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Last Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially launched its mRNA vaccine technology hub in Cape Town, South Africa. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the facility was established in response to global vaccine access inequity to pursue mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 and potentially other poverty-related diseases. South African biotech firm Afrigen Biologics and vaccine producer Biovac are working with the publicly available sequence of Moderna’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine to create a similar vaccine candidate, which will be tested on humans early next year. The candidate will the first to be made based on a widely used vaccine (like Moderna’s) without the developer’s approval and assistance and the first mRNA vaccine designed, developed, and produced at lab scale on the African continent.
The White House plans to nominate cancer surgeon Dr. Monica Bertagnolli to become the director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), succeeding Dr. Francis Collins, who stepped down in 2021. Dr. Bertagnolli has served as the director of the National Cancer Institute since last fall. If confirmed by the Senate, she will inherit COVID-19 pandemic-era challenges around increased scrutiny of the agency’s funding of virus research, including grants to EcoHealth Alliance, which studied coronaviruses in Wuhan, China.
Two studies published last week found that repurposed drug combinations lowered the risk of severe COVID-19 in high-risk patients. Stanford University researchers looked at the combination of the antidepressant fluvoxamine and the corticosteroid budesonide among nonhospitalized adults with early symptomatic COVID-19 and at least one risk factor. A second team from Weill Cornell Medicine looked at the combination of the monoclonal antibodies amubarvimab and romlusevimab in nonhospitalized adult COVID-19 patients with high-risk factors. Using combinations of repurposed drugs to treat severe COVID-19 (if successful in further testing) could prove to be an important tool in reducing the burden of COVID-19 in low- and middle-income countries, where oral therapeutics for COVID-19 are largely unavailable.