Our body must constantly defend itself against bacteria and viruses. It generates millions of different antibodies, which are selected to recognise the enemy and trigger the best possible immune response. Scientists use these antibodies to for therapeutic purposes to target proteins and disrupt their harmful. However, identifying the small molecules that will form the basis of the drug is a long and tedious process.

Biomedical engineers at Duke University have devised a test to quickly and easily assess how well a person’s neutralizing antibodies fight infection from multiple variants of COVID-19 such as Delta and the newly discovered Omicron variant.

This test could potentially tell doctors how protected a patient is from new variants and those currently circulating in a community or, conversely, which monoclonal antibodies to treat a COVID-19 patient.

In the first head-to-head comparison of the effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, researchers examined the electronic health records of veterans who had received each vaccine. Both vaccines were highly effective in preventing COVID-19 outcomes such as documented infection, hospitalization, and death.

The first peer-reviewed study in North America examining the timing between the first and second doses of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines shows that a longer dose interval leads to a stronger immune response. The study is funded by the Government of Canada through its COVID-19 Immunity Task Force (CITF).

From May 23 to August 13, 2021, the Institut Pasteur, in partnership with the French National Health Insurance Fund (CNAM), Santé publique France and the Ipsos institute, conducted the fourth part of the ComCor epidemiological study on circumstances and places of infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus in France. The aim of the study was to identify the socio-demographic factors, places visited and behaviors associated with a higher risk of infection with SARS-CoV-2.

A combination of two targeted cancer drugs showed unprecedented, "clinically meaningful" activity in patients with highly malignant brain tumors that carried a rare genetic mutation, according to a clinical trial report by investigators from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

The drug combination, which blocked an overactive cell-growth signaling pathway, shrank tumors by 50% or more in one-third of 45 patients with hard-to-treat high-grade gliomas, including glioblastomas, the most aggressive brain tumor.

Aspirin use is associated with a 26% raised risk of heart failure in people with at least one predisposing factor for the condition. That’s the finding of a study published today in ESC Heart Failure, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC). Predisposing factors included smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.