Temasek-backed Tychan to start human trials next week for COVID-19 treatment

Singapore’s Tychan, a biotechnology firm backed by state investor Temasek Holdings, said it will begin human clinical trials next week for a potential monoclonal antibody treatment for COVID-19.
The first phase of the trial to be conducted on 23 healthy volunteers will take about six weeks to evaluate the safety and tolerability of TY027 – a monoclonal antibody that specifically targets SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
Antibodies are generated in the body to fight off infection. Monoclonal antibodies mimic natural antibodies and can be isolated and manufactured in large quantities to treat diseases in patients.

Many scientists and researchers believe antibody-based therapies hold great promise for treating people already infected with the disease.
“We will continue with the fast pace of development as we are conscious that a day saved is a day less of misery,” said Teo Ming Kian, chairman of Tychan. He added that the company reached human trials in four months, when it would usually take 12-18 months.
TY027 is being explored for the treatment of patients with COVID-19 to slow the progression of the disease and accelerate recovery, as well as for its potential to provide temporary protection against infection with SARS-CoV-2.

After passing key milestones in the first phase trial, Tychan will seek approval from the Singapore regulator to expand TY027 to a larger population of COVID-19 volunteer patients to establish its efficacy.
Temasek Holdings is the founding investor of Tychan, which has previously developed therapeutic treatments for zika and yellow fever.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-singapore-treatmen/temasek-backed-tychan-to-start-human-trials-next-week-for-covid-19-treatment-idUSKBN23H0M8

U.S. student’s app offers roadmap to Singapore contact tracing tech

Singapore kicked off a global rush to develop contact tracing apps for the novel coronavirus when the city-state launched an apparently new system in March.

But the project actually drew inspiration from a 2014 U.S. high school project that won an international prize but found no backers – until now.
It all started when Rohan Suri created an app at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Virginia, to tell his mom to leave home for the bus stop when he was seven minutes away. As the Ebola epidemic ravaged western Africa at the time, Suri and schoolmate Claire Scoggins connected the dots between tracking apps and contact tracers who ask patients whom they may have spread viruses to.
“I got really interested in basically automating a lot of these contact tracing efforts,” Suri said, noting a staff shortage in remote parts of Africa during the Ebola epidemic.
When Suri and Scoggins developed a prototype called kTrace, they appealed to medical aid organizations and the U.S. government to bring it to the frontlines. But they found no takers, even after winning third place for systems software at the 2015 International Science and Engineering Fair.

The app languished until Suri, now a 21-year-old junior at Stanford University, got an email on Jan. 24 from Jason Bay, a Stanford alum and senior director at Singapore’s Government Technology Agency (GovTech).
“My mom had texted me saying, ‘You’ve got to look at this virus in Wuhan and do something about it,’” Suri said, referring to the city in China where the coronavirus outbreak began. “I didn’t take it seriously, though, and week later the Singapore government is reaching out.”
Bay’s team had been looking for technology to help curb the coronavirus and came across kTrace online. Suri spent February and March volunteering on GovTech’s TraceTogether app alongside fellow Stanford students Nikhil Cheerla and Daniel Lee.
They said they gave Singapore a roadmap by sharing kTrace’s code and providing advice in virtual meetings on stronger privacy protections. They also collected 13 phones to help test Bluetooth technology.
Singapore was “just looking around for any way to speed up the development process and we fit in,” Cheerla said.

The agency said it contacted Suri “to understand his experiences and considerations in designing kTrace for Android.” But Suri “did not commit code to TraceTogether, nor did (GovTech) use kTrace in the development of TraceTogether,” it added.

NEW PROJECT

University scientists Kate Farrahi and Manuel Cebrian said their studies as early as 2011 were the first to show Bluetooth readings could aid contact tracing. They did not develop an app, however, and Suri had not seen their work in high school.
But since Singapore’s app launched, several dozen governments, including Australia, Britain and U.S. states such as North Dakota, have spent millions of dollars among them to develop separate tracing apps. Government health authorities administer and promote the apps and link them to their testing systems.
Many other governments are monitoring progress in Singapore, where about 25% of the country’s 5.6 million residents have downloaded TraceTogether.
Contact tracing apps largely use anonymous Bluetooth radio exchanges to automatically log nearby users. The technology aims to slow viruses by identifying secondhand infections more quickly than through interviews.

