We're in the beginning of the vaccine endgame now: regulatory approval and actual distribution/rollout into the population. The data for the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines continue to look good (here's a new report on the longevity of immune response after the Moderna one), … | Continue reading
From a monarch mystery unlocked with the help of Indigenous people to an environmental disaster averted by a chemist who was not afraid of a fight, this year’s finalists for the Science Books and Films (SB&F) Prizes for Excellence in Science Books highlight how diverse perspectiv … | Continue reading
Every two years there's a big challenge competition in predicting protein folding. That is. . .well, a hard problem. Protein chains have (in theory) an incomprehensibly large number of possible folded states, but many actual proteins just manage to arrange themselves properly eit … | Continue reading
As of this morning, we have a first look at the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine's efficacy in clinical trials via press releases from both organizations. The number in the headlines says about 70% efficacy, but there's more to the story.Here's the landscape so far: we have results fr … | Continue reading
Now that we're seeing that coronavirus vaccines are indeed possible (and are on their way), let's talk about the remaining unanswered questions and the things that we will be getting more data on. Here are some of the big issues - it'll be good to see this stuff coming into focus … | Continue reading
There are several recent preprints and publications that bear on the T-cell immunity story for the coronavirus pandemic, and I wanted to highlight these, since it's been a big part of the story that's needed more information for a long time now.Here, for one, is a multi-institute … | Continue reading
One side effect of the coronavirus has been an explosion of lower-quality publications in the scientific literature. This has come in several forms, some more excusable than others. In the former category are the papers that were rushed out earlier this year, observational studie … | Continue reading
As COVID-19 spread, Science’s journals began publishing a nonstop stream of research papers. Many explained critically important aspects of the disease and effects on human health. As senior scientific illustrator, I faced increased demands for rapidly created visuals that accura … | Continue reading
For months now, people have been watching closely to see if it's possible to get re-infected with the coronavirus. It's taken a while for the signal-to-noise to get better, but by now there's no doubt that the answer is yes, it's possible. We've just had the first of these in the … | Continue reading
Let's catch up with some things that (by this point) feel a bit like old news. But it's important to do it, because (A) the big reason they feel that way is because of the bizarre world we've been living in the last few months, and (B) the pace of medical discovery is not set to … | Continue reading
The 2020 Chemistry Nobel has gone to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier for the discovery of CRISPR. An award in this area has been expected for some time - it's obviously worthy - so the main thing people have been waiting for is to see when it would happen and who would … | Continue reading
As an organic chemist, I am willing to deal with the occasional bang or kapow in the lab, as long as things don't get too out of hand. You're supposed to know enough to be on guard against the sorts of compounds most likely to do that and be ready for them in case they decide to … | Continue reading
Well, as a chemist - one who does amateur astronomy on the side, yet - it's obligatory that I write about the phosphine on Venus paper that came out yesterday. This one's embargo was spectacularly leaky, so everyone who's really into this stuff had various kinds of advance warnin … | Continue reading
I’m an inveterate storyteller,” confesses the celebrated neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks at the start of Oliver Sacks: His Own Life. “I tell many stories, some comic, some tragic.” Tales of both types abound in this elegiac yet lighthearted film based on director Ric Burns’s … | Continue reading
I've been emphasizing for some time that our efforts to find and deploy a coronavirus vaccine have to be as transparent as possible to increase the chances for success. Recent events make that more clear than ever - and not in a good way.The Oxford/AstraZeneca trial has restarted … | Continue reading
An open letter has appeared about the recently published data from the vaccine development effort at Russia's Gamaleya reseach center. This is of course the one that the government announced had been "approved" before even going through any Phase III trials, an even that I charac … | Continue reading
Lots of uncertainty in the vaccine world today: as many will have heard, the Oxford/AstraZeneca trial in the UK, the US, and Brazil has been paused due to a serious adverse event. The New York Times, citing a source with knowledge of the event, reported last night that this was … | Continue reading
It's been a while since I went through the whole vaccine landscape (I've been putting it off!), but there's a lot to catch up on. I'm going to incorporate some slightly reworked material from my July post in the introduction to each vaccine class, for reference, but everything on … | Continue reading
OK, it looks like we're finally going to be talking about a vaccine logistics issue that many people (including me) have been worried about. Specifically, how are these things going to be transported and stored? If you're not in the biomedical field, that question might seem a bi … | Continue reading
So let's take a few minutes to think about what happens when the vaccine trials start to read out. I'm making the assumption that the data will be freely available in a timely manner (which means before any decisions are made), because the alternative to that is Not Real Good. An … | Continue reading
Let's have a look at the case of Unity Biotechnology, because this is a story that won't get so many headlines. Unity has been investigating a really interesting but high-risk idea. It's in the anti-aging field, so those two adjectives sort of apply by definition, and it's the hy … | Continue reading
One hundred years ago this month, the poet laureate of Mars was born in sleepy Waukegan, Illinois. To a generation of baby boomers, Ray Bradbury was best known for his masterpiece The Martian Chronicles (1950), a lyrical collection of stories that wondered how humans might adapt … | Continue reading
So now we have some clinical data on yet another category of vaccine: SinoPharm's inactivated coronavirus candidate. This is one of the classic vaccine techniques, where an infectious virus is altered by some sort of protein-denaturing treatment (heating or reactive chemistry) to … | Continue reading
Many will have heard Russia's announcement that they have approved a coronavirus vaccine. I've already had several people ask me what I think of it, so let me be clear: I think it's a ridiculous publicity stunt. If it's supposed to make Russia look like some sort of biotechnology … | Continue reading
