Category Archives: Genetic Engineering

The bioeconomy covers all sectors and systems that rely on biological resources (animals, plants, microorganisms, and derived biomass, including organic waste) as well as their functions and principles. It includes and interlinks economic and industrial sectors such as food, health, chemicals, materials, energy and services that use biological resources and processes.

It is anticipated that the world will face increased competition for limited and finite natural resources given a growing population, increasing pressure on our food and health systems, and climate change and associated environmental degradation decimating our primary production systems.

Synthetic biology is an emerging field which applies engineering principles to the design and modification of living systems, thus underpinning and accelerating technological advances with clear potential to provide impact at scale to the global economy. Manufacturers are turning towards this method to efficiently produce high performance, sustainable products.

A recent McKinsey report anticipates applications from this bio revolution could have a direct global impact of up to $4 trillion per year over the next 10-20 years, enabling production of 60% physical inputs to the global economy, and addressing 45% of the worlds current disease burden. However, for synthetic biology applications to reach their full potential, its critical to ensure that access and development of knowledge in this sector, along with the relevant research tools, are distributed in low resource contexts. This can help to avoid the technology being centered solely in advanced, resource rich economies and widening inequalities in the global bioeconomy.

Dr. Jenny Molloy, Senior Research Associate at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Cambridge, studies the role and impact of open approaches to intellectual property for a sustainable and equitable bioeconomy.

Her work focuses on better understanding problems facing researchers accessing biological research tools in low resource contexts, particularly Latin America and Africa. Her team develops innovative technologies for local, distributed manufacturing of enzymes to improve access and build capacity for biological research. The broader aim of her research is to contextualize open source approaches to biotechnology within current narratives of innovation and the bioeconomy policy agenda. She is also a member of the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Synthetic Biology.

We discussed new developments, challenges, and her ideal scenario for the bioeconomy policy agenda for the next 10 years. Here's what she said:

Realizing that the current system of how we fund, reward, publish and disseminate science, and how we balance public and private interests in technology is quite recent and could be changed.

Originally, I worked on advocacy for open data and open science (which fortunately is now much more mainstream within research culture), and then my introduction specifically to bioeconomy policies came when I worked on genetic modification of dengue mosquitoes for my doctorate. This put me right at the intersection of global health, synthetic biology, and the bioeconomy in a field nested in a complex tangle of ethics, regulation, responsible innovation, and public opinion.

At the same time, I was contributing to projects on open science for development and getting more interested in how to make access to science, innovation, and its benefits truly global. Everything started pointing to the imperative of working to ensure that we collectively build a global bioeconomy that is equitable and economically and environmentally sustainable.

Id say the ability to de novo synthesise DNA at scale and precisely edit it. When I was trying to genetically engineer mosquitoes, constructing DNA modules was laborious and it was really a roll of the dice as to where in the genome that DNA would end up. Having more affordable ways to write as well as read DNA with increased elegance, precision editing of CRISPR has enabled exciting advances to address so many global challenges: from drug discovery to crop improvement.

That is why I find enabling tools and technologies so exciting: they underpin innovation and users will deliver applications that the original developers didnt dream about. A lot of my work focuses on how to ensure that these developments reach all scientists and not only those in high income countries.

I would say the perception and narrative that is strongly embedded in biotechnology at all levels that open source means uncommercialisable.

Unfortunately, this leads to an unwillingness to creatively explore openness as one possibility within a whole range of Intellectual Property (IP) strategies. I wish people knew to ask, What impact do I want to achieve in the world and to what extent can protecting or openly sharing this technology get me there?. Sometimes, youll land back on patenting everything because the promise of a monopoly is required to unlock sufficiently risk tolerant investment. That is OK!

However, the answer is likely more nuanced when your goal is also environmental or social impact or where you have a user community that could contribute back significant innovations or for many other reasons. Teslas patent pledge in 2014 was likely partially because their success depends on public and private investment in infrastructure like charging stations, so while sharing their technology might allow competitors to get to market faster, that could increase the number of electric cars on the road and the interests of electric car drivers and industry. All this nuance gets missed if you dont ask the question.

One of the best sources of knowledge in biotechnology is, perhaps somewhat ironically, published patents! Developing and emerging economies have immense freedom to apply this knowledge commercially as very few biotech patents have been filed in the Global South while many more have expired and entered the public domain.

However, there are major challenges to making that knowledge used and useful, including having enough people skilled in the art and providing an enabling environment - well equipped labs, reliable supply chains, responsive regulation and funding. Open source approaches play an important role here because beyond open licensing they also encourage collaborative development and sharing of know how, which is essential to overcome barriers to building capacity and innovation.

The application of precision medicine to save and improve lives relies on good-quality, easily-accessible data on everything from our DNA to lifestyle and environmental factors. The opposite to a one-size-fits-all healthcare system, it has vast, untapped potential to transform the treatment and prediction of rare diseasesand disease in general.

But there is no global governance framework for such data and no common data portal. This is a problem that contributes to the premature deaths of hundreds of millions of rare-disease patients worldwide.

The World Economic Forums Breaking Barriers to Health Data Governance initiative is focused on creating, testing and growing a framework to support effective and responsible access across borders to sensitive health data for the treatment and diagnosis of rare diseases.

The data will be shared via a federated data system: a decentralized approach that allows different institutions to access each others data without that data ever leaving the organization it originated from. This is done via an application programming interface and strikes a balance between simply pooling data (posing security concerns) and limiting access completely.

The project is a collaboration between entities in the UK (Genomics England), Australia (Australian Genomics Health Alliance), Canada (Genomics4RD), and the US (Intermountain Healthcare).

