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Well the interventional cardiologists/radiologists love it. No chest cracking, way less complications qnd mortality. Easier recovery

Not only is it the first malaria vaccine, it is the first vaccine ever for use against a parasitic infection. (The name is also kinda amazing: Mosquirix.)

It's effectiveness is middling. Only 30-40%. And it looks like hospitalizations are decreased by 1/3.

Apparently it has been approved in Europe since 2015, but the WHO was waiting for further testing. Looks like it is approved for kids, who are disproportionately affected by Malaria.

Downside - 3-4 dose series shot given over the first 2 years of life. This makes it expensive and difficult for families without easy access to health care.

It looks like PATH and UNICEF are the two main groups working with the WHO and GSK (the manufacturer) to distribute the vaccine (so those would be the groups to donate to if anyone is capable and so inclined). The Google searches I conducted didn't find any formal plans for distribution at this time. Looks like there'll be a waiting list and evaluation of needs and large scale distribution isn't expected to happen for another year or so.

Sources:

if it doesn't, then maybe it should, so, i wanna explain:

México🇲🇽

we are actually about to run out of water: 85% of the mexican territory is in a draught, the worst in 30 years, they say. and there's lakes that are disappearing.

government is spreading "tips" and "infographics" about how to save some water when they're allowing companies like coca-cola and pepsi; cemex, bonafont and bimbo to have leverage in aquifers and they let them own basically 70% of the water in the country thanks to the National Waters Law (Ley de Aguas Nacionales)

oh and just last night (may 3rd) the 12th metro line collapsed in México City and 23 people died. everyone is blaming it on the 2 previous governments' corruption for using cheap materials and rushing to finish it and inaugurate it before it was actually ready

Honduras🇭🇳

same as México, they're running out of water, so far three states are totally out of it, which is around 1.4 million people.

the press has been calling it the worst draught in the history of the country SINCE LAST YEAR

besides the government has stopped buying vaccines and they're leaving around 70% of the population without a vaccination...

Paraguay🇵🇾

there's no space left in the hospitals, the government stole the 1.6k million usd loan that the country got for health care related buys during the pandemic and left the hospitals alone to their luck. people have to sell their things; from their TV's and fridges to their cars, houses, bodies... there's actual people recurring to prostitution so they can buy medicine the government is supposed to be providing

Guatemala🇬🇹

they've been having a hard economic crisis; again, surprise surprise, the government has stolen 14 million quetzales (1.8million usd) that was destined to the healthcare department: since the pandemic started people has been fired by hordes, there's no jobs, there's no money, there's no more safe hospitals or doctors to work in them, or equipment. and the president approved the 2021 budget in the middle of the night and took away money from the health and the education departments, leading to massive protests that, as you have guessed, were repressed with police violence.

Costa Rica🇨🇷

government actually created an espionage agency, the UPAD, they're fining people for being outside hiding behind the excuse of the pandemic; which is making hospitals collapse, they passed a recessive tax reform, the Electoral Supreme Court was scammed in the latest elections and they're actually seeking to create a higher rank power, higher than a president, who can hold the three powers of the nation (dictatorship, everyone?)

Perú🇵🇪

they're enduring a huge political crisis, they have to chose a president and their only two options are: a leftist/marxist man that wants to take all the agricultural land and divide it in equal parts, doesn't support lgbtttiq rights, privatize almost all services and more reforms that would lead to massive firings AND a woman that it's being investigated for fraud and money laundering and that descends from one of the biggest peruvian dictators and wants to get him out of prison.

this uncertainty of course has made the usd price to sky rocket (because what else is new) and now the prices of everything are rising as well, and the wages? they're staying still

El Salvador🇸🇻

another political crisis: the president along with the congress (which is mostly sitting his party) dismissed and basically fired the judges of the supreme court and the attorney general. and recommended/nominated new ones from his party, opening the way to the totalitarianism and welp, the end of democracy in the country: dictatorship.

the people is outraged and the international community along with the America States Organization are rejecting this horrid violation to the Constitution of El Salvador but the panorama is still uncertain.