It's not surprising that there have been many intersections of artificial intelligence and machine learning with the current coronavirus epidemic. AI and ML are very hot topics indeed, not least because they hold out the promise of sudden insights that would be hard to obtain by … | Continue reading
Let's catch on some non-coronavirus research today with an interesting approach against a very bad disease, metastatic colon cancer. This new paper (from groups at Virginia Tech and Wake Forest) adds to our understanding of something that's been noticed for some time: colon cance … | Continue reading
Well, I was writing just the other day about what we don't know about the T-cell response to coronavirus infection, and as of today we know quite a bit more. And from what I can see, we have encouraging news, mixed with some things that we're going to need to keep an eye on.Here' … | Continue reading
Recent posts here have gone into Moderna's Phase I vaccine data, Pfizer's Phase I vaccine data, what we don't know yet about the relationship between T-cells, antibodies, and immunity to the coronavirus, and some new data that are starting to fill in those gaps. This morning come … | Continue reading
Well, it's finally here - eight weeks to the day after press-releasing some top line results, the full paper is out on the Moderna mRNA vaccine candidate's Phase I trial. I'm very glad to see it - it's going to be very important for the full data sets on all the vaccine candidate … | Continue reading
We now have a preprint with a great deal of data on the first mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidate from the Pfizer/BioNTech effort. This is actually the first real data set on any of the genetic vaccines, since Moderna's paper on their Phase I trial has not yet appeared (all we had … | Continue reading
More vaccine news to catch up on - previous updates and specific topic posts on this subject were on June 15, on June 11, on May 26, on May 18 (with two other posts), on May 14, on May 1, on April 23, and on April 15 (author's note: yikes). Keep in mind that some of those posts w … | Continue reading
I'm working on a new vaccine roundup post for tomorrow - it's been a couple of weeks, and there's a lot of news to catch up on. But first off, a comment on vaccines in general. As the prospect of these become more real in the public mind, I'm noticing more and more anti-vaccine t … | Continue reading
News came yesterday from the Recovery trial effort in the UK that they had seen positive results from dexamethasone treatment in severely ill COVID-19 patients (news article from Science here). This set off a number of headlines that everyone has since been trying to deal with, u … | Continue reading
DNA-encoded libraries are a technique that many in the field should be familiar with, and they've come up many times here on the blog. The basic idea is simple: you build up a set of small molecules with some relatively simple synthetic steps, with plenty of branching at each sta … | Continue reading
Since I did a monoclonal antibody update in the last post, here's one on the vaccine front, where there is a lot of news - and where there are a lot of issues coming up similar to the ones with the antibodies as well. The last vaccine update post was here.What we're seeing now is … | Continue reading
There's a lot of interesting antibody news to catch up on, from the early science to clinical trials. A previous post on this subject is here, with links to earlier background explanations, if you would like to catch up on the area. Here, for example, is a report from a large mul … | Continue reading
In the wake of the most recent murders of Black people in the United States, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, the publisher of Science) is supporting #ShutDownSTEM tomorrow, 10 June. The effort seeks to set aside time for white and non-Black people o … | Continue reading
The recent implosion of the Surgisphere data papers has been big news. It included one that purported to show no benefit (and actual harm) from hydroxychloroquine treatment, and even more harm when combined with azithromycin - but since the authors have been unable to back up the … | Continue reading
"Despite this latest setback, Eli Lilly remains committed to plunging through this concrete wall headfirst. This is a sad day for our WallBreaker 2020 program, and some of our longtime head bashers will recall similar periods during SkullButt 2012 and ConcreteCracker 2016. But we … | Continue reading
As she sat in a taxi headed to Cairo International Airport in September 2001, Rana el Kaliouby remembers thinking, “Am I really going through with this?” A married woman and hijab-wearing Muslim, she would be on her own for the next 3 years, pursuing her doctorate in computer sci … | Continue reading
I've had a lot of questions from people about the prospects for monoclonal antibodies and vaccines against the coronavirus, and I thought that it might be helpful to answer them in this format. Let's start the press conference!We'll start with monoclonal antibodies. Why are you s … | Continue reading
Since we've been dealing with a lot of clinical trial data around here, I thought I would field a question from my email that might get to some things that others are thinking about as well. Here (with permission of its sender) is the idea:. . .it does seem, from the outside, lik … | Continue reading
There's plenty of news on the coronavirus vaccine front, so let's have a look. If you need some details on the different sorts of vaccines in general, here's the background post, which should help this one make sense. This is a rapidly advancing field, with a huge number of progr … | Continue reading
The microbiome needs no introduction - it has been several years since you could pick up a biomedical research journal and not run into an article on possible connections of human gut bacteria and disease. There were thousands of such papers last year alone. But it's a very hard … | Continue reading
Time for another look at the coronavirus vaccine front, since we have several recent news items. Word has come from GSK and Sanofi that they are going to collaborate on vaccine development, which brings together two of the more experienced large organizations in the field. It loo … | Continue reading
A report has come out in the NEJM on the experience with "compassionate use" (off-label or not yet approved) of the Gilead drug remdesivir in the Covid-19 epidemic. Here are the inclusion criteria:Patients were those with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection who had an oxygen saturatio … | Continue reading
Let's do an update on the antibody situation in this epidemic (a bit of antibody/immunology background here if you would like some). The word is today that the CDC is starting several efforts to do antibody testing. One of these is to look at people (from areas that showed widesp … | Continue reading
There's a lot of news to catch up on, and to keep things straight I'll divide the hydroxychloroquine part out into this post, and cover others in the next one. My previous reviews of the clinical data in this area are here.First up is this study from France. It's another very sma … | Continue reading