-2 viruses in 10 minutes of sampling air flowing at 8 liters per minute.

The project, which is titled Real-Time Amperometric Platform Using Molecular Imprinting for Selective Detection of SARS-CoV-2 (RAPID) has been funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The second half of funding is contingent upon a successful demonstration of the technology.

“We had started working last summer on the idea of trying to detect SARS-Cov-2,” said Verduzco, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and of materials science and nanoengineering and principal investigator on the project. “Pedro initiated the idea because he had some films that incorporate molecularly imprinted polymers that he thought could very selectively respond to anything.

“He thought we could modify it to emit an electronic signal when a virus binds to the film,” Verduzco said. “Jane got involved because we want a biologist to help build these recognition layers. We saw the opportunity to pursue this with DARPA, because they have a very challenging but specific metric for sensing a very low concentration of SARS in air within 10 minutes.”

Alvarez and Tao previously introduced a filter that could “Trap and Zap” SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater at treatment plants, a technology that was itself adapted from their method to kill bacterial “superbugs” and degrade their antibiotic resistance genes.

“Molecular imprinting cavities where specific molecules or particles fit snugly can enhance the capacity of surfaces to selectively adsorb and concentrate viruses, which in turn facilitates their disinfection, in the trap-and-zap project, or detection, in this RAPID project,” Alvarez said.

“Thus, we were able to leverage previous work on molecular imprinting,” he said. “Jane suggested a significant improvement related to anchoring specific biorecognition factors to further enhance the selectivity of the surface to attach and concentrate SARS-CoV-2.”

The researchers’ proposal describes a bioaerosol sampler that would concentrate airborne SARS-CoV-2 into a liquid electrolyte medium, bind it onto virus-imprinted polymers functionalized with SARS-CoV-2 attachment factors that enhance selectivity and use organic electrochemical transistors to rapidly transduce SARS-CoV-2 binding events into electronic signals.

The proposed device would be sized for analysis of a 50-cubic-meter office, a 300-cubic-meter classroom or central building monitoring. They expect the filtration system to be not only rapidly adaptable for other pathogens but also able to non-destructively capture viruses in a way that retains them for further analysis.

Lawrence’s lab works with the UTMB Galveston National Laboratory, which is part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases biodefense network. He is also director of the Aerobiology Services Division at the lab and has expertise with aerosolization and testing of SARS-CoV-2.

Verduzco said the Rice team will spend the first nine months fabricating the device and testing it on inactivated SARS-CoV-2. “If we are successful, the next nine months will focus on testing with live SARS-CoV-2 at UTMB, and also optimizing the device to meet project metrics,” he said.

Source: Rice University

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Technology is letting us bring people together in new ways to do new things, and this is a great example of forward thinking …

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It’s almost two years since the global pandemic hit and unsurprisingly many people are missing “just accidentally” bumping into their colleagues in corridors and the breakrooms. You know, the way a chance conversation can solve that problem that’s been bugging you for days, or introduce you to someone who can change your whole career. Furthermore, the idea of getting together in a big group also seems a bit alien now, as well many people missing the ideation and energy that comes from those kinds of interactions.

Although remote working and virtual meetings like those on Microsoft Teams and Zoom have so far have helped keep industry wheels turning the feeling now is not so much “Beam me up, Scottie” as “I’ll go anywhere as long as it’s outside of my home office” right now. So, with that at the forefront of their minds one of the teams at Accenture have just announced that they’ve created a new Virtual Reality (VR) space where everyone can meet and accidentally bump into one another, and it’s called the “Nth Floor.”

Learn more about the Future of Work, by Keynote Matthew Griffin

As the largest enterprise user of Microsoft Teams Accenture already makes use of the platforms versatility and scale, but there’s always room for virtual meetings and events that are more fun, collaborative, and interactive – as well as creating environments where spontaneity can flourish.