But privacy concerns are a hurdle, and the technology does not work well on iPhones. A fix Apple Inc introduced in partnership with Alphabet Inc’s Google last month limits the personal data contact tracing apps can collect, which authorities say reduces their effectiveness.
Singapore has adopted a costly solution: Giving residents small tracing gadgets, possibly worn on a lanyard, that do not require smartphones.
Suri said he, too, had developed a wearable device in high school because Ebola infections were highest in countries with low smartphone ownership.
Suri is now focusing on a third app called Zero, aimed at U.S. cities.
The day after TraceTogether launched, a friend who knew about Suri’s involvement introduced him to a handful of New York entrepreneurs and venture capitalists seeking to bring similar technology to the United States.
They ended up co-founding Zero, which aims to attract users by bundling contact tracing technology with a safety-rating tool for shops and restaurants based on measures such as occupancy limits and mask rules.
“You need a strategy that goes hyperlocal, and that’s what Zero is doing,” Suri said.
For example, a shopper would check Zero for safety ratings before deciding where to go. Shops could promote special hours through the app for customers who wear masks.
Zero launched for iPhones last week, with its first business listings coming soon in New Rochelle, New York. Contact tracing will be added when cities agree to become partners.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-apps-tracing/u-s-students-app-offers-roadmap-to-singapore-contact-tracing-tech-idUSKBN23H0I1

Chinese companies put U.S. listing plans on ice as tensions mount

Chinese companies are putting off plans for U.S. listings as tensions between the world’s top two economies rise, lawyers, bankers, accountants and regulators involved in what has been a major capital-raising route told Reuters.

The drop in interest, especially from those in the early stages of planning, is the result of a proposed U.S. legislation that would make it harder for some Chinese firms to debut in America and mounting scrutiny following an accounting scandal at Chinese Starbucks rival Luckin Coffee (LK.O).
“We have seen clients putting their U.S. IPO plans on hold for now,” said Stephen Chan, a partner at law firm Dechert LLP in Hong Kong. “The underlying reason for the slowdown is the relationship between the U.S. and China,” he added.
“If tensions between the two nations remain, we would expect the slowdown to continue,” Chan said.
Chinese groups have raised $1.67 billion via initial public offerings in New York this year and are looking to raise about half billion more on U.S. exchanges, Dealogic data shows.
In 2019, they raised $3.5 billion.
Sino-U.S. relations have nosedived in recent months with the countries, already at odds over trade, now butting heads over the COVID-19 pandemic and China’s proposed national security law for Hong Kong.
Enquiries about U.S. listings have halved this year at one of the big four accounting firms in China versus 2019 levels, a senior auditor from the firm said.
Many companies that reported plans for U.S. listings to China’s securities regulator, marking an early stage in the process, are now targeting exchanges nearer to home, said a person close to the regulator.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission did not respond to requests for comment, while the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission declined to comment.
Listings take at the minimum several months to arrange, involving appointing advisers, preparing a prospectus and obtaining regulatory approvals. The further along the path a company is, the less likely it is to change plans.

‘INVESTOR UNCERTAINTY’

Chinese firms accounted for about a third, or some $279 billion, of funds raised globally via IPOs in the past five years. About half of that was overseas, mostly through New York and Hong Kong floats.
There are more than 550 Chinese firms listed on U.S. stock exchanges. Chinese firms often choose New York for floats given its prestige and international investor base, even as Beijing seeks to encourage them to list at home to share gains among local investors and limit foreign oversight.
Chinese authorities have long resisted audit papers leaving China, making it hard for U.S. auditing regulators to check the quality of audits of Chinese companies.
But a bill passed by the U.S. Senate which, if signed by President Donald Trump, would require U.S.-listed foreign companies to disclose levels of government control. It would also require that Chinese companies comply with U.S. oversight of their audits or face being delisted.
“For U.S. investors, it will mean fewer listings and it will be harder to capture the benefits of growth in China,” said John Ott, partner with Bain & Company and a leader with its Greater China financial services practice.
U.S.-listed Chinese firms have begun disclosing the risk of an “adverse impact” on their shares due to tighter regulations.

Kingsoft Cloud Holdings Ltd KC.O, the first Chinese firm to brave New York since Luckin’s scandal, warned efforts to increase U.S. regulatory access to audit information “could cause investor uncertainty for affected issuers, including us”.
Netease (NTES.O) and JD.com (JD.O) also warned of similar risks in their recent filings with the Hong Kong stock exchange for secondary listings in the city.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-usa-ipo/chinese-companies-put-u-s-listing-plans-on-ice-as-tensions-mount-idUSKBN23H01U

Arizona calls for emergency plan as COVID-19 spikes after reopening

Arizona again told hospitals to activate the coronavirus emergency plans after cases spiked following reopening, turning it into a U.S. virus hotspot along with neighboring Southwest states.

