“Vaccines, obviously, are the ultimate solution for pandemics,” Rino Rappuoli told BioWorld. They have, he added, “already eliminated a lot of pandemic threats – smallpox, influenza, poliomyelitis.” And the road to normalcy from the current pandemic, or any pandemic, is likely to be open only once there is a vaccine.
Novavax Inc., one of the first biopharma companies to reveal its efforts to develop a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in January, has identified a prefusion protein for testing in an Australian phase I trial, slated to start in mid-May.
LONDON – An unseemly row has broken out at the heart of EU science, with Mauro Ferrari, head of the European Research Council (ERC), accusing the European Commission of failing to coordinate and fund R&D needed to combat COVID-19.
PERTH, Australia – Australian stem cell therapy company Mesoblast Ltd. announced that the FDA gave it the green light to test its allogeneic mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) product candidate remestemcel-L in patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) caused by coronavirus (COVID-19). “We’re going to be evaluating whether an injection of our cells intravenously can tone down the immune system just enough so it gets rid of the virus but doesn’t destroy your lungs at the same time,” Mesoblast CEO Silviu Itescu told BioWorld.
COVID-19 has disrupted science in the way it has disrupted everything else. In the short term, universities have largely closed shop as a way to maximize social distancing, and lots of science – or at least, lots of bench work – is not getting done.
HONG KONG – Another promising candidate has emerged in the race to find a treatment for the COVID-19 coronavirus. San Diego-based Ansun Biopharma Inc. released positive results from a four-patient study of its DAS-181 candidate, which is being developed for the treatment of severe COVID-19 infection.
Pluristem Therapeutics Inc., an Israeli regenerative medicine company, said several of the seven COVID-19 patients treated with its allogeneic placental expanded (PLX) cells have progressed from suffering severe symptoms of the disease to signs of clinical recovery, including respiratory improvements.
“In any crisis, leaders have two equally important responsibilities: solve the immediate problem and keep it from happening again... The first point is more pressing, but the second has crucial long-term consequences.” So wrote Bill Gates in a February editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine about COVID-19, which “has started behaving a lot like the once-in-a-century pathogen we’ve been worried about.”
Evercore ISI assembled a dozen internal specialists for a webinar to talk about COVID-19 from a variety of perspectives, with opinions aplenty on transmission route, up-and-coming treatment prospects, and problems in how testing procedures are understood – or not.
As the demand increases for ventilators to treat Americans with severe symptoms of COVID-19, another shortage is being exacerbated – a shortage of the drugs needed to treat patients on ventilators.