For example, basic laboratory equipment like incubators are typically no longer protected by IP but you will rarely find full assembly and repair instructions online: open hardware projects provide this and bring together communities of developers and manufacturers to enable local manufacturing. Access to enzymes is an almost ubiquitous challenge in the Global South and while many useful enzymes are now in the public domain, it can be time consuming to find the DNA and protocols to express them.

Open toolkits like the Research in Diagnostics DNA Collection designed by my lab and many collaborators and distributed through the Free Genes project at Stanford provides a ready to go solution that with the correct manufacturing practices, quality management systems and regulatory approvals could also be used for diagnostics kits. Local manufacturing of molecular diagnostics is a possibility we are exploring with collaborators in Cameroon and Ghana, for example through the AfriDx project funded by EDCTP.

A great example of an open project that has already had a direct impact on scientific progress is the Structural Genomics Consortium, a public-private-partnership which has openly released data, materials and research tools for drug discovery against medically relevant human protein structures to academia and industry for around 20 years, resulting in thousands of collaborations and scientific papers and over 1500 protein structures entering the public domain. The leaders of the consortium continue to push the model further, for example launching pharma companies that aim to apply an open approach to drug discovery for rare childhood cancers.

Realizing that the current system of how we fund, reward, publish and disseminate science and how we balance public and private interests in technology is quite recent and could be changed.

My ideal scenario is that the global bioeconomy policy agenda is truly global, so that over the next 10 years countries in the Global South, that host so much of the biodiversity that is fuelling the bioeconomy, are able to shape that agenda, to level up innovation capacities, and to benefit from the bioeconomy on their own terms.

My advice to global leaders and policymakers is to ensure that all countries get a seat at the table and focus on building out more than local or regional policies but also systems for international governance that can adapt to the extraordinary pace of technical and social change in the bioeconomy.

The Global Future Council on Synthetic Biology has focused a lot of our attention on how to embed the values of sustainability, equity, humility and solidarity into the future bioeconomy policy agenda, providing a compass rather than a map, because we think this is important to ensure that synthetic biology is being harnessed to create a world in which we want to live.

Written by

Abhinav Chugh, Acting Content and Partnerships Lead, World Economic Forum

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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Synthetic biology can benefit all of us, an expert explains - World Economic Forum

PUNE, India, Nov. 25, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- According to The Insight Partners study on "Animal Genetics Market to 2027 Global Analysis and Forecast by Animal Genetic Material, Genetic Material and Service" the animal genetics market was valued at US$ 4,778.67 million in 2019 and is projected to reach US$ 7,705.23 million by 2027; it is expected to grow at a CAGR of 6.3% during 20192027. The growth of the market is attributed to the growing preference for animal derived proteins supplements and food products and rising adoption of progressive genetic practices such as artificial insemination (AI) and embryo transfer. However, limited number of skilled professionals in veterinary research and stringent government regulations for animal genetics is expected to hinder the market growth.

The North American region holds the largest market share of this market and is expected to grow in forecasted years. The growth in North America is characterized by the presence of new market players, various product launches and increasing government initiatives.

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Likewise, Mexico is likely to offer attractive business opportunities for livestock genetics. Over the last decades, Mexico's beef, pork, and dairy productions have undergone valuable developments. Mexican generators in the expanding livestock intensive systems are frequently using modern genetic improvement technologies such as artificial insemination and embryo transfers.

In North America, the US is the largest market for animal genetics market. Livestock groups provide consumers with different products and services, including meat, milk, eggs, fiber, and draught power. The genetic variation within livestock communities produces the raw material for evolving through natural selection in answer to changing conditions and human-managed genetic improvement plans. As per the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), animal genetics is one of the livestock development support. It is a wide field, ranging from characterization to conservation to genetic development. According to the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), there have been dramatic improvements in animal production yields and efficiencies. Therefore, the ever-increasing demand for dietary protein in the United States has been observed. These demands are achieved by one the best Animal breeding is one strategy by which these improvements may be performed. NIFA, with the help of scientists from universities and research organizations and food animal industries, provides national leadership and funding opportunities to conduct basic, applied, and integrated research to increase knowledge of animal genetics and genomics.

The COVID-19 outbreak has disturbed various trades and businesses across the world. The incidence of corona virus or COVID 19 has not yet been registered the animals. Also, there is no evidence that companion animals are the prime source of the spreading epidemic in humans. However, various studies have been conducted to check the spread of disease from animals to humans. In many cases, zoonotic diseases were found in humans due to interaction with animals. Therefore, government bodies are taking more precautions and safety measures to prevent the spread of corona virus in the animals. The measures are widely carried out for companion animals as they frequently come in contact with their owners. Also, it is essential to report the cases to a veterinary authority. For instance, in the region, to report the cases of detection of COVID-19 is done to OIE through WAHIS, in accordance with the OIE Terrestrial Animal Health Code as an emerging disease.

The OIE is actively working by providing assistance to research for their on-going research and other implications of COVID-19 for animal health and veterinary public health. The assistance is also providing risk assessment, risk management, and risk communication. Also, the OIE has put in place an Incident Coordination System to coordinate these activities. In addition, OIE is also working with the Wildlife Working Group and other partners to develop a long-term work program. The aims are to provide better understandings, dynamics, and risks around wildlife trade and consumption. Also, it aims to develop strategies to reduce the risk of future spillover events.

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Additionally, various product and service launches have been initiated, which is helping the US market to grow. For instance, The Veterinary Genetics Laboratory (VGL) at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine has launched an updated and advanced website along with several new tests for veterinary community. As the VGL is one of the foremost genetic testing laboratories in the world, the new site and tests will bring yet another level of global impact to the top-ranked veterinary school. Thus, the consistent support for combating addiction in the country undertaken by various organizations likely to augment the growth of animal genetics market during the forecast years.

