An emergency committee convened by World Health Organization (WHO) director-general, Margaret Chan, concluded that at this point, the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) does not warrant being declared a public health emergency of international concern.

• Cleveland Biolabs Inc., of Buffalo, N.Y., Incuron LLC, of Moscow, a joint venture of CBLI and Bioprocess Capital Venture, and Roswell Park Cancer Institute, published studies describing the Facilitates Chromatin Transcription (FACT) complex as an accelerator of tumor transformation and a possible marker for aggressive cancers in Cell Reports.

• Biodel Inc., of Danbury, Conn., disclosed plans to submit a new drug application (NDA) to the FDA in 2015 for a glucagon rescue device to treat severe hypoglycemia.

Researchers from the Carnegie Institution for Science have weighed in on the question of whether female mammals have germ-line stem cells that are capable of generating new egg cells. Recent reports have questioned the long-held notion that female mammals are born with all the eggs they will ever possess, suggesting instead that they have stem cells capable of generating new eggs.

The emergence of a potential pandemic has always been a favorite topic for Hollywood, which has given us some good films in the genre in recent years such as The Andromeda Strain, Outbreak and Contagion.

Researchers from Temple University discovered that glycogen synthase kinase-three alpha (GSK-3 alpha) is an overall regulator of aging in many different cell types.

Inhibiting hepatitis C's nonstructural 5A, or NS5A, protein causes viral levels to drop by 99 percent within six hours of administration, and in one clinical trial, it led to sustained drops in viral levels in all treated patients – a stunning validation of the possibility of developing an all-oral hepatitis treatment regimen.