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Moderna plots vaccines against 15 pathogens with future pandemic potential

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Moderna Inc said on Monday it plans to develop and begin testing vaccines targeting 15 of the world’s most worrisome pathogens by 2025 and will permanently wave its COVID-19 vaccine patents for shots intended for certain low- and middle-income countries.

The U.S. biotechnology company also said it will make its messenger RNA (mRNA) technology available to researchers working on new vaccines for emerging and neglected diseases through a program called mRNA Access.

Moderna announced its strategy ahead of the Global Pandemic Preparedness Summit sponsored by the UK government and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an international coalition set up five years ago to prepare for future disease threats.

Moderna is already collaborating with partners on vaccines against some of the 15 pathogens, which include Chikungunya, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, Dengue, Ebola, Malaria, Marburg, Lassa fever, MERS and COVID-19.

Those collaborations include a Nipah virus vaccine with the U.S. National Institutes of Health and an HIV vaccine with the Gates Foundation and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, Moderna President Stephen Hoge said in an interview.

The company will either seek out new partners for the others or develop them internally, he said.

Moderna Chief Executive Stephane Bancel told a virtual press briefing on Monday that the 15 viruses are known threats that have not been addressed by many large drugmakers. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed six million people worldwide and sickened millions more, has made clear that needs to change, Bancel said.

“Too many lives were lost in the last few years,” he said.

Early in the COVID pandemic, Moderna pledged not to enforce its vaccine patents during the emergency phase of the health crisis.

That has allowed for development of a vaccine manufacturing plant in Africa backed by the World Health Organization as part of a pilot project to give poor and middle-income countries the know-how to make COVID-19 vaccines.

Moderna said it will make that pledge permanent for the 92 low- and middle income countries that qualify for assistance under the COVAX Advance Market Commitment (AMC) led by the GAVI vaccine alliance.

A company spokesperson said Moderna will not enforce patents for COVID-19 vaccines developed in South Africa by WHO-backed Afrigen Biologics for AMC-92 low- and middle-income countries.

Although it will not enforce its patents in these countries, Hoge said Moderna does not intend to share its vaccine technology with the WHO-backed technology transfer hub in South Africa, in spite of lobbying efforts by the organization.

Earlier on Monday, the company said it will set up a manufacturing facility in Kenya, its first in Africa, to produce mRNA vaccines, including against COVID-19.

As part of its future pandemic plan, Moderna intends to make its technology available to academic research labs to test their own theories for vaccines to address emerging and neglected diseases. Hoge said some of these may eventually result in partnerships with Moderna to address the 15 priority pathogens.

“What we want to make sure happens is that scientists who have great ideas for how they could make vaccines will be able to access our standards and technology, almost as if they worked at Moderna,” Hoge said.

Initially, the program will start with a few academic labs, but Hoge expects it to expand rapidly. He sees the program as a way to expand discovery of vaccines using mRNA technology.

“We want to make sure that we allow others to explore the space that frankly, we can’t get to,” he said. “And that’s really what this is about.”

 

(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago and Michael Erman in New Jersey; additional reporting by Jennifer Rigby in London; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

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Whooping cough is at a decade-high level in US

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MILWAUKEE (AP) — Whooping cough is at its highest level in a decade for this time of year, U.S. health officials reported Thursday.

There have been 18,506 cases of whooping cough reported so far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. That’s the most at this point in the year since 2014, when cases topped 21,800.

The increase is not unexpected — whooping cough peaks every three to five years, health experts said. And the numbers indicate a return to levels before the coronavirus pandemic, when whooping cough and other contagious illnesses plummeted.

Still, the tally has some state health officials concerned, including those in Wisconsin, where there have been about 1,000 cases so far this year, compared to a total of 51 last year.

Nationwide, CDC has reported that kindergarten vaccination rates dipped last year and vaccine exemptions are at an all-time high. Thursday, it released state figures, showing that about 86% of kindergartners in Wisconsin got the whooping cough vaccine, compared to more than 92% nationally.

Whooping cough, also called pertussis, usually starts out like a cold, with a runny nose and other common symptoms, before turning into a prolonged cough. It is treated with antibiotics. Whooping cough used to be very common until a vaccine was introduced in the 1950s, which is now part of routine childhood vaccinations. It is in a shot along with tetanus and diphtheria vaccines. The combo shot is recommended for adults every 10 years.

“They used to call it the 100-day cough because it literally lasts for 100 days,” said Joyce Knestrick, a family nurse practitioner in Wheeling, West Virginia.

Whooping cough is usually seen mostly in infants and young children, who can develop serious complications. That’s why the vaccine is recommended during pregnancy, to pass along protection to the newborn, and for those who spend a lot of time with infants.

But public health workers say outbreaks this year are hitting older kids and teens. In Pennsylvania, most outbreaks have been in middle school, high school and college settings, an official said. Nearly all the cases in Douglas County, Nebraska, are schoolkids and teens, said Justin Frederick, deputy director of the health department.

That includes his own teenage daughter.

“It’s a horrible disease. She still wakes up — after being treated with her antibiotics — in a panic because she’s coughing so much she can’t breathe,” he said.

It’s important to get tested and treated with antibiotics early, said Dr. Kris Bryant, who specializes in pediatric infectious diseases at Norton Children’s in Louisville, Kentucky. People exposed to the bacteria can also take antibiotics to stop the spread.

“Pertussis is worth preventing,” Bryant said. “The good news is that we have safe and effective vaccines.”

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AP data journalist Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Scientists show how sperm and egg come together like a key in a lock

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How a sperm and egg fuse together has long been a mystery.

New research by scientists in Austria provides tantalizing clues, showing fertilization works like a lock and key across the animal kingdom, from fish to people.

“We discovered this mechanism that’s really fundamental across all vertebrates as far as we can tell,” said co-author Andrea Pauli at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna.

The team found that three proteins on the sperm join to form a sort of key that unlocks the egg, allowing the sperm to attach. Their findings, drawn from studies in zebrafish, mice, and human cells, show how this process has persisted over millions of years of evolution. Results were published Thursday in the journal Cell.

Scientists had previously known about two proteins, one on the surface of the sperm and another on the egg’s membrane. Working with international collaborators, Pauli’s lab used Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence tool AlphaFold — whose developers were awarded a Nobel Prize earlier this month — to help them identify a new protein that allows the first molecular connection between sperm and egg. They also demonstrated how it functions in living things.

It wasn’t previously known how the proteins “worked together as a team in order to allow sperm and egg to recognize each other,” Pauli said.

Scientists still don’t know how the sperm actually gets inside the egg after it attaches and hope to delve into that next.

Eventually, Pauli said, such work could help other scientists understand infertility better or develop new birth control methods.

The work provides targets for the development of male contraceptives in particular, said David Greenstein, a genetics and cell biology expert at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study.

The latest study “also underscores the importance of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry,” he said in an email.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Turn Your Wife Into Your Personal Sex Kitten

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