The Asia Pacific region is expected to be the fastest-growing region among all other regions. The growth of the market in the region is majorly due to countries like China, India and Japan, which drives the major consumption of animal derived products. Moreover, growing preference for animal derived proteins supplements and food products, and rising adoption of progressive genetic practices such as artificial insemination (AI) and embryo transfer are also likely to contribute to market growth. On the other hand, significant investment by government in various breeding programs is supporting the growth of market. For instance, the central and local governments have invested more than RMB 5 billion to build breeding or multiplier farms and conservation farms for breed improvement programs and the building of centers for testing the quality of breeding stock, semen, and embryos.

Based on product, the animal genetics market is segmented poultry, porcine, bovine, canine, and others. The porcine segment accounted for more than 35.84% of the market share in 2019. In terms of genetic material, the animal genetics market is segmented into semen, and embryo. The embryo segment held the largest share of the market in 2019. In terms of service, the animal genetics market is segmented into DNA typing, genetic trait tests, genetic disease tests, and others.The DNA typing segment held the largest share of the market in 2019.

Rising Adoption of Progressive Genetic Practices Such as Artificial Insemination (AI) and Embryo Transfer in Animal Genetics Market:

Growing focus on developing superior animal breeds using genetic engineering to obtain high reproduction rates for large-scale production of modified breeds is expected to drive animal genetics market during the forecast period. Animal genetics emphasizes the inheritance and genetic variations in wild and domestic animals. This science is used at a commercial level for services such as testing genetic disorders, screening genetic traits, and typing DNA. For identifying genetic hybridizations, animal genetics uses various genetic practices, such as artificial insemination, embryo transfer, and cytological studies. Moreover, artificial insemination (AI) can reduce various risks involved in animal breeding and disease transmission. It is found that female offspring cattle born through artificial insemination yield more milk than normal offspring. Additionally, the use of antibiotic-containing semen extensors is effective in preventing bacterial infectious diseases. Therefore, the entire AI process is considered hygienic than natural mating.

The market players are focusing on partnerships, collaboration, and acquisitions to develop genetically modified breeds and maintain their market share. For instance, in August 2020, Cogent and AB Europe collaborated to launch a novel sexed semen service for sheep producers in the UK. In May 2018, Recombinetics entered into partnership agreement with SEMEX for the implementation of a precision breeding program, which is expected to improve animal health and well-being through hornless dairy cattle genetics. According to the Brazilian Association of Artificial Insemination, the number of commercialized doses of semen increased from 7 million in 2003 to ~14 million in 2017. Thus, rising adoption of genetic practices will support the market growth in coming years.

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Market: Segmental Overview

In terms of product, porcine segment is anticipated to register the highest CAGR during the forecast period. Growing production of porcine and increase in pork consumption is likely to favor the growth of the market. Pork is the most consumed meat across the globe. In the US, pork production generates $23.4 billion output per year. Additionally, 26% that is around 2.2 million metric tons of pork and its products are exported to other countries. Despite of the challenges such as tariffs, labor and disease risks, the pork industry in US is still growing with around 66,000 sows in 2019. Also, developments by the major pork producers in the country is likely to grow the pork production industry. For instance, in 2017, 123-year-old Clemens Food Group partnered with 12 independent hog farmers to establish a new packing plant in Michigan. Thus, growing pork production industry is likely to favor market growth. In terms of genetic material, the animal genetics market is segmented into semen, and embryo. The embryo segment held the largest share of the market in 2019. In terms of service, the animal genetics market is segmented into DNA typing, genetic trait tests, genetic disease tests, and others.The DNA typing segment held the largest share of the market in 2019.

Animal Genetics Market: Competition Landscape and Key Developments

Neogen Corporation, Genus, Groupe Grimaud, Topigs Norsvin, Zoetis Services Llc, Hendrix Genetics Bv, Envigo, Vetgen, Animal Genetics Inc, Alta Genetics Inc. and among others are among the key companies operating in the animal genetics market. These players are focusing on the expansion and diversification of their market presence and the acquisition of a new customer base, thereby tapping prevailing business opportunities.

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Animal Genetics Market Worth ($7705.23 Mn by 2027) by (6.3% CAGR) with Impact of Coronavirus Outbreak and Global Analysis & Forecast by The...

For the launch of the Year of Biology, the neurobiologist Daniel Choquet explains how progress in imaging has contributed to the current explosion of knowledge in the life sciences.

Is it fair to say that advances in imaging technology have brought about a new era in the life sciences?Daniel Choquet:Absolutely. Imaging is part of a series of revolutionary methods that are rapidly expanding knowledge in biology. I like quoting a remark by the South African biologist Sydney Brenner: Progress in science depends on new technologies, new discoveries, and new ideas, probably in that order. This is especially true in biology, for seeing new things enables us to raise fresh questions. Advanced imaging technologies have helped increase our exploration capacities.

What are the milestones of this imaging revolution?D. C.:Imaging has a long history, as the first microscopes go all the way back to the late sixteenth century. But this new revolution can be dated to the 1980s with the use in biology of fluorescent proteins, which can label molecules and thereby help study the mechanisms and processes at work in cells. Another milestone was the development of confocal microscopy and multiphoton microscopy, which provide three-dimensional images of tissue samples. Another key moment was the emergence, beginning in 2006, of super-resolution microscopes which can generate images of objects smaller than 250 nanometres, in both living and functioning tissue.

What objects and processes do these new technologies make possible?D. C.:I will use my favourite cells, neurons, as an example. The cell body of a neuron is approximately 20 microns. It is therefore within reach of conventional microscopes, which are limited by diffraction to a resolution of approximately a quarter micron. The discovery that the brain is not a gelatinous mass, and instead consists of individual cells, was actually made in the late nineteenth century by the Spanish neuroscientist Ramn y Cajal.

