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At the Thyroid Center in Minsk, Belarus, patients get treatment for the destructive effects of radiation to the thyroid gland after being exposed to fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986.Photograph by Gerd Ludwig, Nat Geo Image Collection
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Children born to Chernobyl survivors don’t carry more genetic mutations
The largest and most advanced study of its kind not only updates past results, it also provides new details on how fallout from the disaster caused certain cancers.
ByMichael Greshko
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On the morning of April 26, 1986, a reactor in a nuclear power plant in what’s now northern Ukraine exploded and burned triggering what would become history’s deadliest nuclear accident. The hellish fire belched out immense clouds of radioactive fallout that entered people’s lungs, settled on homes, fields, and livestock pastures, and infiltrated their supplies. Milk, salami, and eggs had becom
(Volker Lannert/University of Bonn)
Tonix Pharmaceuticals is opening an early-stage antiviral asset deal with OyaGen as the pair targets COVID-19.
The research and license pact, financials of which were not made public, focuses on the antiviral inhibitor of SARS-CoV-2, TNX-3500 (aka sangivamycin, formerly OYA1), which Tonix believes can hit back against the pandemic virus and “potentially other viral disorders.”
The active ingredient of the drug has, in fact, been studied for safety in humans in prior research on cancer patients at the U.S. National Cancer Institute.
New York-based OyaGen says very early tests of TNX-3500 have shown it to be 65 times more potent in head-to-head comparisons at inhibiting SARS-CoV-2 than remdesivir, the active ingredient of Gilead’s Ebola-cum-COVID drug Veklury. Combining the two also saw “additive activity against SARS-CoV-2 in cell culture infectivity,” according to the preclinical biotech, though these results are from as y
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Facebook claims that its new artificial intelligence can predict the way drugs interact with each other inside cells quicker than existing methods, enabling speedier discovery of new drug combinations to treat illnesses like cancer, but some researchers say it may not translate into results that will be useful in humans.
The system, developed by Facebook AI Research and the Helmholtz Centre in Munich, Germany, is claimed to be the first easy-to-use AI model able to estimate how different drugs will work in the body. It could speed up our ability to uncover new treatments for diseases like cancer. “Drug research often takes half a decade to develop a compound,” says Fabian Theis at the Helmholtz Centre, one of the authors of the work.
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Published 2:13 am
Researchers in a new study have found evidence that people with prior infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, appear to be well protected against being re-infected with the virus, at least for a few months.
According to
sciencedaily.com, the finding of the researchers may explain why re-infection appears to be relatively rare, and it could have important public health implications, including decisions about returning to physical workplaces, school attendance, the prioritization of vaccine distribution, and other activities.
For the study, researchers at US National Cancer Institute partnered data analytics companies, HealthVerity and Aetion, Inc. as well as five commercial laboratories. The findings were published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
A new Canadian study finds that for people who take certain blood pressure medications, that advice becomes even more critical because those drugs can increase their sensitivity to the sun s harmful ultraviolet rays.