The state’s stay-at-home order ended on May 15, and its cases have increased 115 percent since then, leading a former state health chief to warn Arizona may need new social distancing measures or field hospitals.
State health director Cara Christ on Saturday told hospitals to “fully activate” emergency plans – a message she last sent on March 25 – after Arizona’s largest medical network Banner Health warned it was reaching its capacity in intensive care unit beds.
“Since May 15, ventilated COVID-19 patients have quadrupled,” Banner Health tweeted on Monday, adding it had hit capacity for some patients needing cardiac and respiratory care.
The alert came after Arizona, New Mexico and Utah each posted rises of 40% or higher in new cases for the week ended June 7 compared with the prior seven days, joining hotpots in the South like Florida and Arkansas, according to a Reuters analysis.
University of Washington researchers estimated on Monday 145,728 people could die of COVID-19 in the United States by August, raising their forecast by over 5,000 fatalities in a matter of days.
In Arizona, a “cavalier” exit from the state’s successful stay-at-home program caused the sudden case surge, said former state health chief Will Humble.
Humble said Governor Doug Ducey let Arizonans voluntarily follow Centers for Disease Control guidance but must now impose measures like mandatory face mask use inside public spaces. A failure to do so will leave Ducey with two drastic choices, he added.

“He’s going to have to either A) implement a field hospital plan, B) do another stay-at-home order, or C) both,” said Humble, head of health professionals organization the Arizona Public Health Association.
Ducey last week told a press briefing that the increase in cases was to be expected due to a rise in testing.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-arizona/arizona-calls-for-emergency-plan-as-covid-19-spikes-after-reopening-idUSKBN23H03K

Half of Californians live in areas with worrying resurgence of coronavirus

Nearly half of all Californians live in areas where coronavirus infections and hospitalizations are rising quickly enough to put their counties on a watch list for potential reinstatement of shutdowns, a Reuters analysis of state data show.
More than 18 million of the most populous U.S. state’s 39 million residents live in counties where rates of increase have put them on a watch list that may eventually require them to roll back reopening efforts, the Reuters analysis shows. Overall, there were 133,489 cases in California by Tuesday, and nearly 4,700 deaths.

Driven in part by increased social gatherings and workplace transmissions, state data updated Tuesday showed rising transmission and hospitalization in nine counties, including populations centers like Los Angeles, Sacramento and Fresno counties, as well as the more rural Tulare and Imperial counties.
“Many of the cases that are showing up in hospitals are linked to gatherings that are taking place in homes – birthday parties and funerals,” said Olivia Kasirye, public health director of Sacramento County.

One cluster in the state capital region was caused by a single traveler: “Someone traveled from another state and came to visit relatives, and then they all started falling sick,” Kasirye said.
New diagnoses in the heavily populated Los Angeles area are going up in part because testing is more widely available. But officials say infections and hospitalizations in most other parts of the state are being driven by factors tied directly to the loosened restrictions or overt flouting of public health rules.
The rising concern in California comes as 21 U.S. states reported weekly increases in new cases of COVID-19, with Arizona, Utah and New Mexico all posting rises of 40% or higher for the week ended June 7 compared with the prior seven days, according to a Reuters analysis.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-california/half-of-californians-live-in-areas-with-worrying-resurgence-of-coronavirus-idUSKBN23G372

Kaiser Permanente: 8 key capabilities for a sustained response to COVID-19

As the industry braces for the next phase of COVID-19, experts at Kaiser Permanente are sharing several key capabilities that will be critical to prepare for another potential surge.
In an article for NEJM Catalyst, leaders at the healthcare giant highlight eight focus areas health systems must consider as the country reopens and offer a look at how Kaiser Permanente tackled those challenges.
A critical starting point, they write, is a robust testing program that feeds into essential contact tracing and monitoring of any spikes in cases. As of May 18, Kaiser Permanente has performed more than 233,706 diagnostic tests and is also tracking the spread telephonically through its call centers as well as secure emails between patients and doctors.

The Oakland, California-based system is also mulling greater use of patient symptom surveying and harnessing data within electronic health records to further enhance the testing effort, according to the article.

Stephen Parodi, M.D., executive vice president at The Permanente Federation and Kaiser Permanente’s national infectious disease leader, told Fierce Healthcare that the goal of the paper is to spotlight how crucial it is to consider all fronts in preventing the spread of COVID-19.
“I think one of the biggest takeaways here is that we need a complete and comprehensive approach to suppress the virus,” he said.
The other capabilities included in the report are:

• Enhanced contact tracing and isolation efforts
• Robust community health efforts
• Home health care options
• Ability to maintain surge capacity
• Targeted and safe strategies to reopen
• Ongoing research on the virus
• Effective communication with patients

Parodi said two of the biggest challenges Kaiser Permanente faced in working through this checklist of capabilities were a lack of supplies and the need to work alongside other organizations.