A synapse, or the connection between two neurons, typically measures one micron, which is close to the limits of conventional microscopy. It therefore cannot provide high-precision measurement or decode their complex organisation. With a resolution of one hundredth of a micron, super-resolution microscopy can observe not only synapses in action, but also the individual proteins behind a nervous signal.

These technologies enable us to study the dynamics at play when neurons are communicating. For example, my team has shown that synaptic receptors are not fixed to the membrane, but are instead constantly moving about.

Electron microscopy has also seen spectacular advances. What does this mean for the life sciences?D. C.:Electron microscopy has always been important for biology. It enabled the first visualisation of viruses, although the role of this technology has often been underestimated. From the 1980s, electron cryomicroscopy brought about another revolution, namely the ability to study the structure of proteins in 3D with a resolution on the order of the atom. Whats more, it makes it possible to see the different conformations adopted by these proteins, thereby helping us elucidate the functioning of these molecular machines while they are performing their task.

Another recent development involves imaging techniques for studying processes at the level of entire organs or living animals. What do they enable you to do?D. C.:This is a very important point, and here we are on the other side of the spectrum of cryomicroscopy. Thanks to labelling techniques and the miniaturisation of microscopes, we can obtain imaging of an entire animal while it is in action.

For example, we can install a microscope weighing a few grams on a rats head, and let it interact with its congeners or move through a labyrinth. This shows which neurons and regions of the brain are activated during a particular activity. It has already yielded important discoveries, such as the functioning of space and place cells, the neurons that enable us to remember specific locations, and to return to them at a later time.

These technologies show which cells are activated when an animal discovers or revisits an environment.

In other words, you can see memory as it is forming.D. C.:Precisely, this is the brain in action. This research can also be used for other organs, such as the spleen and the thymus gland. We can study organs affected by various diseases, and identify differences as compared with normal functioning. This research can also be coupled with genetic engineering in animals.

So new imaging technologies give you access to all scales. How do you coordinate this information?D. C.:This is a challenge of the future: how can we produce knowledge using a continuum of technologies that allows us to go from the atom to the human, from the angstrom to the metre? In an ideal world, we would be able to describe an entire human being at the molecular scale. This may be possible at some point, but today it is the stuff of science fiction. What we can do now is correlate the different scales of observation. Take for example a mouse performing a task. I discover that a specific part of the brain is active, and that a particular neuron in that region is communicating with its neighbours. I can collect a tissue sample and observe this neuron using super-resolution microscopy in order to see which synapses are active, and how they behave. I can then freeze these synapses and examine them with an electron microscope to study the 3D structure of membrane proteins, and to see how this structure changes when the neuron is activated. By overlapping correlation on different scales, we can move across scales and understand, for instance, which changes in protein conformation are connected to which behaviours in the animal.

What effect do these new technologies have on our approach to diseases, such as Alzheimers and Parkinsons?D. C.:Absolutely fascinating things are underway. In particular, there is a new method that combines imaging and transcriptomics, the study of all genes expressed in a cell or tissue. This enables us to study why certain individuals are severely affected by neurodegenerative diseases while others are not. Today we can image these differences between healthy and sick individuals, something that will be decisive in developing therapies. This is a step towards personalised medicine.

We are still in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Can these imaging technologies contribute to the fight against infectious diseases?D. C.:They can indeed. First, it is thanks to electron microscopy that we know what the virus looks like. If we only had its genetic sequence, we would be half blind. For instance, we would not be aware of the importance of the Spike protein, which becomes quite obvious when we see it at the tip of SARS-CoV-2 spikes. Imaging also shows us the parts of the protein that medicine or neutralising antibodies should target in order to block it. Another example is research on Covid-19 symptoms. To study them we must know which tissues are infected, with imaging being decisive in this effort.

Supercomputers, artificial intelligence, learning algorithms How can computing power and analysis be combined with imaging to understand the living world?D. C.:We are in the midst of a boom. Artificial intelligence is invading our everyday lives without us knowing, and biology is no exception. It is indispensable if we want to study numerous parameters on multiple scales. The quantity of information produced is way beyond the grasp of the human brain: without computational resources, it would be impossible to analyse these petabytes of information. A particularly useful application involves teaching artificial neural networks to recognise protruding shapes. This is used widely in cryomicroscopy, as thousands of images are needed to determine the three-dimensional structure of proteins.

In your opinion, what will be the next technological revolution in imaging?D. C.:If I knew, I would have invested already! I think multi-scale analyses will increase. In situ imaging to study organs while they are functioning will become ever more important. Finally, there will be progress in the automation, robotisation, and miniaturisation of microscopes. These could eventually be small enough to enter the body and observe certain organs. What I expect from these advances is a better understanding of living things, and the development of personalised medicine. I think new therapies adapted to each genetic heritage will emerge. Concerning the brain, I think imaging will help with early detection of neurodegenerative diseases, as well as the development of treatments for disorders such as autism.

Continued here:
How imaging is revolutionising biology - ScienceBlog.com - ScienceBlog.com

Special Report

November 28, 2021 12:00 pm

No one is quite sure what the earliest works of science fiction are. Of course, it depends on definitions. One of the often noted precursor works is Jonathan Swifts Gullivers Travels, released in 1726, while Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, released in 1818, is perhaps the most famous pre-20th century work of science fiction.

Frankenstein has become part of the pantheon of older science fiction characters, which include Dracula, who first appeared in 1897 in Bram Stokers book of the same name. These stories and characters also appear in many science fiction films, including some of the best. But the best science fiction movie of all time is Alien (1979). (These are the 50 greatest heroes in the movies.)

