Research News

Garden soil houses a variety of bacteria and their natural byproducts - including one that may help halt tumor growth. Lankacidins are molecules that can be isolated from Strepomyces rochei, a common bacterium in soil. In addition to antimicrobial properties, a type of lankacidins, called lankacidin C, can inhibit tumor activity in various cancer cell lines, including leukemia, melanoma, ovarian and breast cancers.

Once you know how it works for one disease, immuneML can make diagnostic tools for other types of diseases as well.

Different diseases have different methods for testing if a person has the disease or not. immuneML, a new open source machine learning platform, can potentially look for a lot of diseases in just one blood sample.

Patients under immunosuppressive therapy, who do not respond to primary COVID-19 vaccination, have an increased risk for severe COVID-19 disease courses. Until now, it was not clear whether those patients at risk can benefit from an additional booster vaccination. Recent research findings from MedUni Vienna show that a third vaccination is safe and effective in those patients who were initially unable to produce antibodies after vaccination. The study was recently published in the acclaimed journal "Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases".

Scientists at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) have found that four COVID-19 vaccines (Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, J&J/Janssen, and Novavax) prompt the body to make effective, long-lasting T cells against SARS-CoV-2. These T cells can recognize SARS-CoV-2 Variants of Concern, including Delta and Omicron.

Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi, and The International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB), New Delhi, have identified Phytochemicals in the petals of a Himalayan plant that could potentially be used to treat COVID-19 infections.

The findings of the research team have been recently published in the journal Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics.

A growing body of evidence indicates that some people thought to have an allergic response to injectable penicillin, the standard treatment for rheumatic heart disease, may instead be experiencing a cardiac reaction to the medicine, according to a new American Heart Association presidential advisory published today in Journal of the American Heart Association.

Health Canada has authorized the combination of two antiviral drugs, nirmatrelvir and ritonavir (brand name PAXLOVIDTM), to treat adults with mild to moderate COVID-19 who are at high risk of progressing to serious disease, including hospitalization or death. The active ingredient nirmatrelvir in PAXLOVIDTM works by stopping the virus from replicating.

Pfizer Inc shared results from multiple studies demonstrating that the in vitro efficacy of nirmatrelvir, the active main protease (Mpro) inhibitor of PAXLOVID (nirmatrelvir [PF-07321332] tablets and ritonavir tablets), is maintained against the SARS-CoV-2 variant Omicron. Taken together, these in vitro studies suggest that PAXLOVID has the potential to maintain plasma concentrations many-fold times higher than the amount required to prevent Omicron from replicating in cells.

The independent clinical trial, conducted by Locus Medicus in Athens, Greece, prospectively tested 330 patients with symptomatic and asymptomatic cases of COVID-19. For the study, staff at the clinical laboratory collected two bilateral anterior nasal swabs from each patient. Immediately after collection, one swab was tested in the lab’s standard of care CE-Mark RT-PCR test and the other swab was tested by BiologyWorks k(now). Results from the BiologyWorks k(now) molecular test were 99.1% in overall percent agreement with the results of the RT-PCR lab tests.