Despite being one of the world’s most common inherited blood disorders, sickle cell disease has few treatment options, even with the approval of three new drugs since 2017. Several companies hope to use new gene-editing tools to cure the disease by targeting the mutations that cause it. One such treatment is in the final stage …
The Flu Shot and COVID: Will the Delta Variant Play a Role?
Cold and flu season is nearly here, with flu activity typically peaking between the months of December and February. But according to a recent poll conducted by the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, around 44 percent of Americans are still unsure if they’ll get this year’s flu vaccine. Given the fact that the Delta variant …
New Hope for Ultra-Rare Childhood Disease
The recent release of findings from a small Phase 1 clinical trial not only gives hope to families affected by an ultra-rare childhood disease, but may also offer a glimpse into future treatment of genetic disorders affecting the central nervous system. If the study continues to yield results as researchers have seen, these findings may …
CRISPR and the Continuing Quest for CAR-T Safety and Durability
CAR-T is an immunotherapy that is currently used to treat blood cancers and is in clinical trials to treat other cancers as well. This treatment requires harvesting a patient’s T cells from their blood, genetically modifying them to be more efficient in attacking cancer cells, growing them in the lab and then infusing them back …
mRNA: Great Expectations vs. Limited Applications
While research on potential therapeutic applications of mRNA has been underway for more than a decade, the success of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines has expanded interest in the field, with manufacturers like Sanofi announcing significant investment and intent to become an active participant in developing mRNA-based therapies. In addition to developing antibodies as …
Will You Need a COVID-19 Vaccine Booster Shot?
On September 22, 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a single booster dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for specific communities. This booster dose is based on data that shows that a booster shot increases the immune response in previously vaccinated individuals. The results are promising, but you may be wondering, “Will …
When COVID-19 Vaccine Supply Doesn’t Meet the Need, Innovations Emerge
It is hard to believe that within one year of the declaration of the pandemic, as many as eleven COVID-19 vaccines received emergency authorized use. Despite producing enough of these vaccines to administer 6.7 billion doses by the end of September 2021, more than 65 percent of the world’s population remains unvaccinated. A variety of …
COVID-19 Symptoms in the Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated
Earlier this month, the United States reached a crucial milestone: Per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website, 55 percent of the U.S. population has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. That percentage includes approximately 182.5 million Americans who have received two doses of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines or one dose of …
How SARS-CoV-2 Spreads Infection So Efficiently | Part 3 – Invasion of the Variants
In the first two blogs of this three-part series on how SARS-CoV-2 spreads, QPS has covered how the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein can attach to and invade host cells more easily than other coronaviruses, and how the viral RNA can easily enter a host cell and replicate itself. In this third and final part of the …
Move Over AAV – Anelloviruses May Be Key to NextGen Gene Therapy
Biotech start-up Ring Therapeutics, founded by Flagship Pioneering in 2017, hopes to transform gene therapy by using a new class of vector — anelloviruses – a diverse family of harmless viruses present in the human body. Current gene therapies mostly use an adeno-associated virus (AAV) to carry genetic material into a cell – often a …