To determine the best sci-fi movie of all time, 24/7 Tempo developed an index using average ratings on IMDb and a combination of audience scores and Tomatometer scores on Rotten Tomatoes as of October 2021. Great sci-fi doesnt just entertain. It criticizes the present and warns us (or excites us) about the future. It makes us think. It provides us with a sense of wonder. But mostly it can be pretty darn entertaining. (These are the 100 greatest movies ever made.)

Alien is a great example of science fiction that makes us think. Despite director Ridley Scotts assertion that his only intention with the movie was terror, according to Slate, Alien spawned many academic analyses, remaining relevant to this day.

The movie (spoilers ahead) tells the story of the crew of a commercial space tug named Nostromo, who are awoken from stasis on their way back to Earth in order to investigate a transmission coming from a nearby alien moon. All hell breaks loose after they land, and before long theres a horrifying rogue alien brilliantly designed by H.R. Giger terrorizing them (and bursting forth from poor John Hurts chest).

With its fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat storyline, Alien was a smash hit that captured audiences and inspired countless films and TV shows, and it launched a franchise thats still going strong.

Click here to see the 50 best sci-fi movies of all time

Methodology

To determine the best sci-fi movie of all time, 24/7 Tempo developed an index using average ratings on Internet Movie Database, an online movie database owned by Amazon, and a combination of audience scores and Tomatometer scores on Rotten Tomatoes, an online movie and TV review aggregator, as of October 2021. All ratings were weighted equally. Only movies with at least 15,000 audience votes on either IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes were considered. The countless Star Wars movies and superhero fantasies based on Marvel Comics or DC Comics characters were excluded from consideration. Directorial credits and cast information comes from IMDb.

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This Is the Best Sci-Fi Movie of All Time - 24/7 Wall St.

GAITHERSBURG, Md., Nov. 23, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --Novavax, Inc. (Nasdaq: NVAX), a biotechnology company dedicated to developing and commercializing next-generation vaccines for serious infectious diseases, today announced that it will participate in Evercore ISI's 4th Annual HealthCONx Virtual Conference. Novavax' recombinant nanoparticle protein-based COVID-19 vaccine candidate, NVX-CoV2373, will be a topic of discussion.

Conference Details:

Fireside Chat

Date:

Thursday, December 2, 2021

Time:

9:15 9:35 a.m. Eastern Time (ET)

Moderator:

Josh Schimmer

Novavax participants:

Gregory M. Glenn, M.D., President, Research and Development and John J. Trizzino, Executive Vice President, Chief Commercial Officer and Chief Business Officer

Conference

Event:

Investor meetings

Date:

Thursday, December 2, 2021

A replay of the recorded fireside session will be available through the events page of the Company's website at ir.novavax.com for 90 days.

About NovavaxNovavax, Inc. (Nasdaq: NVAX) is a biotechnology company that promotes improved health globally through the discovery, development and commercialization of innovative vaccines to prevent serious infectious diseases. The company's proprietary recombinant technology platform harnesses the power and speed of genetic engineering to efficiently produce highly immunogenic nanoparticles designed to address urgent global health needs. NVX-CoV2373, the company's COVID-19 vaccine, received Emergency Use Authorization in Indonesia and the Philippines and has been submitted for regulatory authorization in multiple markets globally. NanoFlu, the company's quadrivalent influenza nanoparticle vaccine, met all primary objectives in its pivotal Phase 3 clinical trial in older adults. Novavax is currently evaluating a COVID-NanoFluTMcombination vaccine in a Phase 1/2 clinical trial, which combines the company's NVX-CoV2373 and NanoFluTM vaccine candidates. These vaccine candidates incorporate Novavax' proprietary saponin-based Matrix-M adjuvant to enhance the immune response and stimulate high levels of neutralizing antibodies.

For more information, visit http://www.novavax.com and connect with us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Contacts:

InvestorsNovavax, Inc. Erika Schultz | 240-268-2022[emailprotected]

Solebury TroutAlexandra Roy | 617-221-9197[emailprotected]

MediaAlison Chartan | 240-720-7804Laura Keenan Lindsey | 202-709-7521 [emailprotected]

SOURCE Novavax, Inc.

Original post:
Novavax to Participate in Evercore ISI's 4th Annual HealthCONx Virtual Conference - PRNewswire

Havana November 27 A full Today, the regular session of the Cuban Academy of Sciences (ACC) will meet in person and in practice at the headquarters of the Information Technology and Advanced Remote Services Company (CITMATEL).

The deliberations will take place by video conference in four rooms prepared for academics from the provinces of Havana and Mayabeque, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Liliam Alvarez Diaz, Secretary of the Foundation, told CNA.

He explained that those belonging to the provincial branches will participate in the online discussions in each of the delegations of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment (CITMA).

According to its programme, one of the issues to be brought into academic consideration concerns the overall programs corresponding to the National Economic and Social Development Plan 2030.

The other will consist of the accountability of the ACC, by its chair, Luis Velzquez Perez, MD, a second-tier specialist in physiology.

The Cuban Academy of Sciences expanded its advisory job last May, when 420 scientific figures included it in its most recent internal election.

The latter is held every six years, and the academic body currently consists of those elected for the period 2018-2024, with a total of 183 full members and Merit 100; The honorable 44-year-old and the 31-year-old reporter to exercise their advisory role.

CITMATEL is one of the four national entities with High Technology status, characterized by demonstrating extensive R&D and innovation activity, as well as production and marketing of high value-added products and services, with an emphasis on exports.

The same is done by the Centers for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, Molecular Immunology (in the province of Havana) and the National Biopreparados (in Mayabeque). (Lino Lupine Perez)

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The plenary session of the Cuban Academy of Sciences today - SmallCapNews.co.uk

Has social media already done too much damage? Image: Shutterstock

Unchecked technological advancement is destroying our shared reality and sewing severe discord in social democracies, 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa has warned.