Colombia🇨🇴

the government of Ivan Duque just passed a tax reform to collect around 25 billion Colombian pesos (around 6.5k billion usd) through taxes without raising the minimum wages; this would throw the country in an economic crisis that would impact the lower and middle classes and it would take products off the basic market basket.

the people of Colombia have been marching and protesting about this and the government has replied with police violence, they have their own anti-raid police, the ESMAD, and they have orders to shoot to kill.

there isn't yet an exact number on the death count but what the people is sure of is that they're gonna try to hide it along with the number of rapings and tortures the police has been conducting.

Chile🇨🇱

in 2019 chilean government rose the price of the metro/subway and there were protests and marches and manifestations, which led, of course, to policial repression, this was a whole ordeal that was condemned by the UN, now, the people is tired that the same government hasn't dealt properly with the sanitary contingency so they starter planing a huge strike; dozens of worker unions planning to march on april 30th to show that they're millions and they want the president out.

then the president was acused of crimes against humanity before the International Court of Human Rights for the repression of the 2019 protests...

Venezuela🇻🇪

well, if you haven't heard about the venezuelan crisis, you've been living under a rock: it's been going on for more than 20 years, venezuelan people live under a dictatorship (fucking incredible we still have those in the world), the police kills people that march and manifest, citizens don't have dignified access to: public transport, gas and gasoline, electricity, food, water, medicine and medical equipment let alone the covid vaccine.

and when the venezuelan people wanna leave the mediocre and deplorable conditions in which their government had made them live? conditions in which if you don't die of sickness, you get killed by a cop or killed in a robbery or killed on a raid? if you don't die of hunger you die of thirst? they raised the passport prices! and so the venezuelan people as a lot of people in Latinoamérica have to illegally migrate; and we all know how that's seen.

Puerto Rico🇵🇷

an immense femicide rise and Gender Violence alert.

and like that is the total opposite of what a democracy is.

fuckers like kangana ranaut obviously called them terrorists or anti-national. the islamophobia in india is so rampant that apparently being a muslim makes you less of an indian.

the parallel between the farmers protests and blm is pretty clear. blm protests in america were peaceful and nobody wanted to listen to them?? and once it became violent, racists labelled blm protests as violent and don’t deserve to be listened to?? even if they haven’t been listened to since the very beginning??

its pretty much the same here.

the largest workers protests have been going on here and the government is trying to label the farmers as terrorists or too illiterate to understand the farm laws

and the police are building a wall in the capital to stop the protests. even some of the indo pakistani border isn’t this thick

and the indian news channels are trying to convince us that she doesn’t care about the farmer’s protests and she apparently wants to “dismantle the indian democracy”

india isn’t even a democracy anymore. the government now wants to obstruct freedom of speech by warning twitter of penal action if it doesn’t block the accounts which tweet about the protests.

please, this needs more attention. india is descending into fascism. “democracy” is just a blanket covering the chaos underneath. 

here’s a petition to help

All these bollywood celebs saying wE sHoUlDnT lEt pRoPaGaNdA dIvIdE uS have a special spot in hell. India against propaganda, it seems. There are people dying, and they’re sitting in their homes that are paid for by bjp. And the supporters are shaming Rihanna for being a victim of abuse and supporting Chris brown because they’d rather praise the perpetrator of a crime than a person trying to speak up about human rights issues. I’m just so angry at our fucking government and the people who think all the bullshit modi is pulling is okay

What else can you expect from them whose leader, our beloved Prime Minister- follows trolls who give rape threats to women- on Twitter.

India is on a path to ruin. Intolerance is at an all time high. FIRs are filed against tv shows, comedians are arrested for jokes they didnt make, acts of sedition and UAPA are slapped on student activists and journalists to keep them in jail and stop them from speaking the truth.

The mainstream media is rotting everyone’s brains, vilification of anyone who speaks against the govt reins supreme, and I am terrified. I am terrified of the future, scared of the people around me, and feeling extremely desolate.

Speak up, please. Raise your voice. Support the farmers. Our democracy has been in danger for while now, we need to step up before it’s too late.

Mesentery is now classified as an organ.

Researchers have classified a brand-new organ inside our bodies, one that’s been hiding in plain sight in our digestive system this whole time. Although we now know about the structure of this new organ, its function is still poorly understood, and studying it could be the key to better understanding and treatment of abdominal and digestive disease.

Known as the mesentery, the new organ is found in our digestive systems, and was long thought to be made up of fragmented, separate structures. But recent research has shown that it’s actually one, continuous organ.