With more than half a million people worldwide, Accenture has embraced video communications and virtual events like the ones I’ve presented at for a while now, and as they transition more physical meetings to more virtual ones they’re now streaming over 4 milllion minutes of broadcast video a month and playing over 44,000 videos each month. And it’s this that apparently got them thinking about how they could experiment with a whole host of other “better” solutions.

Are you game? Visit the Nth Floor …

Firstly they created the Immersive Collaboration Platform (ICP) which is an extraordinary multi-user, cross-platform meeting solution, with public and private meeting rooms that allows them to showcase their expertise in the Extended Reality (XR) business, and it’s also a great place to co-create and prototype solutions for their clients.

Then, working closely with Microsoft and AltspaceVR they created the Nth Floor, a mixed reality experience that enables people to interact with each other in person, regardless of geographic separation. Whether using it to host a virtual coffee break, conduct training, or host important all hands meetings, the Nth floor is a versatile, customisable, and scalable solution for bringing a geographically distributed workforce together. In short, it’s a kind of prototype metaverse space that helps their staff “be there” without physically being there – even when they do all eventually return to the office.

The virtual space was initially built for an Accenture Nanolabs conference, which enabled leaders of geographically fragmented groups to collaborate and develop a more cohesive structure. Users, co-located with each other as a group, are able to collectively experience the space from a conference room or in an immersive environment like one of their amazing Igloo rooms. For a fully immersive experience, people can wear a VR headset and effectively teleport into the world. And there are plenty of ways they can present information, including playing videos, infusing slide decks, or overlaying themselves onto presentations through TouchCast Studio and TouchCast Pitch.

Accenture also extol their new solutions versatility – whether running an event to recruit students or onboard employees, showcasing new tech or hosting training or roadshows, the virtual environment can adapt to suit. One of their VR experts, for example, has been using the Nth Floor to host a virtual fireside chats every Tuesday for their staff, clients, and partners. He’s also involved third party experts in discussing topics like “challenges with virtual events,” and the “Future of broadcasting in VR” with lively Q&A session followed by professional networking so it seems to be working!

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Companies are coming up with all manner of ways to try and get life back to normal and one of the latest innovations is a new kind of chewing gum!

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We’ve heard of COVID-19 vaccines come in aerosol form, plant form, and pill form, as well as ones that hack your DNA and now a new experimental chewing gum could reduce the spread of Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, according to a recent study published in the journal Molecular Therapy. You might already have noticed headlines calling the findings “fresh hope” in our fight against COVID-19. But how excited should we be? And would this gum work against omicron, the newest variant of concern?

Evidence shows people infected with Sars-CoV-2 have high levels of virus in their saliva. So researchers in the US wanted to investigate whether a specially designed chewing gum could reduce the amount of virus in the mouth, and therefore potentially reduce its spread.

 Learn more about the Future of Healthcare, by Keynote Matthew Griffin

Chewing gum to promote oral health is not a new idea. Studies have shown that chewing gums containing certain substances such as calcium and bicarbonate can improve oral health, reducing the incidence of dental ailments and cutting the numbers of harmful bacteria. But specifically targeting a virus in this way is a novel approach.

Sars-CoV-2 gains entry into human cells by latching onto ACE2 proteins, which are found on the surfaces of certain cells in our body. The researchers produced a gum containing high levels of ACE2 proteins, produced in plants, with the idea being that the ACE2 proteins in the chewing gum could “trap” virus particles in the mouth, minimising the opportunity they have to infect our cells and spread to other people.

To test the effectiveness of the chewing gum, the researchers took saliva samples from patients with COVID-19 and mixed these samples with a powdered form of the gum. They found the treated saliva had significantly reduced numbers of Sars-CoV-2 virus particles compared to those treated with a placebo, the same gum but without the ACE2 protein.

The researchers also demonstrated that the gum prevented a pseudotyped virus, a harmless virus with the Sars-CoV-2 spike protein on its surface, from infecting cells in the lab. As little as 5mg of the gum was associated with significantly reduced viral entry into cells, while 50mg of the gum reduced viral entry by 95%. This suggests the ACE2 gum severely hinders the ability of the Sars-CoV-2 spike protein to infect cells.

