Recent results suggest that the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine has good efficacy against the new UK and South African variants. But the AstraZeneca/Oxford University vaccine appears less effective against the South African variant, a trend emerging for several approved or near-approved vaccines.

The researchers hope that their work will improve diagnosis and treatment of colon cancer, by reducing the number of variants of unknown significance, and can be used as a model for further functional assessment and classification of variants in other diseases.

By Malorye Allison Branca —The most detailed database of COVID-19 variants available has been launched and will likely play a critical role in the coming months, as the focus shifts from just vaccinating as many people as possible to making certain they are protected against all the most common variants of the disease.

Although the main purpose of the study was to assess safety, the researchers also found that the treatment significantly improved survival with 91% of the stem-cell treated patients surviving until 31 days after admission versus 42% of the control group.

While this study requires validation in a bigger patient group, the initial results suggest that one dose of ivermectin given to mild COVID-19 patients reduced viral load and the duration of symptoms such as cough and loss of smell and taste.

Autopsies have shown the presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA and protein in anatomically distinct regions of the nasopharynx and brain, suggesting it enters the brain through the nose, and may inform diagnosis and measures to prevent infection.

The study is also the first to demonstrate a relationship between changes in the gut microbiome and epigenetic changes in neural tissue in the hippocampus, an area of the brain affected in Alzheimer’s.

Because the prevalence of AD is greater among black and Latino Americans than among whites, AMP AD 2.0 will expand the molecular characterization of Alzheimer’s in brain, blood, and spinal fluid samples collected from diverse populations.

A robot-driven platform allows small sections of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to be sequenced quickly and in conjunction with other samples, allowing for cheap and accurate high throughput COVID-19 sampling.