COVID-19

By Sara S Shoemaker Analyses of lung fluid cells from COVID-19 patients conducted on the nation’s fastest supercomputer point to gene expression patterns that may explain the runaway symptoms produced by the body’s response to SARS-CoV-2. A team led by Dan Jacobson of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory used the Summit supercomputer…

PerkinElmer, a global leader committed to innovating for a healthier world, today announced that it has launched two online, free-access Perkin Elmer COVID-19 Data Dashboards to help the global scientific community accelerate the discovery of COVID-19 antivirals and vaccines. These dashboards are powered by PerkinElmer’s data analytics and data visualization solutions which help researchers more…

With the global pandemic still in full swing, scientists are working to develop a vaccine in record time. While everyone wants an effective vaccine, they don’t all agree on how to get there and what “effective” really means. Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, spoke with researchers, doctors and…

Thermo Fisher Scientific (NYSE: TMO) continues to expand global capacity and capabilities across its leading pharma services network to support customers in government, industry and academia as they accelerate development and production of COVID-19 vaccines, therapies and other treatments. The company is now supporting more than 200 of these projects globally. “Well before the pandemic,…

By Aliyah Kovner  If you want to research historical events for a college essay, learn about tropical fish, or even translate text into a different language, you can type keywords into an internet search engine and get almost instant results drawn from diverse, international sources on that subject. Unfortunately, it’s not so easy for the…

Scientists in academic centers and companies around the world desperately search for novel therapeutics and vaccines to treat and prevent COVID-19. However, with lockdowns and limited access to laboratories, researchers are being forced to work from home, putting research continuity at risk. To help scientists continue their life-saving R&D, and ensure research continuity, Arctoris established…

By Luke Frank COVID-19 researchers the world over face a daunting task of sifting through tens of thousands of existing coronavirus studies, looking for commonalities or data that might help in their urgent biomedical investigations. To accelerate the filtering of relevant information, Sandia National Laboratories has assembled a combination of data mining, machine-learning algorithms and…

New Iridium, a company developing commercialized photocatalysis technologies to accelerate drug development and manufacturing, has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grant for $256,000 to conduct research and development work on facilitating timely availability of Remdesivir, a potential life-saving drug in the global fight against COVID-19.  This grant funds the development of an optimized…

By Anne Trafton, MIT News Office By folding DNA into a virus-like structure, MIT researchers have designed HIV-like particles that provoke a strong immune response from human immune cells grown in a lab dish. Such particles might eventually be used as an HIV vaccine. The DNA particles, which closely mimic the size and shape of…

By Glenn Roberts Jr. Even an underground experiment 4,600 feet below a mountain in Central Italy, and a telescope instrument more than a mile high atop an Arizona mountaintop could not escape the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the virus spread around the world, many laboratories and experiment sites entered a period of partial…

Sandia National Laboratories is offering free-of-charge the design and complete instruction manual for building a low-cost, drive-up outdoor shelter that shields healthcare workers conducting COVID-19 testing on its licensing and technology transfer website. Dr. Cody Saxton of Sandia’s medical team said that when a patient is swabbed for COVID-19, the swab must be inserted to…

Global data networks that connect people through their devices have made it possible to create accurate short-term forecasts of new COVID-19 cases, using a method pioneered by two researchers at Sandia National Laboratories. Jaideep Ray and Cosmin Safta used a model developed by Ray more than a decade ago to track plague epidemics using statistics.…

By Heather Ferreyra Rice University’s Brown School of Engineering computer scientist Todd Treangen has received a C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute Award for computational biology research applying artificial intelligence (AI) models to COVID-19 mitigation. Treangen is developing novel bioinformatics algorithms and driving comparative genomic analyses to determine how SARS-CoV-2 is changing over time. C3.ai is a…

By Jeremy P Rumsey A team of researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge and Argonne national laboratories has performed the first room-temperature X-ray measurements on the SARS-CoV-2 main protease — the enzyme that enables the virus to reproduce. The X-ray measurements mark an important first step in the researchers’ ultimate goal of building…

Scientists are working overtime to find an effective treatment for COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Many of these efforts target a specific part of the virus, such as the spike protein. Now, researchers reporting in Nano Letters have taken a different approach, using nanosponges coated with human cell membranes –– the…

By Lindsay Brownell The United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has signed an agreement worth up to $16 million over the next year with the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University to identify and test FDA-approved drugs that could be repurposed to prevent or treat COVID-19. This highly collaborative effort…

By Troy Rummler Sandia National Laboratories is teaming with local hospitals and medical device manufacturers to increase the availability of respirator masks for health care workers. “We’re helping local medical device manufacturers test materials they are using to make medical-grade masks, and we’re helping local hospitals by evaluating methods they’ve developed to clean N95 masks…

By Glenn Roberts Jr. Note: This is part of a recurring series highlighting ongoing Berkeley Lab work in international physics collaborations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Marjorie Shapiro, an experimental particle physicist and faculty senior scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), has been accustomed to working remotely and observing extreme…

A unique liquid-handling robot from Denmark is now speeding up the great task of analyzing COVID-19 tests. Every day thousands of tests for COVID-19 are now being prepared for analysis by the sophisticated flowbot ONE from Flow Robotics. Robot technology minimizes the risk of human error and contagion in the process, and it reduces the…

PerkinElmer, a global company committed to innovating for a healthier world, announced today that EUROIMMUN, a PerkinElmer Company, has received Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its EURORealTime SARS-CoV-2 assay. Clinical laboratories certified under Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) to perform high complexity tests can immediately begin using…

Peter Dizikes | MIT News Office According to a new study led by an MIT professor, the R&D tax credit has a significant effect on entrepreneurship. Moreover, the study finds a striking contrast between two types of tax credits. While the R&D tax credit fuels high-quality new-firm growth, the state-level investment tax credit, which supports…

By Marcin Minor Wladek Minor, PhD, of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, and other top structural biologists have led an international team of biomedical scientists to investigate the protein structures contained in the COVID-19 virus – structures that are vital to developing treatments and vaccines. The team has created a web resource that…

For biopharma companies seeking increased development and manufacturing capacity for vaccines and therapies, including new COVID-19-related programs, Thermo Fisher Scientific provided highlights of its new capabilities during the BIO International Convention, June 8-12, now a virtual event at bio.org/events/bio-digital. “We can now provide an uninterrupted path from development to commercialization for biopharma companies, small to…

The coronavirus COVID-19, which first appeared in the Chinese province of Wuhan in December of 2019, spread to all continents of the world within just a few weeks. National and international authorities are currently managing efforts to contain the virus by deliberately interrupting infection chains. At the same time, the virus is being examined at…

By Theresa Duque A team of scientists from Stanford University is working with researchers at the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience user facility located at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), to develop a gene-targeting, antiviral agent against COVID-19. Last year, Stanley Qi, an assistant professor in the departments of bioengineering, and…