The evidence for the organ’s reclassification is now published in The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology. “In the paper, which has been peer reviewed and assessed, we are now saying we have an organ in the body which hasn’t been acknowledged as such to date,” said J Calvin Coffey, a researcher from the University Hospital Limerick in Ireland, who first discovered that the mesentery was an organ.

So what is the mesentery? It’s a double fold of peritoneum - the lining of the abdominal cavity - that attaches our intestine to the wall of our abdomen, and keeps everything locked in place. One of the earliest descriptions of the mesentery was made by Leonardo da Vinci, and for centuries it was generally ignored as a type of insignificant attachment. Over the past century, doctors who studied the mesentery assumed it was a fragmented structure made of separate sections, which made it pretty unimportant.

But in 2012, Coffey and his colleagues showed through detailed microscopic examinations that the mesentery is actually a continuous structure. And while that doesn’t change the structure that’s been inside our bodies all along, with the reclassification comes a whole new field of medical science that could improve our health outcomes.

“When we approach it like every other organ… we can categorise abdominal disease in terms of this organ,” said Coffey. “Now we have established anatomy and the structure. The next step is the function. If you understand the function you can identify abnormal function, and then you have disease. Put them all together and you have the field of mesenteric science … the basis for a whole new area of science.”

“This is relevant universally as it affects all of us.”

(Image caption: Effects of CBD on brain activation in people with psychosis during memory task. Brain clusters showing greater activation under placebo compared to cannabidiol are red/yellow, and those showing less activation under placebo compared to cannabidiol are depicted in blue/green)

New insight into how cannabidiol takes effect in the brains of people with psychosis

Researchers from King’s College London have shown that cannabidiol (CBD) alters the brain activity in people with psychosis during memory tasks, making it more similar to the activation seen in people without psychosis during the same tasks. 

Published in Psychological Medicine, the research used fMRI scans to examine the brain activity of 13 people with a diagnosis of psychosis under the influence of a single dose of CBD or placebo and 16 controls whilst they were undertaking a memory task. The researchers showed that, during the task, there was a different pattern of activity in the prefrontal and mediotemporal brain areas of people with psychosis under placebo compared to the activity seen in those without psychosis. When those with psychosis were given one dose of CBD, the activation in these brain areas became more like the activation seen in controls.

CBD is one of over 100 chemical compounds known as cannabinoids that are found in the cannabis plant. There has been recent interest in the use of cannabidiol (CBD) as an alternative to current antipsychotic medicines as it could prove to be more tolerable generally and more effective for a subset of people who do not respond to available antipsychotics. Its use has been associated with a decrease in symptoms of psychosis and changes in brain activity during verbal memory tasks in patients at high risk of psychosis.

The study also showed that activity in the striatum and the activity in hippocampus was more co-ordinated in people with psychosis, indicating there was a greater functional connectivity between these two areas in this group compared to controls.  After one dose of CBD this functional connectivity was reduced in people with psychosis and became more similar to that seen in the controls. Those people with psychosis continued on their existing antipsychotic treatment throughout the study.

The results indicate that CBD has a moderating effect on the altered pattern of brain activity in the prefrontal, mediotemporal and striatal areas in people with psychosis. The study also showed that psychotic symptoms did show a decreasing trend after the dose of CBD but researchers highlighted that no definitive conclusions could be drawn about this effect as the study did not look at sustained use of CBD and the sample size was small.

Mini Heart Organoid

To study the body’s organs and the diseases that affect them, scientists can extract cells from those organs and grow them in culture. Except it’s not always that simple or informative. Take the heart for example. Adult cardiac muscle cells don’t replicate – making them hard to culture – and even if they did, a dish of muscle cells does little to recapitulate an actual beating heart where the cells contract synchronously and are supported by other cell types. The mini heart organoid in the video is the result of researchers’ attempts to grow a more realistic laboratory model of the heart. It was grown from mouse embryonic stem cells using special growth factors to generate the various heart cell types. And, like a real heart, it beats rhythmically. With this improved model, studies of heart development and disease, as well as drug screens, are set to provide richer, more detailed information.

