The National Institutes of Health (NIH) said on Friday it is investing $248.7 million in seven diagnostic companies with new testing technologies to increase their testing capacities and make millions of rapid COVID-19 tests per week available by fall. The funding is part of NIH’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) initiative which was launched in…

The U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed effort will provide up to $2.1 billion to Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline to fund development and manufacturing of the companies’ experimental Covid-19 vaccine, the companies announced Friday. As part of the agreement, the companies will provide the U.S. with 100 million doses of the vaccine, which will begin human trials in…

Merck & Co. plans to begin two large clinical trials in September of an experimental oral antiviral therapy for Covid-19, pushing ahead with efforts to bring another treatment option to market. There is a “profound medical need for an orally active treatment,” Roger Perlmutter, the pharmaceutical giant’s top scientist, said Friday on Merck’s earnings conference call.…

The recent Coronavirus pandemic has led to a rapid response from the viral research and therapeutics community around the world.  These research teams need robust and reliable genomic tools to classify and characterize viral samples, and genome engineering tools to build vaccines to help stop the spread of this deadly virus.   Twist’s unique silicon-based…

Pharmaceutical companies that are racing to develop vaccines for the coronavirus are already working behind the scenes to build the supply chains needed to deliver their drugs to billions of people as rapidly as possible. To serve global demand once a vaccine is approved, a complicated and high-stakes supply chain would kick into gear on…

Rather than building its COVID-19 vaccine candidate with mRNA—the new technology that rivals Moderna and Pfizer have turned to—Johnson & Johnson selected an older vaccine platform that had proven to be safe in diseases like RSV and Ebola. Now, it’s reporting that a single dose of the vaccine protected nonhuman primates in a preclinical study.…

Never before have prospective vaccines for a pathogen entered final-stage clinical trials as rapidly as candidates for Covid-19. Just six months ago, when the death toll from the coronavirus stood at one and neither it nor the disease it caused had a name, a team of Chinese scientists uploaded its genetic sequence to a public site. That kicked off…

Democrats in both houses of Congress have introduced legislation that would force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to better monitor emissions of ethylene oxide (EtO) from plants that manufacture the toxic gas or use it to sterilize medical devices. The Public Health Air Quality Act of 2020, sponsored by Sen. Tammy Duckworth (Ill.) and Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester…

The director of NIAID talks about vaccines, school reopenings, hostility toward science, and the lessons we’ll learn when (yes, when) we recover. DR. ANTHONY FAUCI’S new normal is less normal than anyone’s during this year of the coronavirus. As the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—and perhaps the most widely trusted voice on the…