Although these results seem promising, there are a number of reasons we can’t view this gum as a pandemic gamechanger just yet. First, this is early-stage research, meaning the experiments were conducted in a lab in controlled conditions rather than with real people.

The conditions in a lab experiment are going to be different to the conditions in a person’s mouth. While the researchers used a chewing simulator machine to show that the motion of chewing doesn’t affect the integrity of the ACE2 protein in the gum, there are other questions for which we don’t yet have answers.

For example, would the environment in a person’s mouth, such as body temperature and oral bacteria, impact the effectiveness of the gum? And how long would one piece of gum continue working for? It will be interesting to see whether the gum produces similar effects in people as it has in the lab if the research progresses to this stage.

Second, although the gum significantly reduced infection of a virus that carried the Sars-CoV-2 spike, the researchers didn’t use the full Sars-CoV-2 virus in their experiments. While the method they used, virus pseudotyping, is a tried and tested scientific method to assess virus entry into cells, it would be interesting to see how the gum affects the full Sars-CoV-2 virus.

As for whether the gum would be effective across different COVID variants, such as omicron, the principles of virology give us reason to be optimistic. Regardless of the variant and its mutations, Sars-CoV-2 gains entry into human cells by latching on to ACE2 proteins – which is key to how the gum works. That said, this is another question we won’t know the answer to for sure until the product is tested in real-world trials.

Finally, it’s important to understand what this gum is designed for. The researchers point out that its main use is likely to be reducing viral spread from people with COVID-19 to others, particularly in clinical settings. It’s unclear how well it would work as a prophylactic to prevent uninfected people getting the virus, particularly when Sars-CoV-2 can be transmitted through multiple routes including the eyes and nose as well as the mouth.

All the same, this gum could have exciting prospects in a clinical setting – for example reducing spread in dental surgeries or COVID hospital wards. When used in combination with current methods such as mask wearing, ventilation and vaccination, it could be another weapon in our arsenal for preventing the spread of COVID-19. But further research is needed before we can expect to be chewing it.

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We have a whole host of new ways to prevent and treat disease, and now they’re all being used to target the pandemic.

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Ever since the global pandemic hit there’s been a race on to create vaccines that protect people from the virus as well as all manner of other research to find alternative ways to minimise its impact on people. While some of the vaccines have included everything from DNA shields to aerosols, to heat proof vaccines, nano vaccines, and vaccines that use cutting edge genetic engineering, and pills, there’s also been an increasing amount of focus on the latter type of treatment – especially since pills are easier to distribute and administer.

Now, a large study of Pfizer’s experimental anti-viral pill, Paxlovid, has found that the drug can cut hospitalisations and deaths from Covid by nearly 90 percent, the company has said. The US firm’s encouraging results, which are described in a press release but not yet peer-reviewed, suggest oral pills that can be taken at home are poised to take an increasing burden off hospitals that are still overstretched with Covid patients.

The company released the study data on Friday, a day after the UK medicines regulator announced it had approved Molnupiravir, a drug developed by Ridgeback Biotherapeutics and Merck Sharp & Dohme, as the first oral antiviral pill for Covid.

Under deals announced in October, the UK expects to receive 480,000 doses of Molnupiravir this year, with 250,000 courses of Paxlovid due in late January. Paxlovid is a combination of an antiviral drug with Ritonavir, a drug usually used to treat HIV.

The latest data on Paxlovid come from an interim analysis of 775 adults enrolled on the study. Those taking the drug had an 89% reduction in their combined rate of hospitalisation or death after a month, compared with patients taking a placebo. Fewer than 1% of patients taking the drug needed to be admitted to hospital and none died. In the comparison group, 7% were admitted to hospital and there were seven deaths.

Dr Mikael Dolsten, Pfizer’s chief scientific officer, said: “We were hoping that we had something extraordinary, but it’s rare that you see great drugs come through with almost 90% efficacy and 100% protection for death.”

