Infectious Disease

Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) said today that its Janssen Pharmaceutical Cos. has forged a partnership with the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) to support coronavirus vaccine development. Janssen and the virology lab led by Dr. Dan Barouch at BIDMC have started preclinical testing of multiple vaccine prospects, with the goal of identifying a COVID-19…

Researchers at the University of Bristol (United Kingdom) are touting their use of virtual reality (VR) as a means to design and develop the next generation of drug treatments. In a published work in the journal PLOS ONE, the researchers explained the use of VR in discovering new drugs by finding molecules that bind to…

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) is offering advanced development support to Hologic (NSDQ:HOLX) for a molecular diagnostic test for coronavirus (COVID-19). Marlborough, Mass.-based Hologic’s test is the first coronavirus product selected for development through ASPR’s biomedical advanced R&D authority streamlined selection process (BARDA), which…

Discovery of a new feature of a large class of pathogenic viruses may allow development of new antiviral medications for the common cold, polio and other illnesses, according to a new study publishing June 11 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Rana Abdelnabi and Johan Neyts of the University of Leuven, Belgium, and James…

A universal flu vaccine that could prevent a potential influenza pandemic has been a holy grail for epidemiologists around the world ever since the first flu vaccines were developed in 1938. Now, an international team of researchers from the University of Michigan, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and other institutions believe they…

About 1.5 million people died of tuberculosis (TB) in 2017, making it the most lethal infectious disease worldwide. A growing rise in drug-resistant TB is a major obstacle to successfully treating the illness. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Umea University in Sweden have found a compound that prevents…

With a new case of measles and whooping cough seemingly in the news every week and vaccination rates declining, researchers are trying new approaches to predict future disease epidemics. A research team from the University of Georgia has developed a new five-year modeling technique to forecast disease reemergence, particularly with preventable childhood infections like measles…

Researchers at McMaster University have invented a stable, affordable way to store fragile vaccines for weeks at a time at temperatures up to 40C, opening the way for life-saving anti-viral vaccines to reach remote and impoverished regions of the world. The new method combines the active ingredients in existing vaccines with a sugary gel, where…

A new study from The Westmead Institute for Medical Research has uncovered how serious fungal infections grow in humans by conserving phosphate, highlighting a possible target for treatment. Cryptococcus neoformans is a potentially life-threatening invasive fungal disease that infects people with weakened immune systems, such as cancer patients and organ transplant recipients. The fungus needs…

2018 was a bad year for influenza. In the United States alone, 80,000 people died and nearly one million people were hospitalized as a result of the virus, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC). It was the worse year since the last pandemic occurred in 2009. While 2019 is thus far appearing to…

It remains mysterious why humans get infected by some bacterial or viral pathogens relatively easily while animals that have very similar tissues and immune functions do not. This chasm also is the reason why researchers frequently face problems in their efforts to model pathogenic diseases in animal models, such as mice, and why drugs developed…

Scientists looking at the genetics of Zika virus have found a way to fast-track research which could lead to new vaccines. The study, led by The University of Queensland and QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, used a new technique to uncover Zika mutations that help foster virus replication in mosquito hosts, while hindering its ability…