Pharma News

New research suggests that the peptides short chunks of protein used to treat Type 2 diabetes may be more effective if they’re able to flexibly move back and forth between different shapes.

Infection with the virus that causes COVID-19 can trigger an immune response that lasts well beyond the initial infection and recovery—even among people who had mild symptoms or no symptoms at all, according to Cedars-Sinai investigators. The findings are published in the Journal of Translational Medicine.

Immunotherapies called chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells use genetically engineered versions of a patients own immune cells to fight cancer. These treatments have energized cancer care, especially for people with certain types of blood cancers. Now, scientists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centers Sloan Kettering Institute (SKI) have developed new CAR T cells that can do something their predecessors cannot make drugs.

Bharat Biotech International Limited (BBIL) said that BBV152 (COVAXIN), its whole-virion inactivated COVID-19 vaccine candidate, has proven to be safe, well-tolerated, and immunogenic in paediatric subjects in phase 2 and 3 study.

Bharat Biotech had conducted phase 2/3, open-label, and multicenter studies to evaluate the safety, reactogenicity, and immunogenicity COVAXIN in healthy children and adolescents in the 2-18 age group.

Sickle cell anemia (SCA) is a common genetic disorder affecting red blood cells in the Indian population. The disease is passed on to children with the faulty beta globin gene from their parents, although the parents themselves do not get the disease. About 0.4% of the population suffers from the disease, while 10% are carriers of the disease, giving rise to new SCA patients.

CD4+ T cells are important parts of the immune system and play a key role in defending the body against pathogens. As they possess a great variety of defense mechanisms against HIV in their resting state, they are infected only very rarely – but these few infected cells form a latent reservoir for HIV in the body that currently cannot be reached by antiviral drugs. Consequently, the virus can spread again from there after activation of the CD4+ T cells.

Scientists at Scripps Research, University of Chicago and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have identified a new Achilles heel of influenza virus, making progress in the quest for a universal flu vaccine. Antibodies against a long-ignored section of the virus, which the team dubbed the anchor, have the potential to recognize a broad variety of flu strains, even as the virus mutates from year to year, they reported Dec. 23, 2021 in the journal Nature.