Speaking at the Australian Strategic Policy Institutes Sydney Dialogue event last week, Ressa founder of Filipino news site Rappler and the countrys first Nobel Laureate described what she called big techs insidious manipulation of human biology.

Theres something fundamentally wrong with our information ecosystem because the platforms that deliver the facts are actually biased against the facts, Ressa said.

The worlds largest delivery platform for news is Facebook and social media in general has become a big behaviour modification system.

Ressa was talking to questions about whether social media companies ought to create different versions of their platforms to protect weaker democracies from the damaging effects of online propaganda campaigns and misinformation.

One of the revelations in the recent Facebook Papers was that the social media company struggled to effectively moderate content to match its growing scale the more places Facebook reached, it seemed, the less control its Silicon Valley headquarters appeared to have over the way information moved.

Our biology is very, very vulnerable to this technolgoy, Ressa said.

The design of this technology and the way it can insidiously manipulate people is powerful in the same way as genetic engineering technology.

She used the example of gene editing technology CRISPR, saying that governments and regulators put guard rails in place very quickly around it during its development.

This is what we failed to do collectively on information technology, Ressa continued.

Now it is manipulating our minds insidiously, creating alternate realities, and making it impossible for us to think slow at a time when we need to solve existential problems.

Junk food for the mind

Ressas fellow panelist in the discussion, Dr Zeynep Tufekci, an Associate Professor with the University of North Carolina and long-time critic of the use of data to manipulate information flows, agreed that the information technology landscape as it stands is toxic to individuals and societies.

Dr Tufekci said the ongoing debate around censorship by tech companies and social media often ignores the more fundamental problem with how these products get designed in the first place.

Its easier to try and say who should we kick off which platform and harder to think about how we need to shift the entire information ecology by design, she said.

Its like food. If you have humans who evolved under conditions of hunger and then you build a cafeteria the business model of which is to keep you there that cafeteria is going to serve you chips, ice cream, chips, ice cream one after the other.

In that case you have taken a very human vulnerability hunger and youve monetised it using an automated cafeteria.

Similarly, Dr Tufekci suggests the human need for information, knowledge, and social connection has been monetised in a way that takes advantage, as Ressa said, of our very biology.

She doesnt blame the engineers working on these technologies, but rather suggests we have done a poor job of incentivising companies to build more careful products.

Its not because the people working on these technologies are not great or smart or well-meaning, Dr Tufeki said.

[Fixing this] has to be something that we ask them to do, rather than not telling them what to do, then getting mad at them.

One fix at a time

Twitters Head of Legal, Policy and Trust, Vijaya Gadde, defended the position of social media companies by saying that solving some of the well-known problems with these platforms isnt always simple but that it can be done.

We piloted a bunch of things at Twitter like what we call nudges, Gadde said.

These are just quick little pop-ups that appear before youre tweeting information or before you re-tweeting an article which might say did you actually read this article? or a warning to say this was considered misleading by certain groups, are you sure you want to retweet this.

And weve had remarkable incidents of reducing harm on the platform because of those little speed bumps that were putting in place.

So those are the types of things I want to encourage platforms to do and experiment with but the thing is that if the solutions were easy, we would have found them and implemented them already.

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Technology is killing our shared reality | Information Age | ACS - ACS

For half a year, Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious-disease official, and Kentucky senator and physician Rand Paul have been locked in a battle over whether the National Institutes of Health funded dangerous "gain of function" research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and whether that research could have played a role in the pandemic. Against Senator Paul's aggressive questioning over three separate hearings, Dr. Fauci adamantly denied the charge. "The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology," he said in their first fracas on May 11, a position he has steadfastly maintained.

Recently, however, a tranche of documents surfaced that complicate Dr. Fauci's denials. The documents, obtained by Freedom of Information Act requests, show that the NIH was funding research at the Wuhan lab that involved manipulating coronaviruses in ways that could have made them more transmissible and deadly to humanswork that arguably fits the definition of gain-of-function. The documents establish that top NIH officials were concerned that the work may have crossed a line the U.S. government had drawn against funding such risky research. The funding came from the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which Dr. Fauci heads.

The resistance among Dr. Fauci and other NIH officials to be forthcoming with information that could inform the debate over the origins of COVID-19 illustrates the old Watergate-era saw that the coverup is often worse than the crime. There's no evidence that the experiments in question had any direct bearing on the pandemic. In the past, Dr. Fauci has made strong arguments for why this type of research, albeit risky, was necessary to prevent future pandemics, and he could have done so again. But the NIH has dragged its feet over FOIA requests on the matter, handing over documents only after The Intercept took the agency to court.

The apparent eagerness to conceal the documents has only raised suspicions about the controversial research and put the NIH on the defensive. Fauci told ABC, "neither I nor Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, lied or misled about what we've done." The episode is a self-inflicted wound that has further eroded trust in the nation's public health officials at a time when that trust is most important.

While Dr. Fauci takes the political heat, the revelations center on another figure in this drama: Peter Daszak, president of the private research firm EcoHealth Alliance, which received the $3 million NIH grant for coronavirus research and subcontracted the gain-of-function experiments to the Wuhan lab. The activities of Daszak and EcoHealth before the pandemic and during it show a startling lack of transparency about their work with coronaviruses and raise questions about what more there may be to learn.

From the start, Daszak has worked vigorously to discredit any notion that the pandemic could have been the result of a lab accident. When the media was first grappling with the basics of the situation, Daszak organized a letter in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet from 27 scientists, to "strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin," and got himself appointed to the WHO team investigating COVID origins, where he successfully argued that there was no need to look into the WIV's archives.

