Moderna Inc. said the U.S. government has agreed to pay as much as $483 million for the company to develop and test its Covid-19 vaccine now in an initial clinical trial.
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One of the defining features of Covid-19 is the excessive immune response that can occur in severe cases. This burst of immune overreaction, also called a cytokine storm, damages the lungs and can be fatal.
A team of MIT researchers has developed specialized proteins, similar in structure to antibodies, that they believe could soak up these excess cytokines.
Continue reading “Proteins may halt the severe cytokine storms seen in COVID-19 patients” »
The Centre for Digestive Disease headed by Professor Thomas Borody has cured Crohn’s disease as reported today by Dr Gaurav Agrawal in Gut Pathogens.
Centre for Digestive Diseases.
A Chicago hospital treating severe COVID19 patients with Gilead Sciences’ antiviral medicine remdesivir in a closely watched clinical trial is seeing rapid recoveries in fever and respiratory symptoms, with nearly all patients discharged in less than a week, STAT has learned.
Remdesivir was one of the first medicines identified as having the potential to impact SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, in lab tests. The entire world has been waiting for results from Gilead’s clinical trials, and positive results would likely lead to fast approvals by the Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory agencies. If safe and effective, it could become the first approved treatment against the disease.
The outcomes in patients at a Chicago hospital offer only a snapshot of remdesivir’s effectiveness, but are the first clinical data to surface to date.
Continue reading “Gilead data suggests coronavirus patients are responding to treatment” »
AT&T is connecting IoT robots, in new partnerships with Xenex and Brain Corp., that aim to help hospitals and retail establishments like grocery stores keep facilities clean, kill germs and keep shelves stocked more efficiently.
Chris Penrose, SVP of Advanced Solutions at AT&T, told FierceWireless that the robots are riding on the carrier’s 4G LTE network, rather than narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) or LTE-M networks. That’s because of the large amounts of data they need to push, along with latency and speed requirements for these particular use cases.
Continue reading “AT&T 4G LTE connects IoT robots to kill germs, keep shelves stocked” »
Editor’s note: The story has been updated.
Japan could see some 850,000 people seriously sickened by the coronavirus and almost half of them dying if no social distancing or other measures are followed, according to an expert estimate released Wednesday.
Japan has the world’s oldest population, which is a particular concern since COVID-19 can be especially serious and fatal in the elderly. And there are concerns that Japan’s government has done too little and acted too late to stave off high numbers of seriously ill patients.
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Until now, Aroostook County native Jessica Meir has watched the unfolding coronavirus pandemic from orbit.
Continue reading “Maine astronaut Jessica Meir returns to a changed planet on Friday” »
Doing “whatever it takes” to save the global economy from the coronavirus pandemic is going to cost a lot of money. The U.S. government alone is spending a few trillion dollars, and the Federal Reserve is creating another few trillion dollars to keep the financial system from collapsing. A custom Bloomberg index measuring M2 figures for 12 major economies including the U.S., China, euro zone and Japan shows their aggregate money supply had already more than doubled to $80 trillion from before the 2008–2009 financial crisis.
These numbers are so large that they no longer have any meaning; they are simply abstractions. It’s been some time since people thought about the concept of money and its purpose. The broad idea is that money has value, but that value is not arbitrary. Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker once said in an interview that “it is a governmental responsibility to maintain the value of the currency they issue. And when they fail to do that, it is something that undermines an essential trust in government.”
