BenevolentAI, a startup which has raised $292 million to apply AI to create drugs faster, today says it has uncovered an already approved drug as a potential treatment for COVID-19, after it applied its AI platform and team to the problem. The revelation, which has now appeared in peer-reviewed scientific journals and has entered clinical trials with a major pharmaceutical company, could offer a glimmer of hope to a world locked down by the pandemic.

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A small study from China suggests transfusions of blood from those who have beaten the disease could help buy time for new victims


Transfusions of blood serum from people who’ve recovered from covid-19 could help severe cases recover, according to a new study from China.

Plasma donation: The concept of using blood from survivors—or “convalescent plasma”—isn’t new, but it’s now being tried against covid-19 because there aren’t any drugs known to work. A survivor’s blood is ch...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization for a blood purification system to treat patients 18 years of age or older with confirmed Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) with confirmed or imminent respiratory failure.




The authorized product works by reducing the amount of cytokines and other inflammatory mediators, i.e., small active proteins in the bloodstream that control a cell’s immune respons...

As researchers scramble to find new drugs and vaccines for Covid-19, a vaccine that is more than a century old has piqued researchers' interests. The Bacillus Calmette-Guerin vaccine -- which was first developed to fight off tuberculosis -- is being studied in clinical trials around the world as a way to fight the novel coronavirus.
Tuberculosis and Covid-19 infection are two very different diseases -- TB is caused by a type of bacteria while Covid-19 is caused by a virus, for starters. Bu...

The UK government opened its first mass coronavirus-testing facility on 9 April.




The lab, in Milton Keynes, is the first of three such facilities to open. The others — in Glasgow and Alderley Park in Nether Alderley — are scheduled to open within the next two weeks. In March, the UK government requisitioned polymerase chain reaction machines from university labs across the country in order to outfit these central testing facilities.




The labs — which t...

The diagnosis center of Hospital Clínic de Barcelona has incorporated a new robot to perform massively PCR tests for COVID-19 diagnosis. After calibrational procedures, it is a matter of days that will be operational. This initiative, Covichain Robots, it has been carried out by several public and private organizations, making possible robot's arrival. Being a high tech open-source robot, it can be modified for adapting it to the procedures required in different hospitals. In this particular ...

U.S. drugmaker Pfizer Inc (PFE.N) said on Thursday that early data has helped it identify a drug candidate with the potential to help treat patients infected with the novel coronavirus.

It also finalized a plan to develop a coronavirus vaccine in partnership with German drugmaker BioNTech SE (22UAy.F) and said the companies hope to produce millions of vaccines by the end of 2020. The companies said they plan to start trials of the vaccine as early as this month.

Data from pr...

As well as the saltshaker, in that instant, they shared the new coronavirus, scientists have since concluded. That their exchange was documented at all is the result of intense scrutiny, part of a rare success story in the global fight against the virus. The co-workers were early links in what was to be the first documented chain of multiple human-to-human transmissions outside Asia of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

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The latest analysis of data from the COVID Symptom Tracker app, used by over 2 million people, shows the rate of new symptoms being reported nationally has slowed down significantly in the past few days.  The latest figures estimate that 1.4 million people in the UK aged 20-69 have symptomatic COVID, a fall from 1.9 million on the 1st April. You can read more about our machine learning model to predict symptomatic COVID-19 here.

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Medtronic plc  the global leader in medical technology, announced the 30th March it is publicly sharing the design specifications for the Puritan Bennett™ 560 (PB 560) to enable participants across industries to evaluate options for rapid ventilator manufacturing to help doctors and patients dealing with COVID-19. This decision is consistent with the recent FDA Guidance and in accordance with the public health and medical response of governmental agencies globally.

Introduced in 2010, ...

Siemens Healthineers announced on Apr 02, 2020 the availability of its molecular Fast Track Diagnostics (FTD) SARS-CoV-2 Assay test kit used to aid in the diagnosis of infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the COVID-19 disease. Test kits are already being shipped within the European Union for research use only (RUO) to expedite availability while the company continues to pursue Emergency Use Assessment and Listing (EUAL) from the World Health Organization (WHO) for cli...

A new COVID-19 vaccine candidate is entering Phase 1 clinical human testing today, after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) accepted an application from Inovio Pharmaceuticals under the regulator’s Investigational New Drug program. Inovio plans to inject its first volunteer test subject with the INO-4800 DNA vaccine candidate it has developed, following promising results from preclinical studies performed on animals that did indicate increased immune response.




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