“The nausea and vomiting that often define the first trimester of pregnancy are primarily caused by a single hormone, according to a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. Researchers said that the discovery could lead to better treatments for morning sickness, including rare, life-threatening cases of it.”
From New York Times.
“In a first-ever human clinical trial of four adult patients, an mRNA cancer vaccine developed at the University of Florida quickly reprogrammed the immune system to attack glioblastoma, the most aggressive and lethal brain tumor…
Reported May 1 in the journal Cell, the discovery represents a potential new way to recruit the immune system to fight notoriously treatment-resistant cancers using an iteration of mRNA technology and lipid nanoparticles, similar to COVID-19 vaccines, but with two key differences: use of a patient’s own tumor cells to create a personalized vaccine, and a newly engineered complex delivery mechanism within the vaccine.”
From Medical Xpress.
World Health Organization | Communicable Disease
“Also known as kala-azar, visceral leishmaniasis is the world’s deadliest parasitic killer after malaria.
It causes fever, weight loss, spleen and liver enlargement, and, if not treated, death. Kala-azar is transmitted by the bite of infected sandflies and is endemic in 80 countries, mainly in Eastern Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. One billion people are at risk globally and Eastern Africa has currently the highest number of cases. As for other vector-borne diseases, climate change is changing the epidemiology of leishmaniasis and could lead to its expansion to new areas. An estimated 50,000 to 90,000 new cases occur worldwide annually, and half are children under 15 years of age.
In Africa, the current treatment for visceral leishmaniasis includes painful injections given at hospital daily for 17 days, a treatment that may also present rare but life-threatening side effects, including to the heart, liver, and pancreas. In contrast, the new molecule under study in Ethiopia, called LXE408, is administered in the form of oral pills and is expected to be safer than the current treatment.”
“Scientists have experimented with enzymes, biological molecules that facilitate biochemical reactions, to remove A and B antigens to make O-type blood for decades. But enzyme-treated blood can still be incompatible. Writing in Nature Microbiology on April 29th, Martin Olsson, a transfusion-medicine consultant at Lund University in Sweden, and Maher Abou Hachem from Denmark’s Technical University argue that the problem could stem from lengthened antigen sugar chains, called extensions, that are not targeted by current enzymes. That led the team to hunt for enzymes capable of removing the antigens as well as their extensions. They settled on enzymes from Akkermansia muciniphila, a bacterium that feasts on the protective mucus lining the gut, because mucus contains sugars similar to those on red blood cells.
Their idea held up: using a mix of different A. muciniphila enzymes, the team removed both the antigens and their known extensions. To test if that made any difference to compatibility, they ran tests that combined the treated red blood cells with plasma, the watery component of blood, from other blood groups. If antibodies in the plasma bind to antigens in the treated blood, the test yields a positive result, indicating incompatibility. A negative result suggests donation is safe. When type B blood cells were treated with the enzyme mix, the negative rate was between 91% to 96%. When the extension-targeting enzymes were left out, the rate was around 80%, implying that the new extensions were at least partly responsible for the difficulty in making universal blood.”
From The Economist.
World Health Organization | Vaccination
“In a significant step forward for malaria prevention in Africa, three countries—Benin, Liberia and Sierra Leone—today launched a large-scale rollout of the life-saving malaria vaccine targeting millions of children across the three West African nations. The vaccine rollout, announced on World Malaria Day, seeks to further scale up vaccine deployment in the African region.
Today’s launch brings to eight the number of countries on the continent to offer the malaria vaccine as part of the childhood immunization programmes, extending access to more comprehensive malaria prevention. Several of the more than 30 countries in the African region that have expressed interest in the vaccine are scheduled to roll it out in the next year through support from Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, as efforts continue to widen its deployment in the region in coordination with other prevention measures such as long-lasting insecticidal nets and seasonal malaria chemoprevention.”
