More countries with greater resources are opening up for a more normal life. But COVID-19 and the SARS-CoV-2 virus are still a significant threat in large parts of the world.

The lack of medicines that are effective, easy to distribute and easy to obtain are a significant part of the problem.

A recent Cleveland Clinic study found that patients who regularly use steroid nasal sprays are less likely to develop severe COVID-19-related disease, including a 20 to 25% lower risk of hospitalization, ICU admission and mortality. The study was published in Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice.

A team of international researchers, including McGill Professor Stéphane Laporte, have discovered the working mechanism of potential drug targets for various diseases such as cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, and even COVID-19. The findings published in Molecular Cell uncover the inner workings of cell receptors that are involved in cancer progression and inflammatory diseases.

A newly developed immunotherapy that simultaneously uses modified immune-fighting cells to home in on and attack two antigens, or foreign substances, on cancer cells was highly effective in mice implanted with human neuroblastoma tissue, report researchers from the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and the UNC School of Medicine.

Breathe in, breathe out. That’s how easy it is for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, to enter your nose. And though remarkable progress has been made in developing intramuscular vaccines against SARS-CoV- 2, such as the readily available Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, nothing yet - like a nasal vaccine - has been approved to provide mucosal immunity in the nose, the first barrier against the virus before it travels down to the lungs.

Using a virus that grows in black-eyed pea plants, nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego developed a new treatment that could keep metastatic cancers at bay from the lungs. The treatment not only slowed tumor growth in the lungs of mice with either metastatic breast cancer or melanoma, it also prevented or drastically minimized the spread of these cancers to the lungs of healthy mice that were challenged with the disease.

An expert review by an international group of scientists, including some at the WHO and FDA, concludes that, even for the delta variant, vaccine efficacy against severe COVID is so high that booster doses for the general population are not appropriate at this stage in the pandemic.

The review, published in The Lancet, summarises the currently available evidence from randomised controlled trials and observational studies published in peer-reviewed journals and pre-print servers.