Author: Biotech Express

Moderna filed with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for emergency use authorization (EUA) for its COVID-19 vaccine in adolescents. In May, the company announced that its Phase II/III TeenCOVE trial in adolescents hit the primary immunogenicity endpoint. The efficacy in almost 2,500 adolescents who received the vaccine was 100%, meaning none came down with COVID-19. “We have already filed for authorization with Health Canada and the European Medicines Agency and we will file with regulatory agencies around the world for this important younger population,” stated Stephane Bancel, Moderna’s chief executive officer. If granted authorization for this use, Moderna’s…

The speed in producing information and the rush to publish scientific articles on COVID-19 in several knowledge areas have resulted in what is known as an infodemic also in the scientific field, potentially producing inaccurate information and sources of misinformation at scholarly communication. This has led to some articles being retracted or withdrawn due to unintentional errors or deliberate misconduct, but they continue to be cited. The article (i) gives an overview of the COVID-19 retracted articles and preprints, and (ii) analyses a set of post-retraction citations in the context of the COVID-19 infodemic. We analyzed 56 retracted articles…

On 31 January 2020, nine Indian researchers published a paper on bioRxiv, an open access online repository, after their request to carry their research paper was rejected by seven prominent medical journals. These nine researchers had found, to put it in layman’s language, that the Covid-19 virus was “manipulated” and “laboratory made”. The researchers, who are from IIT Delhi and Acharya Narendra Dev College, University of Delhi, in their report titled “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag” wrote that they found at least “four insertions” in the spike glyco-proteins which are…

The leaders of the Group of Seven nations have pledged over 1 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses for the rest of the world – either directly or through funding to COVAX, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced. U.S. President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had used the G7 summit in England to announce the donation of 500 million and 100 million vaccines respectively for the world’s poorest nations. While the head of the United Nations welcomed the move, even he said more was needed. Antonio Guterres the ninth secretary-general of the United Nations warned that if people in…

An Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) professor has been elected as an Associate Member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) to join the life scientists’ community. Professor Roop Malik from the Department of Bio Sciences and Bio Engineering is the fifth scientist from India to be elected as an EMBO Associate Member. EMBO has announced that 64 life scientists have been elected to its membership. The new EMBO Members and Associate Members will join the community of more than 1,800 leading life scientists, an IIT Bombay statement said. Professor Mallik is an Indian biophysicist who is working…

Mazumdar Shaw’s contribution will be part of the initial funding pool for the research projects on ‘Pandemic Preparedness’. These projects support national efforts in preparing for and responding to future pandemics. A key goal will be to build competencies that will enable India to mount a quick and effective response to future pandemics, said an Ignite Life Science Foundation release. IGNITE LIFE SCIENCE FOUNDATION is a not-for-profit scientific research institution that will fund and enable scientists to pursue their research projects in an uninhibited and uninterrupted manner. Swami Subramaniam, CEO, Ignite Life Science, said, “I welcome Mazumdar Shaw’s contribution and,…

The research team from the Departments of Chemistry and Biological Sciences at IISER Bhopal includes Dr Vishal Rai, Dr Ram Kumar Mishra, Dr Sanjeev Shukla, Dr Srinivasa Rao Adusumalli, Dr Dattatraya Gautam Rawale, and Dr Neetu Kalra, among others who have worked on this novel research. The development of their Linchpin Directed Modification (LDM) platform has been described in three papers published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (2018), Angewandte Chemie (International Edition – 2020), and Chemical Science (2021). Explaining the significance of this research, Dr Vishal Rai, Associate Professor and Swarnajayanti Fellow, Department of Chemistry, IISER Bhopal,…

The Indian government doubled the gap between the two doses of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine without the agreement of the scientific group that it said recommended the increase, three members of the advisory body have told the Reuters news agency. The ministry of health announced the decision to change the gap from 6-8 weeks to 12-16 weeks on May 13, at a time when supplies of the shot were falling short of demand and infections were surging across the country. The ministry said the extended gap was recommended by the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (NTAGI), based on real-life…

CSIR- Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) said it has tied up with Meril Life Sciences for commercially scaling up its dry swab-based tests for detecting COVID-19. The premier research institute, in a press release, said the dry swab-based direct RT-PCR for COVID-19 testing has been developed by the CCMB and has been approved by ICMR based on their independent validation. This method is a simple variation of the existing gold standard RT-PCR method and can easily scale up the testing by 2 to 3-fold with no new investment of resources. Rakesh Mishra, Advisor, CSIR-CCMB, said RNA extraction, even…

The unique observation of author Dr Rachna Agarwal revealed that SARS-CoV-2 has direct neurological manifestations such as anosmia and gustatory impairment, encephalopathy, and seizures as well as an indirect effect on the psychiatric health such as anxiety, amnesia, etc. because of psychosocial stress. The paper suggest that the most commonly reported neurological symptoms should not be ignored and must be tested for COVID-19. More neurological studies like medical imaging and neuropathology should be performed on these COVID-19 patients. The study find out that COVID-19 patients do have concurrent neurological manifestations that are subjected to further study. The authors collected 97…