clinical trials, microbiology

Researchers say they’re abandoning the project in its current form—one of several that aims to induce what’s known as mucosal immunity against SARS-CoV-2.

The ACTIV-6 trial reports that people who took the drug for three days may have spent slightly less time feeling unwell with SARS-CoV-2, but fails to find differences in disease progression between the treatment and placebo groups.

Because most people are vaccinated against tetanus as children, delivering benign bacteria carrying a tetanus antigen into pancreatic tumors makes them visible to memory cells in the immune system, researchers report.

Merck reports that its antiviral molnupiravir was effective against early stages of COVID-19 in high-risk patients in a Phase 3 clinical trial.

With multiple microbiota therapeutics in the pipeline for recurrent Clostridium difficile infection, clinicians foresee a shift in treatment options for the condition.

Immunization had up to 77 percent efficacy in a Phase 2 clinical study of 450 children in Burkina Faso.

The vaccine was 79 percent effective at blocking symptomatic infections, according to data from a Phase 3 trial in the US, Chile, and Peru. A US safety oversight board says the data might be incomplete.

Mix-and-match shots could simplify vaccine rollout and stimulate more-robust immune responses. Ongoing clinical trials will soon give answers.

The decision adds to evidence that the benefits of plasma infusions from COVID-19 survivors may be limited, but advocates say the case isn’t closed.

Few peer-reviewed clinical papers on the pandemic contained original data, and many of those that did had poor experimental design.

Long before Moderna’s and Pfizer’s COVID-19 shots, scientists had been considering the use of genetically encoded vaccines in the fight against infectious diseases, cancer, and more.

The results mark the second experimental COVID-19 vaccine to show high efficacy, but the study is not complete and the data have not been peer reviewed.

Vaccine experts say the results surpass their expectations, but the study is not complete, and the data have not been peer reviewed.

Researchers propose that an infusion of memory T cells from people who have recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infections could treat severe disease.

A vaccine expert explains that such answers likely won’t come until a vaccine has already been approved and administered to millions of people.

UPenn’s Katharine Bar discusses ongoing clinical trials to explore the efficacy of treating patients with plasma from individuals who have recovered from an infection.

Upon seeing pregnant women sick with COVID-19 at a University of Pennsylvania hospital, researchers there wrote trial protocols for blood transfusions to treat the disease that include expecting mothers.

A paper published in The Lancet reported that hospitalized COVID-19 patients taking the drug had a higher risk of death, although some researchers have raised questions about the data.

The idea of deliberately infecting volunteers with SARS-CoV-2 has garnered significant attention as a potential avenue to speedier development, as the World Health Organization weighs in with recommendations.