Those who took part in the study were unvaccinated, had mild to moderate Covid, and were considered at high risk of hospitalisation because of underlying conditions such as obesity, diabetes or heart disease. The treatment began within three to five days of patients displaying symptoms and lasted for five days.

The benefits of the drug led to the trial being stopped early on the recommendation of an independent group of medical specialists.

As with Molnupiravir, which was found to halve hospitalisations and deaths in at-risk patients, paxlovid treatment must be started soon after symptoms appear so that the drug can prevent coronavirus from replicating and spreading in the respiratory system to cause severe disease.

According to Pfizer, a review of safety data in 1,881 patients found side-effects in 19% of those who took paxlovid and in 21% of those who received the placebo.

Although supplies of the pill are due in the UK early next year, the treatment has yet to be approved by medicines regulators.

Dr Siu Ping Lam, the director of licensing at the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), said: “We look forward to receiving an application from Pfizer for their antiviral [Paxlovid]. As with any medicine, it would only be approved if the expected standards of quality, safety and effectiveness have been met.”

Molnupiravir works by interfering with the coronavirus’s genetic code, a novel approach to disrupting the virus, while Pfizer’s drug belongs to a much older family of antiviral drugs known as protease inhibitors, which revolutionised the treatment of HIV and hepatitis C. Protease inhibitors block a key enzyme that viruses need to multiply in the body.

Prof Jonathan Ball, a molecular virologist at the University of Nottingham, said it had taken longer to develop antivirals than vaccines for Covid because the process was more difficult.

“The vaccine platforms had been trialled in humans and so, with a few important tweaks – training them to target the new coronavirus – they were pretty much ready to go into human trials,” he said.

“With antivirals, the process is more laborious. You have to show that the drug inhibits the virus in the lab, and in the case of a totally new drug – show that it’s safe. First in animals then humans. This all takes time,’ he added. “Even the antivirals that are appearing now have been developed for other viruses, so a lot of the preliminary work had already taken place. We must remember this was a virus discovered less than two years ago, so the progress in preventing and treating the infection has been phenomenal.”

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There are many parts of the world that need vaccines, especially in a pandemic, and this system will not only be fast it’ll be portable and be able to produce vaccines at scale.

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As the global COVID-19 pandemic hit the world faced many challenges but two were particularly urgent: first develop a vaccine then second make enough of it for everyone on the planet as quickly as possible. While organisations like DARPA were working on solutions to pandemics way before COVID-19 hit, such as their P3 program which aimed to identify pandemics and develop vaccines to stop them in their tracks in under 60 days, today we’re still seeing just how hard it is to manufacture viable vaccines at the speed and scale needed to get life back to the “new normal.”

Now GE have announced they’ve teamed up with DARPA on a moonshot project to create a revolutionary mobile vaccine platform that could fit on a truck and make potentially hundreds of millions of vaccines where they’re needed in days.

Standing in a lab on the GE Research campus in Niskayuna, New York, John Nelson holds up a sample of Synthetic DNA inside a vial that is small enough to fit comfortably between his thumb and forefinger. Nelson, who has worked as a senior principal scientist at GE Research for the last 24 years, says there’s enough synthetic DNA inside that half-gram vile to produce an estimated 5,000 vaccines.

“It took us under a day to produce this,” he says.

Now Nelson and his team are using their expertise in producing industrial amounts of synthetic DNA to take on a new challenge: finding a way to more easily and quickly mass-produce vaccines globally.

In August, GE Research and its partners were awarded an up to $41 million, five-year project by DARPA to help “develop a mobile medical manufacturing platform” that will be able to produce DNA and RNA-based vaccines in under three days.

This proposed production system is part of a new DARPA program managed by Dr. Amy Jenkins in the Biological Technologies Office called Nucleic Acids On-Demand Worldwide (NOW), and the program has two primary purposes: the first is to develop new technologies to improve the preparedness of deployed troops against bio-threat attacks, and the second is to tackle the threat of emerging infectious diseases.

