Stunning Levels Of Air Toxins Found In New York's Subway System

 The air quality in the subway systems across the U.S. is almost downright toxic. 

New research published last week shows high levels of pollution for subway riders, with the worst air quality coming from places like New York and New Jersey, according to The Guardian. 

The report notes that tiny specks of pollution called PM2.5 were well above nationally determined safe daily levels of 35 micrograms per cubic meter in cities like New York, Washington and Philadelphia. The particles are likely "thrown up by train brakes or the friction between train wheels and rails". 

In New York, these particles measured 251 micrograms per cubic meter. Terry Gordon, a professor at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, who co-authored the research, said: “New Yorkers in particular should be concerned about the toxins they are inhaling.” 

The level was even higher, coming in at 1,499 micrograms per cubic meter at Christopher Street in the West Village. This is about 77 times higher than above-ground air pollution and is a level "more commonly found near a large wildfire or during a building demolition". 

Gordon continued: “It was the worst pollution ever measured in a subway station, higher than some of the worst days in Beijing or Delhi. It just wasn’t believable. My colleague went down there and his airways were feeling tight after an hour or so.”

“People should be highly alarmed by these high levels,” he said. Pollutants were composed of iron and organic carbon produced "from the breakdown of fossil fuels or decaying plants and animals." Gordon says more research is necessary to explain why pollution is so bad in some areas, and to figure out the health impact on commuters and transit workers. 

The research found that people conducting a daily commute using Christopher Street were increasing their risk of an adverse cardiovascular event by 10%. And despite subway ridership falling due to the pandemic, many of the people who still use mass transit are frontline workers, on their way to help fight a virus that is known for attacking the lungs. 

Gretchen Goldman, research director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, commented: “This is an important contribution, especially to our understanding of the disproportionate burden of air pollution faced by low-income communities and communities of color. As the scientific community works to better understand exposure and potential health effects of air pollution in the urban environment, I hope local decision makers use this valuable work to inform the best ways to address the known racial and socioeconomic inequities in air pollution exposure in US cities.”

Broadway in Boston, Second Avenue in New York City and 30th Street in Philadelphia also scored among the top polluted stations in the Northeast. 

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/stunning-levels-air-toxins-found-new-yorks-subway-system

Fund Backed by 20 Drugmakers Raises $140M to Save Antibiotic Pipeline

 The AMR Action Fund, which was unveiled last year by more than 20 drugmakers to help struggling antibiotic companies, said on Thursday it received $140 million from a group of new investors, including the European Investment Bank.

The new funding, which includes investments from Britain-based Wellcome Trust and Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation, adds to an initial $1 billion support from drugmakers such as Merck & Co Inc and Pfizer Inc.

Antibiotic makers have struggled with anemic investment and bankruptcies, even after the approval of new drugs, as fears of drug-resistant microbes force hospitals to adopt a more conservative approach toward such treatments.

The AMR Action Fund aims to sustain a pipeline for new treatments and bring two-four new antibiotics to patients by the end of the decade in a market, which has seen a series of bankruptcies in the past three years.

With the new funding, AMR Action will "be starting to look at investments in the second quarter, and I expect we would make our first investment this year," said Henry Skinner, who was named as the fund's chief executive officer on Thursday.

Skinner was most recently the senior vice-president at investment adviser Tekla Capital Management and has also served as the CEO of antibiotics developer SelectX Pharmaceuticals.

Companies have to keep developing antibiotics to counter these drug-resistant microbes as older antibiotics lose effectiveness in some patients, Skinner said.

"It's a little bit of a Catch-22. And because of that, the willingness to invest in this space has diminished over the last 20 years."

The fund will help bridge the lack of investment in the field until new legislation offers a more permanent fix in the market, Skinner said.

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/946033

Ex-NSA Pottinger faults China for covid coverup

 Former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, who served under former President Donald Trump, claimed China attempted to cover up the coronavirus in the early days of the crisis, cutting out its Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and instead relying on its military to contain the deadly virus.

In an interview with "Face the Nation" that aired Sunday, Pottinger said the head of the Chinese CDC was unaware the coronavirus was spreading throughout the nation until late December 2019.

"It looks like the Chinese CDC to some extent was cut out because the Chinese Communist Party turned to its military to try to cover this thing up, to try to contain it until it was too late," Pottinger said. "And the consequences we're all feeling now."

