The U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee needed two days of hearings to get through a spending measure that provided the FDA with $500 million for its part in the government response. The CDC would receive $7.5 billion for vaccine distribution and tracking, all developments that ran parallel to an announcement that another 200 million doses of vaccine will be delivered by the end of July at a cost of $3.7 billion.
As of the end of January, SARS-CoV-2 has demonstrably infected more than 100 million individuals globally. It has killed more than 2 million. And the long-term sequelae of COVID infections – to say nothing of the health consequences of grief, social isolation and widespread economic distress – are still unfolding and will be for years to come.
Researchers at the University of California at San Francisco have developed a method to diagnose any known pathogen from any body fluid within a day – or, depending on the sequencing method, within a few hours. For an unknown pathogen, the method spits out its nearest known relative.
HONG KONG – South Korea’s AI-based biotech venture, Kaipharm Co. Ltd. has secured ₩5 billion (US$4.22 million) in series A funding. Founded in 2018, the firm has attracted a total of ₩7 billion in investments. Kaipharm will generate a reference dataset of 2,000 drugs (KMAP_2K) using next-generation sequencing (NGS). The dataset will include all the FDA-approved drugs to date.
Nanthealth Inc. has received U.S. FDA clearance for a whole exome sequencing test to determine overall tumor mutational burden (TMB) in cancer tissue. Known as Omics Core, the first-of-its-kind in vitro diagnostic test is available now as part of Nanthealth's GPS Cancer molecular profiling suite.