The National Institutes of Health and its foundation announced that, in collaboration with multiple biopharmaceutical companies and government agencies, they will develop an international strategy for coordinating research responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The collaboration includes the Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, the Centers for Disease Control…

Dr. Anthony Fauci said this morning that hundreds of millions of doses of a vaccine for COVID-19 could be ready by January. In an interview on the Today Show, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said that a vaccine candidate is in the first phase of a clinical trial. If the second…

Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) shares dipped today despite first-quarter results that topped the consensus forecast. The New Brunswick, N.J.-based company posted profits of $5.8 billion, or $2.17 per share, on sales of $20.7 billion for the three months ended March 29, 2020, for a 54.6% bottom-line gain on sales growth of 3.3%. Get the full story…

  Quest Diagnostics (NYSE:DGX) announced today that consumers can now order a COVID-19 antibody test it launched last week directly from the company, without visiting a doctor’s office. The Secaucus, N.J.-based testing giant said consumers can purchase the antibody test service online for $119 through its QuestDirect business. They will be prompted to schedule an appointment…

PerkinElmer recently announced that it has expanded its analysis and automation portfolio for quality, safety and content testing. The company geared the new offerings for pharmaceutical, semiconductor, biomonitoring, food, materials and academia labs. They’re supposed to help streamline workflows, sharpen insights and meet regulations. Go to our WTWH Media sister site R&D World for the…

The National Institutes of Health today announced the publishing of new COVID-19 treatment guidelines, and the expert panel producing the guidelines says no drug has yet been proven safe and effective against the virus. NIH has the new guidelines posted online at covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov — and says it will update the guidelines often as new peer-reviewed…

Sanofi and GSK recently announced that they have signed a letter of intent to collaborate on an adjuvanted vaccine for COVID-19 — with a goal of having the vaccine available by the second half of 2021. Sanofi is contributing its S-protein COVID-19 antigen. The company’s recombinant DNA technology produced an exact genetic match to proteins…

Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is a reliable, highly sensitive method for detecting the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19. Although the test can be performed on bench-top instruments capable of analyzing one or a few samples at a time, most RT-PCR tests are conducted by large workstations capable of processing thousands of samples per…

CRISPR-startup Mammoth Biosciences will file for an emergency use application from the FDA after publishing a study in Nature Biotechnology that suggests its platform can detect SARS-CoV-2 from a respiratory swab RNA extracts in less than 45 minutes. The company says the paper contains the first peer-reviewed data using CRISPR diagnostics for COVID-19. In a…

BioSig Technologies (NSDQ:BSGM) announced today that it is beginning a Phase II clinical trial at Mayo Clinic for Vicromax as a treatment for COVID-19. ViralClear Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of BioSig, updated its clinical development program for the Vicromax treatment which is slated to be used in a trial under Dr. Andrew Badley, the professor and chair…

Clara Health, a company connecting patients to clinical trials, is partnering with two Silicon Valley tech leaders to create a free public health initiative that connects people with clinical trials targeting COVID-19. World Without COVID will help COVID-19-positive and -negative people find trials testing new diagnostics, treatments and vaccine discovery. Raj Kapoor, chief strategy officer…

Bausch Health (NYSE:BHC) announced today that it initiated a clinical trial program in Canada to investigate the use of Virazole for treating COVID-19. With today’s announcement, Bausch joins Eli Lilly (NYSE:LLY) and Care Access Research, which both announced clinical testing of coronavirus therapies last week. Bausch’s Virazole is currently approved in the U.S. and Canada, among other…

Bio-Rad Laboratories (NYSE:BIO) this week said it acquired Celsee for an undisclosed amount. Celsee develops instruments and consumables for the isolation, detection and analysis of single cells. The company’s Genesis System allows scientists to isolate, analyze and interpret cellular behavior and collect cell-based information for improved results in single-cell cytometry, single-cell transcriptomics, single-cell multiomics, rare-cell enrichment…

Miele — a manufacturer of laboratory glassware washers — recently unveiled six new models for North America that the company says offer maximum cleanliness, reliability, consistency and flexibility to meet stringent safety and sanitary demands of productive laboratories. The new models from Miele include a plug and play, 115V under-counter washer (PLW 8505), as well…

SP Scienceware is touting ProCulture, its new workflow-minded product line for cell culture under the company’s Bel-Art and Wilmad-LabGlass brands. ProCulture covers multiple steps of the cell culture process from isolation to harvesting, according to SP Scienceware. Products include an array of shaker flasks, spinner flasks with a unique impeller that increases aeration and eliminates…

Deciphering the key characteristics of the virus that causes COVID-19 and using experiments and computational methods to identify promising drug and vaccine candidates — those are but some of the efforts underway at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. The laboratory is also exploring options to help supply medical professionals…

Researchers in Pittsburgh and Boston are moving forward with research into two separate vaccine programs against SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic. The work of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers is detailed in a paper published recently in EBioMedicine, which is published by the Lancet. Delivery of the vaccine involved…

Thermo Fisher Scientific is boasting that scientists no longer need to limit routine trace element analysis workflow productivity. The company has launched a new series of inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES) instruments for food and beverage, consumer safety, industrial, environmental and pharmaceutical laboratories. Read the full story on our sister site R&D World. 

Hardly anyone’s R&D  workplace has been spared all the repercussions of the COVID-19 crisis. People are working remotely, staggering their hours in laboratories to avoid too many coworkers, and relying heavily on conference calls and video meetings. Our WTWH Media sister site R&D World spoke to a few industry people to see how they’re coping…

General Electric (NYSE:GE) announced that it completed the sale of its BioPharma business to Danaher (NYSE:DHR) for net proceeds totaling approximately $20 billion. Boston-based GE said in a news release that, under the agreeement, it received a total consideration worth $21.4 billion, with $21 billion in cash along with Danaher’s assumption of certain pension liabilities. After accounting…

While vaccines and pharmaceutical treatments for COVID-19 might be far off, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Colorado are exploring a stopgap measure that could buy time for critically ill patients, according to a release by the two institutions. In a clinical trial being planned for hospitals in Massachusetts and Colorado,…

Synthetic biology company SGI-DNA is touting its efforts to accelerate research in the creation of vaccines for SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic. The San Diego-based company said in a news release last month that it built the genes thought to be critical to developing successful vaccines against the virus and made those tools…

A Phase 1 clinical trial for an investigational COVID-19 vaccine is underway at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle. The open-label trial plans to enroll 45 healthy adults aged 18 to 55 years over a six week period. The first study participant received the vaccine yesterday. Researchers at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research…

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…