What Daszak didn't reveal at the time was that the WIV had been using the NIH grant money to genetically engineer dozens of novel coronaviruses discovered in bat samples, and that he knew it was entirely possible that one of those samples had contained SARS-CoV-2 and had infected a researcher, as he conceded to the journal Science in a November 17 interview: "Of course it's possiblethings have happened in the past."

The NIH fought for more than a year to keep details about the EcoHealth grant under wraps. The 528 pages of proposals, conditions, emails, and progress reports revealed that EcoHealth had funded experiments at the WIV that were considerably riskier than the ones previously disclosed.

The trouble began in May 2016, when EcoHealth informed the NIH that it wanted to conduct a series of new experiments during the third year of its five-year grant. One proposed producing "chimeras" made from one SARS-like virus and the spike proteins (which the virus uses to infiltrate animal cells) of others, and testing them in "humanized" mice, which had been genetically engineered to have human-like receptors in their lungs, making them better stand-ins for people. When such novel viruses are created, there is always a risk they will turn out to be dangerous pathogens in their own right.

Another risky experiment involved the MERS virus. Although MERS is lethalit kills 35 percent of those who catch itit's not highly transmissible, which is partly why it has claimed fewer than 900 lives so far. EcoHealth wanted to graft the spikes of other related coronaviruses onto MERS to see how that changed its abilities.

Both experiments seemed to cross the gain-of-function line. NIH program officers said as much, sending Daszak a letter asking him to explain why he thought they didn't.

In his reply, Daszak argued that because the new spikes being added to the chimeras were more distantly related to SARS and MERS than their original spikes, he didn't anticipate any enhanced pathogenicity or infectiousness. That was a key distinction that arguably made them exempt from the NIH's prohibition on gain-of-function experiments. But, of course, one never knows; as a precaution, he offered that if any of the chimeric viruses began to grow 10 times better than the natural viruses, which would suggest enhanced fitness, EcoHealth would immediately stop all experiments, inform the NIH program officers, and together they'd figure out what to do next.

The NIH accepted Daszak's terms, inserting his suggestions into the grant conditions. Scientists at WIV conducted the experiments in 2018. To their surprise, the SARS-like chimeras quickly grew 10,000 times better than the natural virus, flourishing in the lab's humanized mice and making them sicker than the original. They had the hallmarks of very dangerous pathogens.

WIV and EcoHealth did not stop the experiment as required. Nor did they let the NIH know what was going on. The results were buried in figure 35 of EcoHealth's year-four progress report, delivered in April 2018.

Did the NIH call Peter Daszak in to explain himself? It did not. There are no signs in the released documents that the NIH even noticed the alarming results. In fact, NIH signaled its enthusiasm for the project by granting EcoHealth a $7.5 million, five-year renewal in 2019. (The Trump administration suspended the grant in 2020, when EcoHealth's relationship with the WIV came under scrutiny.)

In a letter to Congress on October 20, the NIH's Principal Deputy Director, Lawrence Tabak, acknowledged the screwup, but he placed the blame on EcoHealth's door, citing its duty to immediately report the enhanced growth that had occurred: "EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant." In a follow-up interview with the Washington Post, NIH Director Francis Collins was more blunt: "They messed up here. There's going to be some consequences for EcoHealth." So far, the NIH has not elaborated on what those consequences might be.

As damning as the NIH grant documents are, they pale in comparison to another EcoHealth grant proposal leaked to the online investigative group DRASTIC in September. In that 2018 proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Pentagon research arm, EcoHealth sketched an elaborate plan to discover what it would take to turn a garden-variety coronavirus into a pandemic pathogen. They proposed widely sampling Chinese bats in search of new SARS-related viruses, grafting the spike proteins from those viruses onto other viruses they had in the lab to create a suite of chimeras, then, through genetic engineering, introducing mutations into those chimeras and testing them in humanized mice.

One piece of the proposal was especially Strangelovian. For years, scientists had known that adding a special type of "cleavage site" to the spike could supercharge a virus's transmissibility. Although many viruses in nature have such sites, neither SARS nor any of its cousins do. EcoHealth proposed incorporating human-optimized cleavage sites into the SARS-like viruses it discovered and testing their infectiousness. Such a cleavage site, of course, is exactly what makes SARS-CoV-2 wildly more infectious than its kin. That detail was the reason some scientists initially suspected SARS-CoV-2 might have been engineered in a lab. And while there's no proof that EcoHealth or the WIV ever actively experimented with cleavage sitesEcoHealth says that "the research was never conducted"the proposal makes it clear that they were considering taking that step as early as 2018.

DARPA rejected the proposal, listing among its shortcomings the failures to address the risks of gain-of-function research and the lack of discussion of ethical, legal, and social issues. It was a levelheaded assessment. What's remarkable is that much of the same work that crossed a line for the Department of Defense was embraced by the National Institutes of Health.

The NIH and EcoHealth have asserted that none of the engineered viruses created with the NIH grant could have become SARS-CoV-2. On that, everyone agreesthe viruses are too distantly related. But the detailed recipe in the DARPA application is a blueprint for doing just that with a more closely related virus.

In September, scientists from France's Pasteur Institute announced the discovery of just such a virusSARS-CoV-2's closest known relativein a bat cave in Laos. Although still too distant from SARS-CoV-2 to have been the direct progenitor, and lacking the all-important cleavage site, it was a kissing cousin.

The discovery was hailed by some scientists as evidence that SARS-CoV-2 must have had a natural origin. But the plot turned in November, when another trove of NIH documentsreleased in response to a FOIA request by the White Coat Waste Projectbrought the evidence trail right to EcoHealth's doorstep.

In 2017, EcoHealth had informed the NIH that it would be shifting its focus to Laos and other countries in Southeast Asia, where the wildlife trade was more active, relying on local partner organizations to do the sample collecting and to send the samples to the WIV for their ongoing work. EcoHealth told Newsweek that it did not directly undertake or fund any of the sampling in Laos. "Any samples or results from Laos are based on WIV's work, funded through other mechanisms," says a company spokesman.

