News by Subject Biology

New Columbia study suggests current vaccines and monoclonal antibody therapies provide less neutralizing activity against the U.K. and South Africa variants of SARS-CoV-2.

The treatment uses a type of CRISPR to target viral RNA and appears to stop replication of both viruses in the lungs.

The body's immune response plays a crucial role in the course of a SARS-CoV-2 infection. In addition to antibodies, the so-called T-killer cells, are also responsible for detecting viruses in the body and eliminating them. Scientists from the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Medical University of Vienna have now shown that SARS-CoV-2 can make itself unrecognizable to the immune response by T-killer cells through mutations.

Pancreatitis drug Camostat inhibits new SARS-CoV-2 activators identified in the upper respiratory tract

Specialists in viral and genetic analysis, led by Swiss scientists Dr. Emma Hodcroft at the University of Bern and Prof. Christophe Dessimoz at University of Lausanne, alongside Dr. Nick Goldman at EMBL-EBI in the UK, lay out the 'bioinformatics bottlenecks' that are hindering response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and propose ways to 'clear the road' for better tools and approaches.

An international research group led by the University of Basel has developed a promising strategy for therapeutic cancer vaccines. Using two different viruses as vehicles, they administered specific tumor components in experiments on mice with cancer in order to stimulate their immune system to attack the tumor. The approach is now being tested in clinical studies.