Chronic hepatitis B affects around 250 million people in the world and its cure remains elusive. At the 2023 European Association for the Study of the Liver Congress in Vienna, Austria, Emily Harrison of Precision Biosciences Inc. presented the company’s work on using a naturally occurring endonuclease in the development of its ARCUS gene editing approach to eradicating the persistent viral infection.
The family of 32 known RNA alphaviruses are present globally, are transmitted by mosquitos, and can cause human disease most commonly arthritogenic or encephalitic in presentation, the latter of which has a fatality rate as high as 35% to 75% depending on host co-morbidities. Previous studies have demonstrated antibody-mediated protection against specific types of alphavirus infections, but broad-spectrum protection against multiple alphavirus has only been reported recently. Even more, the vaccine-mediated elicitation of monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) has yet to be demonstrated until now.
At the ongoing European Association for the Study of the Liver meeting, researchers from Suzhou Ribo Life Science Co. Ltd. presented preclinical data on RBD-1016 in two models of chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection.
Having demonstrated in previous work that drug-Fc conjugates (DFCs) are a promising treatment alternative for multidrug-resistant (MDR) gram-negative bacteria, researchers from the Center for Discovery and Innovation and Cidara Therapeutics Inc. presented results from the identification of CTC-177, a novel DFC, as a potential immunoprophylactic agent against MDR gram-negative bacterial infections.
A cluster of deaths in 1993 in the southwestern U.S. that were characterized by an acute respiratory failure and shock were determined to be due to hantaviruses, which are RNA zoonotic viruses typically transmitted by a rodent vector. Given a fatality rate ranging from 15% to 40% and capacity to potentially spread through human-to-human contact, it is possible that the public health risks posed by these agents have been underestimated.
To address the absence of clinical trials evaluating immunotherapeutics for Acinetobacter baumannii infections, a team from the University of Texas at San Antonio conducted a study using immunoinformatics (EigenBio’s proprietary epitope prediction software) to identify peptides that contain both putative B- and T-cell epitopes from proteins associated with the pathogenesis of A. baumannii.
Saturating bioactive glass with silver sustains the metal’s antimicrobial properties and reduces biofilm formation, researchers at the University of Birmingham, U.K., found. Their study, published in Biofilm, demonstrated that specific preparation, storage and application techniques minimize the transformation of silver ions to silver chloride that typically reduces silver’s healing properties over time.
The Institute for Drug Research has patented pyrrolidine antiviral compounds acting as 3C-like proteinase (3CLpro; Mpro; nsp5) (SARS-CoV-2; COVID-19 virus) inhibitors.
Having caused over 6.2 million deaths globally ongoing, the COVID-19 pandemic since 2020 continues to pose a serious public health challenge. While the SARS-CoV-2 receptors angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) and transmembrane protease serine 2 play requisite roles in permitting the initial infection, up to 10 proviral host factors have also been determined to play crucial roles in controlling the viral replication, but most are not pharmacologically targetable.
RSS