As a dual use platform the system could be used by the military to more quickly distribute vaccines and therapeutics, such as some of the recently approved COVID-19 vaccines, as part of humanitarian operations.

“What our engineers like to say is that we’re taking an entire pharmaceutical processing plant and shrinking it down to fit within a 6-foot by 6-foot by 6-foot framework,” Nelson says.

Meet the GE Vaccine dream team

Of course, anyone who follows the news knows that producing enough vaccines for the entire population during a crisis and doing it quickly is a massive challenge. Mass production of DNA and RNA, the building blocks of many modern-day vaccines, typically takes weeks. The strands have to be assembled from oligonucleotides — short DNA molecules that have to be assembled into the DNA sequence, in much the same way that a puzzle is put together from a bunch of smaller pieces. Typically, the material needs to be grown in a lab using living cells before it is used to formulate a vaccine and injected into recipients’ arms.

Nelson, who holds 65 US patents, invented a synthetic method for making DNA in a shorter time and requiring less space and equipment.

“If you need a gallon of DNA to vaccinate Albany, that DNA is going to take multiple 500-liter fermenters of bacteria doing it the old way,” Nelson says. “What we’ve developed is a synthetic method to do that enzymatically using a much smaller container.”

They are using enzymes — proteins that catalyze biochemical reactions — to assemble the DNA and RNA. Unlike bacteria, Nelson and his team don’t need to feed the enzymes and clean up after them. Nelson says the process is like printing the same page of a cookbook and mass-producing a recipe.

“We’ve put the master copy in, we put all of our ingredients in, and we stick it in an incubator,” he says. “When we come back in roughly 10 hours, there are grams of pure DNA there, so we’ve eliminated fermenters growing bacteria and breaking that bacteria open to get the DNA from them.”

The project couldn’t be more timely amid the pandemic. The approach has the potential to be compatible with mRNA vaccines, which are the basis of COVID-19 jabs from Pfizer and Moderna. Those vaccines use messenger mRNA molecules to teach a person’s immune system how to make antibodies to keep a person from becoming sick if they come in contact with the virus.

Nelson along with his colleagues Weston Griffon, Erik Kvam and Brian Davis will oversee this DARPA research with a small, multidisciplinary team at GE Research known as RUN FAST (Rapid Universal Nucleic Acids using Fieldable Automated Synthesis Technology), some of whom have been working for two decades on a faster method for making larger quantities of DNA-based vaccine doses. By combining their expertise in chemistry, molecular biology and engineering with the talents of their partners at the Broad Institute, DNA Script, MedInstill, Molecular Assemblies and the University of Washington, the GE Research team believes it should be possible to integrate all of the steps needed to create a mobile vaccine production platform.

The final assembly, when it is ready, could fit inside a walk-in closet.

“Think of this generic box we’re making like a typewriter and a photocopy machine, but for vaccines,” he says. “We first print out the master version, then copy it over and over. Ultimately, what we will have to demonstrate with our box is that we have all the ink that we will need — we have all the tools within there for making these DNA copies — and that the copies that get made will have exactly the right sequence.”

Nelson has worked on many scientific and technological breakthroughs throughout his career at GE Research, including projects to amplify DNA from trace amounts in forensic samples, individual microbes and circulating tumor cells. With RUN FAST, he says he’s most excited about creating something for DARPA that could possibly go on to deliver tangible medical help to people on a large scale.

“I’ve done a lot of things that are considered novel, but this is a huge project that is trying to hook together a variety of really unique technologies in a completely automated way,” Nelson says. “It’s really exciting to know that we’re doing something that has never been done before; automating the production of pharmaceutical-grade DNA from scratch.”

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Particle accelerators that fit on a chip will one day revolutionize medicine but in the meantime they’re transforming X-Rays.

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In our desire to see and explore the human body in greater depth and detail than ever before recently we’ve seen the development of everything from small portable MRI and at home X-Ray machines, which can be wheeled to a patient’s bedside, all the way through to new revolutionary medical imaging technologies that let you video human cells in vivo in real time, and see the human body live in extreme detail. And then there are particle accelerators that fit on a chip … but that’s another story.

