Category Archives: Medical research

Omicron’s full impact will be felt in countries where fewer are vaccinated

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Analysis: the new coronavirus variant seems highly transmissible, but the big question is whether it causes severe disease. Either way, poorer nations will be hit hardest

In early August Gideon Schreiber and a team of virologists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel began playing around with the spike protein of the Sars-CoV-2 virus – the protein that allows the virus to enter our cells – to see if they could predict future mutations that could yield dangerous new variants of Covid-19.

At the time, Schreiber noted with concern that there were a variety of ways in which the spike protein could evolve. If all of these mutations occurred at once, it could yield a variant that was both extremely transmissible and potentially capable of evading some of the body’s immune defences, blunting the efficacy of the vaccines.

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Omicron: everything you need to know about new Covid variant

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Key questions answered about coronavirus variant first detected in southern Africa

The variant was initially referred to as B.1.1.529, but on Friday was designated as a variant of concern (VOC) by the World Health Organization because of its “concerning” mutations and because “preliminary evidence suggests an increased risk of reinfection with this variant”. The WHO system assigns such variants a Greek letter, to provide a non-stigmatising label that does not associate new variants with the location where they were first detected. The new variant has been called Omicron.

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BioNTech says it could tweak Covid vaccine in 100 days if needed

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Company says it will know in two weeks whether current Pfizer jab is effective against Omicron variant

BioNTech says it could produce and ship an updated version of its vaccine within 100 days if the new Covid variant detected in southern Africa is found to evade existing immunity.

The German biotechnology company is already investigating whether the vaccine it developed with US drugmaker Pfizer works well against the variant, named Omicron, which has caused concern due to its high number of mutations and initial suggestions that it could be transmitting more quickly.

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Novavax expected to be approved as fourth Covid vaccine in UK

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Trials show the protein-based jab causes fewer side-effects – and hundreds of British jobs depend on it

Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna. Britons have become so accustomed to the three Covid vaccines available in the UK that most have forgotten about another jab, Novavax – even though the government has ordered 60m doses and hundreds of British jobs depend on it.

Late last month the US company, with a factory on Teesside primed to manufacture doses, submitted final data to UK regulators and a positive decision is anticipated within days or weeks. It will bring to an end what feels like a long wait compared with the speedy development and approval of the other jabs, including for those who took part in trials.

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‘Follow the science’: AstraZeneca unveils £1bn R&D centre

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Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company has come a long way since it fought off a takeover bid in 2014

Little expense has been spared at the giant glass and steel structure that sprouts from a once-vacant plot of land on the outskirts of Cambridge.

AstraZeneca’s £1bn new research and development centre houses 16 labs and 2,200 scientists, making it the biggest science lab in Britain along with the Francis Crick Institute in London, and the pharmaceutical company’s biggest single site investment to date.

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New Zealand to reopen borders to vaccinated visitors from new year

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Border will first open to New Zealand citizens coming from Australia, then from the rest of the world, and finally to all other vaccinated visitors from April

New Zealand has announced it will reopen its borders to vaccinated visitors in the opening months of 2022, for the first time since prime minister Jacinda Ardern announced their snap closure in the first month of the Covid-19 pandemic. The country’s borders have been closed for more than a year and a half.

The border will initially open to New Zealand citizens and visa holders coming from Australia, then from the rest of the world, and finally to all other vaccinated visitors from the end of April. They will still have to self-isolate at home for a week, but will no longer have to pass through the country’s expensive and highly-space limited managed isolation facilities.

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UK employers step up demand for workers vaccinated against Covid

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Analysis shows job adverts requiring candidates to be jabbed rose by 189% between August and October

Employers in the UK are following the lead of their counterparts in the US by stepping up demands for staff to be vaccinated against Covid-19, analysis of recruitment adverts reveals.

According to figures from the jobs website Adzuna, the number of ads explicitly requiring candidates to be vaccinated rose by 189% between August and October as more firms ask for workers to be jabbed before they start on the job.

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Good or bad? Top cardiologist gives verdict on chocolate, coffee and wine

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Exclusive: Prof Thomas Lüscher assesses the heart healthiness of some of our favourite treats

Dark chocolate is a “joy” when it comes to keeping your heart healthy, coffee is likely protective, but wine is at best “neutral”, according to one of the world’s leading cardiologists.

