Tag Archives: breakthrough

Not China, but Russia announces world’s first Covid-19 vaccine

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Any Covid-19 vaccine? All nations and the entire world humanity was eagerly awaiting the precious announcement from at least one top nation that its scientists have successfully completed clinical trials of Covid-19 vaccine.

When expectations were running high that it would be China, where the novel coronavirus had its origin in the city of Wuhan, unexpectedly Russia has announced first to the world that its clinical trials are completed successfully and the vaccine is ready for production.

The Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University is the one which has claimed that it has successfully completed the trails their vaccine has all the “safety of those vaccines that are currently in the market.”

Announcing the news, Vadim Tarasov, the director of the Institute for Translational Medicine and Biotechnology of the Unviersity said the clinical trials have been conducted on volunteers, reports Russian news agency Sputnik, adding that the first group of volunteers would be discharged on 15 July and the second on 20 July.

Russian vaccine

The vaccine was produced by Russia’s Gamalei Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology on June 18. “Sechenov University has successfully completed tests on volunteers of the world’s first vaccine against coronavirus,” Tarasov said.

“The safety of the vaccine is confirmed. It corresponds to the safety of those vaccines that are currently on the market,” said another scientist Alexander Lukashev, director of the Institute of Medical Parasitology, Tropical and Vector-Borne Diseases at Sechenov University.

“Sechenov University in a pandemic situation acted not only as an educational institution but also as a scientific and technological research center that is able to participate in the creation of such important and complex products as drugs,” Tarasov said.

Elsewhere, Gilead Sciences, Oxford University’s researchers and American biotech company Moderna are at the forefront of developing a Covid-19 vaccine, while a Canadian and Chinese joint project is equally pushing the date for completion of clinical trials. BioNTech SE and Pfizer Inc’s Covid-19 vaccine candidate is expected to be ready by the end of 2020.

Sclerosis Medicine can help Fight Drug-Resistant Bacteria

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A surprising discovery shows that a widely used and 20-year-old medicine used to treat multiple sclerosis can also beat a type of multi-resistant bacteria for which there are currently only a few effective drugs.

Encountering bacteria with innocent names such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Enterobacteriaceae can lead to hospitalisation and – in a worst-case scenario – can also be life-threatening. The bacteria, which cause infections such as pneumonia, frequently develop multi-resistance towards classic antibiotics.

Researchers from Aarhus University have discovered that a drug known as glatiramer acetate, which is normally used for treating the disease multiple sclerosis, has a hitherto unknown effect on obstinate bacteria.

Laboratory experiments have shown that the drug kills half of the Pseudomonas bacteria in specimens from patients with cystic fibrosis who are often exposed to the bacteria in the lungs.

The research results have recently been published in the scientific journal Scientific Reports.The discovery is good news at a time where multi-resistant bacteria are a growing problem.

According to a British survey commissioned by the British government, in 2050 resistant bacteria will all-in-all kill more people around the world than cancer. Neither the pharmaceutical industry or researchers have so far succeeded in developing new types of antibiotics that can beat the bacteria following classic strategies for the development of new medicines.

The research project is part of a new global movement within the development of medicine that focuses on medicine recycling or, as it is also called, repurposing. This is where researchers and companies test already approved medicines or substances on other diseases or functions of human biology than those they were originally developed for.

The discovery also opens up for a new view of multiple sclerosis.

“The results give us greater knowledge about how the drug works on sclerosis patients and indicates at the same time that bacteria might be part of the problem with the disease. This is also indicated by some studies,” says Thomas Vorup-Jensen.

Aarhus University is collaborating with Aarhus University Hospital, Imperial College London, UK, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA and the British pharmaceutical company Cycle Pharmaceuticals, who specialise in the recycling of medicine.

Forgetting Face Recognition? Check for Dementia, say Japanese Researchers

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A Japanese research group has proposed that failure to recognize or memorize human faces in the short term could be early stage of dementia. The elderly with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) suffer from weakened ability to recognize faces when compared to healthy elderly people. When trying to memorize, their gaze is also different, suggest Japanese researchers.

Alzheimer’s disease, the most common type of dementia, should be detected in its early stages to halt its progression into a more serious form of the disease. MCI, a preliminary stage of Alzheimer’s, is detected with weak cognitive functions, such as poor memory or inability to think though these traits do not affect daily life.

MRI scans of brain imaging show that areas for memory and visually processing human faces in people are structurally and functionally transformed during this stage.

Researchers from Kumamoto University in Japan conducted comparative experiments with normal elderly subjects and MCI patients (18 each) using a delayed-matching task with face and house stimuli in independent blocks.

In each block, they asked subjects to remember a single image and then, after a short delay, select a memorized image from a set new of images. The researchers also recorded subject gaze trends during the image memorization process.

Their experiments revealed that the memorization performance of MCI patients was lower for facial images than for house images. However they found no performance difference in normal subjects.

While memorizing, MCI patient’s gaze concentration on the eyes of an image decreased but the time spent looking at the mouth increased. They had reduced short-term memorization ability and a different gaze pattern for faces when compared to normal people, said researchers.

“Looking at the eyes is important for remembering the entirety of the face,” said Emeritus Professor Kaoru Sekiyama. “MCI patients probably have an abnormality in the cognitive processing of faces due to the deterioration of brain function. It is possible that the distributed gaze pattern is compensation for this decreased function.”

This research was published online in the journal Scientific Reports.