Tag: human

Spain’s medicines agency approved Tuesday a first round of clinical trials on humans for a COVID-19 vaccine developed by Spanish firm Hipra. “This is the first trial on humans of a vaccine made in Spain,” the agency said in a statement. Dozens of volunteers will be recruited from Spanish hospitals “as soon as possible” for

Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have discovered one way in which SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, hijacks human cell machinery to blunt the immune response, allowing it to establish infection, replicate and cause disease. In short, the virus’ genome gets tagged with a special marker by a human enzyme

French pharmaceutical firm Sanofi on Friday announced the launch of human trials of its second COVID-19 vaccine, with its first still in the testing phase after having fallen behind in development. Sanofi and US company Translate Bio are developing the vaccine based on messenger RNA technology. The phase 1 and 2 trials aim to verify

Cells used to study the human blood brain barrier in the lab aren’t what they seem, throwing nearly a decade’s worth of research into question, a new study from scientists at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Weill Cornell Medicine suggests. The team also discovered a possible way to correct the error,

Michigan State University researchers have created for the first time a miniature human heart model in the laboratory, complete with all primary heart cell types and a functioning structure of chambers and vascular tissue. In the United States, heart disease is the No. 1 cause of death. “These minihearts constitute incredibly powerful models in which

In a Perspective for the New England Journal of Medicine, members of the National Institutes of Health’s Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) Vaccines Working Group assess practical considerations and prerequisites for using controlled human infection models (CHIMs), which can be used for human challenge studies, to support SARS-CoV-2 vaccine development. In the article,

Credit: CC0 Public Domain A German man who contracted the novel strain of coronavirus was infected by a colleague visiting from China, officials said on Tuesday, in what appeared to be the first human-to-human transmission in Europe. Other confirmed cases in Europe of the viral outbreak have so far involved patients who had recently been

Here’s something new to consider being thankful for at the dinner table: the long evolutionary journey that gave you your big brain and your long life. Courtesy of our primate ancestors that invented cooking over a million years ago, you are a member of the one species able to afford so many cortical neurons in

Why do some of our choices appear to be driven by a desire to explore the unknown? An Inserm team from École Normale Supérieure led by Valentin Wyart has shown that most of these choices are not motivated by curiosity, but by errors caused by the brain mechanisms implicated in evaluating our options. These findings

The invention of interactive map applications has revolutionized wayfinding, providing an unprecedented level of information far beyond what printed road maps can offer. Researchers at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles are giving us a similar look into the anatomy of the human lung, and their findings could help babies breathe easier. Infants born prematurely often suffer

The cover for issue 54 of Oncotarget features Figure 2, “Comparative proteomic profiling of the peptides/proteins identified from 293T, IL16lamp2b and mExo-Tat samples,” by Lu, et al. The HIV-1 Tat protein is a potent activator of viral transcription. The researcher’s previous work has demonstrated that exosomal formulations of Tat can reverse HIV-1 latency in primary

Representations reflecting non-linguistic experience have been detected in brain activity during reading in study of healthy, native English speakers published in JNeurosci. The research brings us one step closer to a more complete characterization of human language. Words and their relationship to one’s experience are thought to be combined in the brain to enable understanding

As humans, we may feel rather lucky about our evolutionary lot. We live longer than many other animals, and lifespans continue to increase thanks to better diets, advances in medicine and improved public health. But our quest to beat aging and the diseases that come with aging continues. Osteoarthritis rates, for example, have doubled since

Scientists at Harvard University and the Broad Institute’s Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research have made a major advance in the development of human brain ‘organoids’: miniature, 3-D tissue cultures that model a patient’s own brain cells in a dish. Their new method, published in Nature, consistently grows the same types of cells, in the same

Alpha-1-antitrypsin is a protein produced by the liver. The protein gets secreted to the blood stream, where it circulates the body to protect the lungs. However, some people are born with genetic disorders that hinders production of this protein. These patients can suffer from decreased lung function, liver diseases and shortness of breath. In the

A study of the differences between healthy brains and those with Alzheimer’s Disease has produced largest dataset of its type ever. And the data, developed by a team of researchers led by Dr. Richard Unwin at The University of Manchester, is now freely available online for any scientist to use. The team included researchers from

When we remember a past event, the human brain reconstructs that experience in reverse order, according to a new study at the University of Birmingham. Understanding more precisely how the brain retrieves information could help us better assess the reliability of eye witness accounts, for example of crime scenes, where people often are able to

Human error, not human biology, largely accounts for the apparent decline of mortality among the very old, according to a new report publishing on December 20 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Saul Newman of Australia National University in Canberra. The result casts doubt on the hypothesis that human longevity can be greatly extended

Breakthrough study to culture human skin cells called keratinocytes to produce skin grafts has been published by a team of researchers from Duke-NUS Medical School and the Singapore General Hospital (SGH). This method is the first to use a specific type of tissue-proteins known as laminins, found in the human body, to create a safer

Researchers have discovered that mouse skin and skin cells from humans produce pigmentation in response to sunlight on a 48-hour cycle. They observed that exposing skin to ultraviolet light every 2 days yielded darker pigmentation with less radiation damage than daily exposure. The findings appear October 25 in the journal Molecular Cell. “The damaging effects