He said that didn’t only mean strengthening and reinforcing existing relationships with community groups but also reaching out to other health systems and providers to coordinate plans and work together.
It also required coordination between officials and policymakers at all levels of government, he said.
“Having the leaders at individual medical centers working with the county level folks is really key to making sure that we’re aware of each other’s work and response, then actually syncing them together,” Parodi said.
Parodi also said that Kaiser Permanente went “wholesale” into using telehealth during the initial surge of COVID-19 cases, and now the system and its physicians will be working together to determine where virtual care is most appropriate and effective, as the interest in and growth of those services isn’t going away anytime soon.

He added that moving into the reopening phase poses its own set of challenges, because it’s an “unprecedented” situation to navigate.
Kaiser Permanente is aiming to center shared decision-making and patient education in the response to reopening, he said, while also providing guidance to support providers. That way, decisions are ultimately made by the doctor and patient, but they’re informed and guided decisions, he said.
“There is no set playbook for how to do it right,” Parodi said.
https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/hospitals/kaiser-permanente-8-key-capabilities-for-a-sustained-response-to-covid-19

Pharmacist recommended: 50 top over-the-counter health products

U.S. News & World Report and Pharmacy Times, released their annual list of top recommended health products.
The list collects recommendations from thousands of pharmacists for more than 800 over-the-counter brands in 135 product categories.
The No.1 pharmacist-recommended OTC products in 50 categories:
Acid reducers: Prilosec (winning 34 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Acne products: Differin Gel (winning 29 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Antibacterial soaps: Hibiclens (winning 49 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Antidiarrheals:Imodium (winning 91 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Antihistamines for allergies:Zyrtec (winning 41 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Anti-inflammatory products:Advil (winning 41 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Arthritis and joint pain topical:Aspercreme (winning 27 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Aspirin for heart health:Bayer (winning 66 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Bandages, covers and gauze:Band-Aid (winning 54 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Blood glucose monitors:OneTouch (winning 31 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Burn treatment: Neosporin (winning 37 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Children’s allergy medicine:Children’s Zyrtec Allergy Syrup  (winning 36 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Children’s cough medicine:Children’s Delsym (winning 30 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Children’s pain relief:Children’s Tylenol (winning 56 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Cholesterol management:Nature Made Fish Oil (winning 31 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Cold remedies:Cepacol (winning 33 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Cold sore treatments:Abreva (winning 80 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Cough suppressants:Delsym (winning 53 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Dandruff shampoo: Selsun Blue (winning 29 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Diabetic foot cream:Eucerin (winning 35 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Expectorants:Mucinex(winning 82 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Fiber Laxatives:Metamucil (winning 52 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Flu treatment:DayQuil Cold & Flu (winning 24 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Foot care products:Gold Bond (winning 24 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Hand sanitizer:Purell (winning 86 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Headache relief:Excedrin (winning 28 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Insect bite and sting management: After Bite (winning 77 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Lactose intolerance products: Lactaid (winning 88 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Leg cramp relief: Hyland’s Leg Cramps (winning 46 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Lice treatments:Nix (winning 79 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Lip balm:Carmex (winning 24 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Nausea remedies:Emetrol (winning 54 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Menstrual pain relief:Midol Complete (winning 36 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Migraine relief:Excedrin Migraine (winning 71 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Motion sickness remedies:Dramamine (winning 57 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Oral decongestants:Sudafed (winning 49 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Pregnancy testing:First Response (winning 54 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Scar treatments:Mederma (winning 75 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Sleep aid:Unisom (winning 36 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Smoking cessation aids: NicoDerm CQ Patch (winning 63 percent of pharmacist’ votes)
Snore aids:Breathe Right (winning 92 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Sore throat products:Chloraseptic (winning 31 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Stool softeners: Colace (winning 79 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Toothache products:Orajel (winning 73 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Toothpaste for general use:Crest (winning 36 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Upset stomach remedies:Pepto-Bismol (winning 65 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Urinary tract pain relief:AZO Urinary Pain Relief (winning 86 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Wart removers:Compound W (winning 56 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Yeast infection prevention and relief:Monistat (winning 58 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
Zinc cold remedies: Zicam (winning 65 percent of pharmacists’ votes)
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/pharmacy/pharmacist-recommended-50-top-over-the-counter-health-products.html