Written by Ruth Williams

Video from work by Jiyoung Lee and colleagues, Dept of Epigenetics, Medical Research Institute, Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU)

Department of Epigenetics, Medical Research Institute, Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU), Tokyo, Japan

Image copyright held by the original authors

Published in Nature Communications, September 2020

CRISPR’s Adaptation to Genome Editing Earns Chemistry Nobel

By Amanda Heidt (The-Scientist). Images: © NOBEL MEDIA 2020 ILLUSTRATION: Niklas Elmehed and Johan Jarnestad/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded jointly to Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology and Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on October 7th. They are recognized for their pioneering work in developing CRISPR technology, which has revolutionized the field of gene editing.

“Today’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognizes CRISPR-Cas9, a super-selective and precise gene-editing tool where chemistry plays an incredibly important role,” Luis Echegoyen, the president of the American Chemical Society, of which Doudna is a member, says in a statement. “This discovery, originally derived from a natural defense mechanism in bacteria against viruses, will have untold applications in treating and curing genetic diseases and fighting cancer, as well as impacts on agricultural and other areas. The future for this technique is indeed bright and promising.”

“I don’t know quite what to say. I’m about as shocked as I’ve ever been,” Doudna tells The Scientist, reacting to the news of her award. “I’m really so grateful.”

CRISPR-based technology allows scientists to precisely manipulate DNA, a desirable ability for many fields. CRISPR has contributed to discoveries across disciplines, conferring mold and pest resistance to important crops, leading to new cancer therapies, and, more recently, repairing damage within mitochondrial DNA. During the COVID-19 pandemic, CRISPR has also been used in new diagnostic tools for detecting the virus.

“This type of research will always lead potentially to a way to discover new pathways that could be useful for developing therapeutics against bacteria,” Charpentier said during a call with the Nobel Prize committee, “but also as a way to find new mechanisms to target genes and their expression.”

A CRISPR CUT: The guide RNA (gRNA) forms a complex with Cas and directs the enzyme to cleave the target DNA to which the gRNA binds through complementary sequence. The cell tries to repair the DNA break, which often results in the insertion (as shown) or deletion of nucleotides that changes the reading frame of the gene and a creates premature stop codon. THE SCIENTIST STAFF.

Charpentier completed both her PhD and her first postdoc in the lab of Patrice Courvalin, a microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. “She’s a very obstinate scientist. She will not quit the problem, and will work on it until the end,” Courvalin tells The Scientist. “Science is all her life.”

Through her study of the bacteria Streptococcus pyogenes, Charpentier discovered a new immune molecule, called tracrRNA, that neutralized viruses by breaking apart their DNA. After publishing her findings in 2011 in Nature, she initiated a collaboration with Doudna in which the pair isolated and refined the molecular underpinnings of these genetic scissors.

Their landmark paper, published in Science in 2012, tracked closely with work being undertaken by other researchers at the time. Virginijus Šikšnys, a biochemist at Vilnius University in Lithuania, published a paper in PNAS in September that year in which he and his team further characterized the bacteria’s immune mechanism. While Charpentier and Doudna’s paper published first, in June, it was submitted later. Their results reaffirmed earlier findings that CRISPR could be used to cut double-stranded DNA at specific, predetermined sites along the genome, and further simplified the tool by showing that crRNA and tracrRNA could be fused to create a single, synthetic guide to direct the cutting mechanism to a site of interest. The next year, in 2013, Doudna’s team applied her new technology to human cells.

The adoption of CRISPR and the subsequent iterations that endowed the tool with new abilities have been global. At the same time, there have been ongoing disputes over the ownership of the intellectual property. The first patent for the use of CRISPR gene editing technology in eukaryotes was granted to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, based on the work of Feng Zhang’s group, back in April 2014. While the University of California has sought to have its own patents, based on Charpentier and Doudna’s work, take precedence, in February 2017, the US Patent Trial and Appeal Board sided with the Broad—a decision later upheld by US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The battle is far from over in the US, and another patent battle rages in Europe, where the European Patent Office has already revoked at least one Broad patent.

Charpentier and Doudna join 53 women who have previously won a Nobel Prize, including only five who have been awarded in chemistry. The last prize in chemistry went to Frances Arnold in 2018. “It’s stunning, it’s appropriate, and it brings joy to those of us who are women in science,” Lila Gierasch, the editor in chief of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, tells The Scientist.