Category Biology/Biotechnology

The first human clinical trial of a universal Sarbeco coronavirus vaccine, developed by the University of Cambridge and spin-out DIOSynVax (DVX) Ltd, has shown that the vaccine is safe and has no significant side effects.

The trial, involving 39 healthy volunteers, tested a vaccine designed to provide protection against multiple Sarbeco coronaviruses—the large group of viruses that occur in nature including SARS-CoV-2, which caused the COVID pandemic.

The vaccine triggered immune responses in the volunteers not only to SARS-CoV-2 and SARS, but to related bat viruses that could potentially jump from animals to humans and cause future pandemics.

This trial proves the safety of an entirely new way of designing vaccines...

Northwestern Medicine scientists have developed a novel synthetic biomolecular condensate that can degrade intracellular disease-causing proteins, providing a framework for new therapeutic approaches for a wide range of diseases, as detailed in a recent study published in Nature Communications.

Shana Kelley, Ph.D., the Neena B. Schwartz Professor of Chemistry, Biomedical Engineering, and Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics and the president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago, was senior author of the study.

Targeted protein degradation is an emerging therapeutic strategy that harnesses cells’ own degradation machinery to clear disease-cau...

University of Florida researchers are exploring how lasers could help astronauts build structures on the moon using materials already available there, including lunar soil transformed into glass. The work, led by Victoria M. Miller, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering and researcher with the UF Astraeus Space Institute, recently completed a research phase focused on laser forming, a manufacturing process that bends materials without physical contact.

The team’s latest paper, published in Lasers in Manufacturing and Materials Processing, examined how different atmospheric conditions affect laser bending, an important question for future manufacturing in the vacuum of space...

A Phase III clinical trial led by Neeraj Agarwal, MD, FASCO, senior director of clinical research at Huntsman Cancer Institute and professor of internal medicine at the University of Utah (the U), has found that a combination prostate cancer treatment could prevent the disease from progressing into a harder-to-treat form of cancer in select patients.

Combination therapy targets gene-altered tumors
The study, TALAPRO-3 (NCT04821622), evaluated a combination of two drugs—talazoparib and enzalutamide—in patients with metastatic castration-sensitive prostate cancer. This is a form of the disease that has spread beyond the prostate but remains susceptible to standard hormone therapy treatment.

The patients involved also had prostate cancer affected ...