As editor of the European Heart Journal for more than a decade, Prof Thomas Lüscher led a team that sifted through 3,200 manuscripts from scientists and doctors every year. Only a fraction – those deemed “truly novel” and backed up with “solid data” – would be selected for publication.

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First known Covid case was Wuhan market vendor, says scientist

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Claim will reignite debate about origins of pandemic, a continuing source of tension between US and China

The first known Covid-19 case was a vendor at the live-animal market in Wuhan, according to a scientist who has scrutinised public accounts of the earliest cases in China.

The chronology is at odds with a timeline laid out in an influential World Health Organization (WHO) report, which suggested an accountant with no apparent link to the Hunan market was the first known case.

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Man’s severe migraines ‘completely eliminated’ on plant-based diet

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Migraines disappeared after man started diet that included lots of dark-green leafy vegetables, study shows

Health experts are calling for more research into diet and migraines after doctors revealed a patient who had suffered severe and debilitating headaches for more than a decade completely eliminated them after adopting a plant-based diet.

He had tried prescribed medication, yoga and meditation, and cut out potential trigger foods in an effort to reduce the severity and frequency of his severe headaches – but nothing worked. The migraines made it almost impossible to perform his job, he said.

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UK firm to trial T-cell Covid vaccine that could give longer immunity

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Exclusive: Oxfordshire-based Emergex gets go-ahead for trials in Switzerland for skin patch vaccine

An Oxfordshire-based company will soon start clinical trials of a second-generation vaccine against Covid-19, an easy-to-administer skin patch that uses T-cells to kill infected cells and could offer longer-lasting immunity than current vaccines.

Emergex was set up in Abingdon in 2016 to develop T-cell vaccines, the brainchild of Prof Thomas Rademacher, the firm’s chief executive and professor emeritus of molecular medicine at the University College London medical school.

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Science YouTuber Philipp Dettmer: ‘Getting cancer was super-interesting’

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The online star with 15 million subscribers on demystifying everything from black holes to the immune system, the trouble with anti-vaxxers, and what his cancer taught him

Skim Philipp Dettmer’s CV and you’d have to say he was an improbable candidate to become one of the world’s foremost science communicators. The 35-year-old from Munich dropped out of high school in Germany aged 15. He eventually did a history degree, and only became involved in science through his interest in infographics. This led, in 2013, to him creating Kurzgesagt (AKA “In a nutshell”), one of the most popular science channels on YouTube. The platform’s irreverent, kaleidoscopic videos – stripped-back guides to everything from black holes to Covid – have more than 15 million subscribers and have clocked up almost 1.5bn views.

Dettmer has now written a book about the human immune system, which has intrigued him for more than a decade. Everyone has an opinion on theirs – whether it’s good or not up to much; how best to “boost” it – but it can be a struggle to understand how it works. In Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive, Dettmer uses eye-catching graphics and simple language to untangle the strange, compelling, sometimes grisly methods our bodies use to defend us from disease.

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Blood pressure drugs could prevent type 2 diabetes, study finds

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Lowering high blood pressure may slash the risk of the disease in millions of people in future

Blood pressure drugs could prevent millions of people worldwide from developing type 2 diabetes, a large study suggests.

Lowering high blood pressure is an effective way to slash the risk of the disease in the future, according to the research published in the Lancet.

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As Covid recedes in US a new worry emerges: wildlife passing on the virus

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New study shows that deer can catch the virus from people and give it to other deer in overwhelming numbers

As America’s pandemic – for now – seems to be moving into a new phase with national rates in decline from the September peak and vaccines rolling out to children, a new worry has appeared on the horizon: wildlife passing on the virus.

A new study shows that deer can catch the coronavirus from people and give it to other deer in overwhelming numbers, the first evidence of animals transmitting the virus in the wild. Similar spillover and transmission could be occurring in certain animal populations around the world, with troubling implications for eradicating the virus and potentially even for the emergence of new variants.

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Chakras, crystals and conspiracy theories: how the wellness industry turned its back on Covid science

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Its gurus increasingly promote vaccine scepticism, conspiracy theories and the myth that ill people have themselves to blame. How did self-care turn so nasty?

