Lifeboat Foundation

The United States is considering sampling wastewater taken from international aircraft to track any emerging new Covid-19 variants as infections surge in China, as UK-based health experts estimate about 9,000 people a days are now dying of the disease in China.

The proposed of testing wastewater by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would provide a better solution to tracking the virus and slowing its entry into the US than new travel restrictions announced this week, three infectious disease experts said.

Boosting vaccination rates, widespread mask use and reimposing some restrictions on movement could reduce the number of deaths.

BRUSSELS, Jan 3 (Reuters) — The European Union has offered free COVID-19 vaccines to China, the EU executive said on Tuesday, as infections there surged following Beijing’s relaxation of its “zero-COVID” policies.

China has not responded to the offer yet, a spokesperson for the European Commission told journalists at a regular briefing. He did not specify the amount of vaccines the EU was offering or their manufacturers.

“In view of the COVID situation in China, (Health) Commissioner Stella Kyriakides has reached out to her Chinese counterparts to offer EU solidarity and support,” he said.

Year 2022 😗

Testing multiple treatments for heterogeneous (varying) effectiveness with respect to many underlying risk factors requires many pairwise tests; we would like to instead automatically discover and visualize patient archetypes and predictors of treatment effectiveness using multitask machine learning. In this paper, we present a method to estimate these heterogeneous treatment effects with an interpretable hierarchical framework that uses additive models to visualize expected treatment benefits as a function of patient factors (identifying personalized treatment benefits) and concurrent treatments (identifying combinatorial treatment benefits). This method achieves state-of-the-art predictive power for COVID-19 in-hospital mortality and interpretable identification of heterogeneous treatment benefits. We first validate this method on the large public MIMIC-IV dataset of ICU patients to test recovery of heterogeneous treatment effects. Next we apply this method to a proprietary dataset of over 3,000 patients hospitalized for COVID-19, and find evidence of heterogeneous treatment effectiveness predicted largely by indicators of inflammation and thrombosis risk: patients with few indicators of thrombosis risk benefit most from treatments against inflammation, while patients with few indicators of inflammation risk benefit most from treatments against thrombosis. This approach provides an automated methodology to discover heterogeneous and individualized effectiveness of treatments.

Year 2022 😗

Automation is not just for high-throughput screening anymore. New devices and greater flexibility are transforming what’s possible throughout drug discovery and development. This article was written by Thomas Albanetti, AstraZeneca; Ryan Bernhardt, Biosero; Andrew Smith, AstraZeneca and Kevin Stewart, AstraZeneca for a 28-page DDW eBook, sponsored by Bio-Rad. Download the full eBook here.

A utomation has been a part of the drug discovery industry for decades. The earliest iterations of these systems were used in large pharmaceutical companies for high-throughput screening (HTS) experiments. HTS enabled the testing of libraries of small molecule compounds by a single or a series of multiple experimental conditions to i dentify the potential of those compounds as a treatment for a target disease. HTS has evolved to enable screening libraries of millions of compounds, but the high cost of equipment has largely resulted in automation occurring primarily in large pharmaceutical companies. Today, though, new types of robots paired with sophisticated software tools have helped to democratise access to automation, making it possible for pharma and biotechnology companies of almost any size to deploy these solutions in their labs.

Continue reading “The rise of automation in drug discovery” »

A study using 30 years of data links good hydration to a lower risk of developing some chronic illnesses and premature aging.

These global heat maps, published by NASA, illustrate just how much hotter the world is today than it was in the previous decades.

Earthquakes are almost impossible to predict. Luckily, engineers have come up with some amazing ways to protect people the next time one might strike.

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Continue reading “The Future of Earthquake-Proof Buildings” »

Researchers have found what may be the first-ever “virovore” or an organism which eats viruses. The study was published last week, in the PNAS journal by scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the United States, which found two plankton organisms named Halteria and Paramecium, can not only feed on viruses but also thrive by consuming them.