Now, adding to those advances, a groundbreaking new imaging technique, utilizing X-rays generated by a cutting-edge particle accelerator, is offering 3D images of whole organs in unprecedented detail. Demonstrating the technology researchers imaged the lung of a deceased COVID-19 patient, revealing novel insights into how the disease disrupts blood oxygenation.

learn about the Future of Healthcare, by Keynote Speaker Matthew Griffin

The new technology is called Hierarchical Phase-Contrast Tomography (HiP-CT) and is an X-ray technique that allows whole organs to be imaged down to a resolution of 1 micron – 100 times the resolution of a conventional CT scan.

The imaging advance comes from a technological upgrade at the European Synchrotron Research Facility (ESRF). This cutting-edge particle accelerator was improved recently with what is dubbed the Extremely Brilliant Source upgrade (ESRF-EBS).

This EBS upgrade created the world’s first fourth-generation synchrotron, making it the brightest X-ray source in the world. This increased X-ray performance by a factor of 100 in terms of “brilliance and coherence.” And the X-rays generated by this device are 100 billion times brighter than what is found in a conventional hospital X-ray.

X-Rays like you’ve never seen them before

“The idea to develop this new HiP-CT technique came after the beginning of the global pandemic, by combining several techniques that were used at the ESRF to image large fossils, and using the increased sensitivity of the new Extremely Brilliant Source at the ESRF, ESRF-EBS,” explains lead scientist at ESRF Paul Tafforeau, adding “This allows us to see in 3D the incredibly small vessels within a complete human organ, enabling us to distinguish in 3D a blood vessel from the surrounding tissue, and even to observe some specific cells.”

Using the new technology, a team led by researchers from University College London is launching a project called the Human Organ Atlas which complements the Human Cell Atlas that I talked about a while ago. Peter Lee, who is leading the project, says the goal of the Human Organ Atlas is to fill a gap in our understanding of human anatomy.

… see even more!

“Clinical CT and MRI scans can resolve down to just below a millimeter, whilst histology (studying cells/biopsy slices under a microscope), electron microscopy (which uses an electron beam to generate images) and other similar techniques resolve structures with sub-micron accuracy, but only on small biopsies of tissue from an organ,” says Lee. “HiP-CT bridges these scales in 3D, imaging whole organs to provide new insights into our biological makeup.”

The Human Organ Atlas will be a free online resource and it launches with displays of several key human organs, including the brain, kidneys, heart and spleen. The project also offers imaging comparing a healthy lung against a lung from a deceased COVID-19 patient.

A fundamental pathological sign of a COVID-19 deterioration is a sharp drop in blood oxygenation levels and HiP-CT imaging has revealed insights into how this occurs through a process known as “shunting.” It had been previously hypothesized that COVID-19 reduces blood oxygen rates by increasing levels of shunting in the lungs but this is the first direct evidence of that process.

“By combining our molecular methods with the HiP-CT multiscale imaging in lungs affected by COVID-19 pneumonia, we gained a new understanding [of] how shunting between blood vessels in a lung’s two vascular systems occurs in COVID-19 injured lungs, and the impact it has on oxygen levels in our circulatory system,” says Danny Jonigk, a researcher from Hannover Medical School working on the project.

HiP-CT is designed to offer doctors a library of images documenting how different diseases affect a variety of organs. This never-before-seen structural data illustrates how disease can influence tissue architecture down to resolutions as small as one micron.

Claire Walsh, a mechanical engineer from University College London working on the project, says the detailed imagery will be used in tandem with machine learning techniques to improve insights garnered from clinical imaging such as MRI and CT scans. As well as helping better calibrate and improve those current technologies, Walsh suggests the HiP-CT data will help researchers develop AI systems than can clarify MRI and CT imaging.

“The ability to see organs across scales like this will really be revolutionary for medical imaging,” says Walsh. “As we start to link our HiP-CT images to clinical images through AI techniques, we will – for the first time – be able to highly accurately validate ambiguous findings in clinical images.”