Ozlem Demirboga Carr is not really into all that woo‑woo stuff. “I’m definitely a full-science kind of person,” says the 41-year-old telecoms worker from Reading. She doesn’t believe in crystals, affirmations or salt lamps. But she did find herself unusually anxious during the UK’s Covid lockdown in March 2020 and, like many people, decided to practise yoga as a way to de-stress.

“I tried to be open-minded and I was open to advice on trying to improve my wellbeing and mental health,” she says. So she followed a range of social media accounts, including the “somatic therapist and biz coach” Phoebe Greenacre, known for her yoga videos, and the “women’s empowerment and spiritual mentor” Kelly Vittengl. The Instagram algorithm did its work. “I suddenly found myself following so many wellness accounts,” she says.

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Israel to hold world’s first drill to test readiness for new Covid variant

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War games exercise will help prepare for the possible emergence of a lethal ‘Omega’ variant

Israel is to conduct the world’s first national Covid drill to test the country’s readiness for an outbreak of a new and lethal variant of the virus.

The drill, scheduled for Thursday, will take the format of a war games exercise and will be led by the prime minister, Naftali Bennett.

Restrictions on gatherings and movement, quarantine policy, lockdowns, curfews and tourism.

Oversight and warnings issued during the development of a new and dangerous variant, testing vaccine protection, epidemiological investigations, hospital capacity and the carrying out of mass-testing and vaccination programmes.

The legality of local or regional lockdowns and curfews, and other restrictions.

Economic support for the population.

Public security in enforcing quarantine, lockdowns and curfews.

Closing schools in outbreak centres, reducing class sizes and remote learning.

Departure and arrival policy at borders including Ben Gurion airport.

Informing the public and responding to “discourse on the internet”.

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People testing negative for Covid-19 despite exposure may have ‘immune memory’

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Study says some individuals clear virus rapidly due to a strong immune response from existing T-cells, meaning tests record negative result

We all know that person who, despite their entire household catching Covid-19, has never tested positive for the disease. Now scientists have found an explanation, showing that a proportion of people experience “abortive infection” in which the virus enters the body but is cleared by the immune system’s T-cells at the earliest stage meaning that PCR and antibody tests record a negative result.

About 15% of healthcare workers who were tracked during the first wave of the pandemic in London, England, appeared to fit this scenario.

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Randox: how one-man-band operation became a Covid testing giant

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Healthcare firm named in Owen Paterson lobbying scandal has won £500m in UK government contracts

As the Covid-19 pandemic swept towards the UK, a senior employee of the healthcare firm Randox addressed an audience of horse racing royalty, gathered amid the neoclassical splendour of St George’s Hall in Liverpool.

Randox, which had garnered a role within the “sport of kings” via its sponsorship of the Grand National, had developed a test for Covid-19, he told them.

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The dawn of tappigraphy: does your smartphone know how you feel before you do?

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Tech companies are seeking to analyse data on the way we tap, scroll, text and call to monitor our mental health – with potential consequences for privacy and healthcare

We all fear our smartphones spy on us, and I’m subject to a new type of surveillance. An app called TapCounter records each time I touch my phone’s screen. My swipes and jabs are averaging about 1,000 a day, though I notice that’s falling as I steer shy of social media to meet my deadline. The European company behind it, QuantActions, promises that through capturing and analysing the data it will be able to “detect important indicators related to mental/neurological health”.

Arko Ghosh is the company’s cofounder and a neuroscientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “Tappigraphy patterns” – the time series of my touches – can, he says, confidently be used not only to infer slumber habits (tapping in the wee hours means you are not sleeping) but also mental performance level (the small intervals in a series of key-presses represent a proxy for reaction time), and he has published work to support it.

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‘Our notion of privacy will be useless’: what happens if technology learns to read our minds?

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The promise of neurotechnology to make lives better is growing. But do we need a new set of rights to protect the integrity of our minds?

“The skull acts as a bastion of privacy; the brain is the last private part of ourselves,” Australian neurosurgeon Tom Oxley says from New York.

Oxley is the CEO of Synchron, a neurotechnology company born in Melbourne that has successfully trialled hi-tech brain implants that allow people to send emails and texts purely by thought.

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