Regardless of who paid for the collecting portion of the project, it's clear that for years, a large number of bat samples from the region that harbors viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2 were sent to the WIV. In other words, EcoHealth's team was in the right place at the right time to have found things very close to SARS-CoV-2 and to have sent them to Wuhan. Because there's a lag of several years between when samples are collected and when experiments involving those viruses are published, the most recent papers from EcoHealth and the WIV date to 2015. The identity of the viruses found between 2016 and 2019 are known only to the two organizations, neither of which has been willing to share that information with the world.

A lack of evidence proves nothing, but neither does it put EcoHealth's or the WIV's actions in the early days of the pandemic in a good light. Why choose not to share valuable information on SARS-like coronaviruses with the world? Why not explain your projects and proposals and give scientists access to the unpublished virus sequences in your databases?

For whatever reason, they chose crisis-management mode instead. The WIV went into lockdown. Databases were taken offline. Daszak launched his preemptive campaign to prevent anyone from looking behind the curtain. And EcoHealth and the NIH tried hard to keep the details of their collaboration private.

Congressional inquiries focusing on Dr. Fauci and the NIH's decisions to fund unnecessarily risky research by a lab in Wuhan are probably forthcoming if, as appears increasingly likely, Republicans take control of Congress after the 2022 midterms. While it's important to understand how the NIH came to use such poor judgment in its dealings with EcoHealth Alliance, that won't tell us much about the WIV's research in the months leading up to the pandemic, especially since China is not likely to open its books. Answers are more likely to lie in the records of EcoHealth Alliance. Republicans and Democrats alike should be eager to find them.

See the article here:
How Dr. Fauci and Other Officials Withheld Information on China's Coronavirus Experiments - Newsweek

During the pandemic, Cambridge-based AstraZeneca became a household name for its role in creating a Covid-19 vaccination alongside scientists from Oxford University.

But the biopharmaceutical company has also led the way in several other cutting-edge scientific innovations.

The company has more than 76,000 employees worldwide, and its work focuses on developing prescription medication in areas such as oncology, rare diseases and the respiratory system.

Much of that work will now be driven from its new 1bn Cambridge headquarters - so here are five ways that the research centre is leading the way.

1. 'Heart-in-a-jar'

In collaboration with biotech company Novoheart, scientists at AZ are re-creating miniature organs to help them better understand things like the human heart.

A mini beating heart is created using the company's "3D human ventricular cardiac organoid chamber" - better known as the heart-in-a-jar. Scientists hope it will help them understand the characteristics of heart failure better, and therefore get treatments to patients quicker.

2. Functional genomics

Scientists are finding new ways of understanding how human genes work. Through what they call 'functional geonomics', AZ is testing the function of a given gene in a relevant disease model. And that, they say, will help them understand the complex relationship between our DNA and disease.

3. Using 'living medicines' to find cancer cells hiding in the body

Scientist are looking at regenerating tissues and organs by extracting a patient's own cells or using cells which have been expanded in the lab or enhanced through genetic engineering.

Those cells are then used to produce "living medicines" and are administered to the patient - known as cell therapy. It builds on research that analyses the way serious diseases affect different parts of the body.

The aim is to find ways to target and arm these living medicines to locate and destroy cancer cells that hide in the body, including even the hardest-to-treat solid tumours.

4. Cancer 'warheads'

AZ scientists say they are "re-defining" cancer by replacing chemotherapy with targeted, personalised therapies. While chemo kills cancer cells, it also impacts healthy ones too.

AZ is working on a tailored treatment it calls "the warhead". It is designed to kill cells and - unlike chemotherapy - scientists can now achieve precise cancer cell killing by attaching the warhead to an antibody, that provides cancer cell selectivity for example by targeting a protein that is highly expressed in breast cancer.

5. Clinical trials of the future

AstraZeneca is hoping to change the way pharmaceutical companies conduct clinical research, encouraging a more "holistic and human-centred" type of care.

Scientists want to do this by altering the design of clinical trials themselves in a way that gives patients the best experience possible.

Read more about science innovation in the Anglia region here:

See original here:
AstraZeneca: Five innovations from Cambridge's new 1bn headquarters - ITV News

SRINAGAR: Bringing laurels to Kashmir, a young Botanist, Dr Parvaiz Ahmad has been included in the top one percent Highly cited Researcher-2021 in the field of Plant Sciences.

The list has been compiled on the basis of multiple citation indicators and their composite across scientific disciplines.

Clarivate for Academia and Government in association with a web of Science and Publon unfold the Highly cited Researcher every year throughout the globe. Approximately 8.8 million researchers are working this time in different fields like engineering, science, medicine, Economics and Business, Computer sciences etc. and among these less than 1% have published many papers over a decade and that rank in the top 1% of citations for a particular field.

Hailing from Payir area of south Kashmirs Pulwama district, Dr Parvaiz Ahmad was also included in the top 2% scientists of 2021 by Standford University, California, United States of America.

It is worth mentioning that in 2020, he was also listed in the top 2% list of scientists provided by Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America.

Dr Parvaiz completed his M.Sc in Botany from Hamdard University New Delhi and later completed his PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi (IITD).

He also worked as postdoc fellow in International Council For Genetic Engineering And Biotechnology (ICGEB)- New Delhi.

Presently, he is the Senior Assistant Professor at Government Degree College, Pulwama.

Dr Parvaiz has published around 25 books with eminent international publishers like Elsevier, Springer, John Wiley etc.

He has also published 272 research papers in the research field according to the web of science and Publon.

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Kashmir Botanist Among Top 1% Highly Cited Researchers-2021 - Kashmir Life