A new study reporting on HiP-CT was published in the journal Nature Methods.

Source: University College London

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

How many times during the pandemic did you wonder if you’d been in contact with “the virus” – this could tell you in the future.

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One of the most daunting aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic involves tracking the spread of the microscopic, airborne coronavirus causing the disease. But what if you could spot its presence using nothing more than your smartphone? On the one hand this would likely freak you out depending how sensitive the sensor was, and on the other it might give you some solace that the area you’re in is safe from the virus – for now anyway.

While there are already some sensors that can detect coronavirus in the air around you, such as this bio-optical sensor and this face mask that glow when they detects it, now researchers at GE have announced they’re working on their own version – a sensor smaller than a fingertip that could find viruses and pathogens in the air and be integrated into an ordinary smartphone.

Led by Radislav Potyrailo, a principal scientist at GE Research in Niskayuna, New York, the team received a two-year research grant from the National Institutes of Health to build the tiny device.

The group’s success could mean that, in the future, smartphones and smartwatches equipped with such sensors could help users detect not only the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID-19, but potentially other pathogens and irritants – and future pandemic viruses perhaps.

“One of the first lines of defense against any virus is avoiding exposure, which is easier said than done when you can’t see it,” Potyrailo says. “Through our project with the NIH, we are developing a sensor small enough to embed in a mobile device that could detect the presence of the COVID-19 virus.”

The project will draw on GE’s years of experience with developing industrial sensors that can detect minute amounts of gases and chemicals in the environment in the presence of dust and other common chemical and biological contaminants. Like a digital bloodhound, the technology is programmed to isolate and identify a specific pathogen while excluding the interference of other particles.

“The holy grail is to detect a single virus particle,” Potyrailo says.

The finished project will produce a microchip smaller than a dime with nanowells, or tiny pores, that can be activated only by a particular molecule — in this case, a molecule from the coronavirus causing COVID-19.

“In each of those nanowells there are bioreceptors that are designed to recognize only the virus particle they were designed for,” Potyrailo says. “If some flu particle or pollen or bacterium appears, it won’t be recognized. It’s like a lock and key.”

The team’s goal is to build a chip able to determine the amount of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the sample. This is important because this so-called viral load can affect the severity of the illness and its outcome. While the goal of this project is to make a small sensor, the technology could also be applied in larger machines to detect the presence of germs and viruses in expansive settings, such as factories, classrooms and food-processing facilities.

Potyrailo came to the US in 1993 from Ukraine to study analytical chemistry at Indiana University in Bloomington. He has visited scientific libraries from Moscow to Manhattan and corresponded with scientists all over the world, all in the name of curiosity.

“It’s all about finding the knowledge that is out there and then building a bridge to the future,” he says. “A day in the library is worth a year in the lab.” He likes to pore over the footnotes of scientific journal articles looking for details about how others have tried and failed — or succeeded — and the nuances of their experiments.

Potyrailo, whose background is in optoelectronic engineering, also finds inspiration in nature. In an earlier project, he and his research team studied the ridges on the wings of iridescent Morpho butterflies to understand how they absorb and bend light. They used the observations to make a special film for Homeland Security that detected toxic chemicals.

His most recent achievement is an improvement on gas sensors, which alert people to the presence of dangerous chemicals for industrial safety. Small as a grain of rice and impervious to changes in temperature, these new gas sensors could be used someday in drones or in wearable applications to help keep people, labs, and factories safe. Last May, the discovery made the cover of the journal Nature Electronics.

The inspiration for his coronavirus sensor came from the extent of the pandemic’s impact on the world.

“Societal need for me was the biggest driver,” Potyrailo says. He notes that other global crises, such as World Wars I and II, have led to advancements in analytical instruments — such as mustard gas detectors — as scientists have sought to meet new needs brought on by the fighting.

“It’s the beginning of the journey,” he says. “We are grateful that we have this opportunity.”

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