• Transcript: Matthew Pottinger on "Face the Nation"

The first cases of the coronavirus were discovered in Wuhan, China, though the virus' exact origins remain unclear. Still, Mr. Trump and other top officials in his administration criticized Beijing for its handling of the pandemic, which has led to more than 2.4 million deaths worldwide. In the United States, the death toll from COVID-19 is approaching 500,000.

Reflecting on the early days of the pandemic, Pottinger said there "undoubtedly" were Chinese officials who wanted to share information about the coronavirus but couldn't do so.

"I think that no doubt, there were people who wanted to share much more aggressively but were being muzzled by the Chinese Communist Party," he said.

There were many officials across all levels of government, he said, "who were all being told shut your mouths. Don't send notes on your WeChat account about it. Don't send social media. Don't tell anyone. You've got to keep this thing secret."

The World Health Organization (WHO) has launched an investigation to determine the origins of the coronavirus. But national security adviser Jake Sullivan said last week that the White House has "questions about the process used to reach" the probe's early findings and stressed it's "imperative" for the report to be independent, "with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government." Sullivan called for the Chinese government to make available its data from the first days of the coronavirus outbreak.

Pottinger praised Sullivan for the statement and said the World Health Organization "has a lot to answer for."

"The World Health Organization made all sorts of untruthful or misinformed claims about this virus — that it doesn't spread human to human, that it's not asymptomatic. They praised the Chinese government for shutting down domestic travel in China while simultaneously criticizing the United States for shutting down international travel, which is a morally and logically indefensible position," Pottinger said.

He claimed the panel of investigators sent to China by the WHO is "deeply conflicted" and composed of people who were hand-picked by the Chinese government.

"You have a situation where it's like you're turning to the rabbits to investigate what happened to the lettuce that they were guarding," he said. "And so it's not a credible exercise that we've seen undertaken to get to the roots of where this thing originated."

Pottinger said while many questions have been raised as to the origins of the coronavirus, it's unlikely researchers with the WHO will provide answers. U.S. intelligence, meanwhile, has said COVID-19 was not man-made or genetically modified. 

"The Chinese government's making it very difficult to pin down and pursue hard evidence," he said. "But if you weigh the circumstantial evidence, the ledger on the side of an explanation that says that this resulted from some kind of human error, it far outweighs the side of the scale that says this was some natural outbreak."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/matt-pottinger-trump-deputy-national-security-adviser-face-the-nation/

Call for universal coronavirus vaccine

 The prestigious journal Science on Thursday published an editorial calling for a global effort to develop a universal coronavirus vaccine that would remain effective against other members of the same virus family that might cross over to humans.

Wayne Koff, head of the Human Vaccines Project, and Seth Berkley, who leads the global vaccine alliance Gavi, said that although the COVID-19 pandemic was far from over, humanity now possessed the tools to end it and was undertaking the most rapid immunization campaign in history.

But, they warned: "More virulent and deadly coronaviruses are waiting in the wings. Thus, the world needs a universal coronavirus vaccine."

SARS-CoV-2 belongs to a diverse group of viruses, of which there are thousands, characterized by their crown-like appearance, which comes from the spike proteins that dot their surfaces.

They are capable of infecting a wide range of animals, from bats and pangolins to pigs and mink.

Four coronaviruses are known to cause common colds in humans, and historically they have been deemed a low priority for research.

That changed with the 2002 SARS-CoV-1 outbreak that eventually killed some 8,000 people with a fatality rate of 10 percent.

Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in 2012 was 34 percent fatal.

Koff and Berkley wrote there was a risk that SARS-CoV-2 may mutate in ways that will render current vaccines less effective—as has already been seen with the South African variant—or even become ineffective.

Moreover, the potential is growing for other coronaviruses to jump the species barrier.

"Modern agricultural practices, viral evolution, and relentless human encroachment on the natural environment mean there is an increasing risk of people encountering previously isolated animal populations that harbor new strains with pandemic potential," they said.

"With human migration, population growth, urbanization, rapid global travel, and climate change hastening the spread, it has never been easier for outbreaks to turn into epidemics and escalate into pandemics."

On the other hand, they argued, advances in biomedical research, computing and engineering sciences had ushered in a new era in vaccine discovery.

High performance supercomputers can help identify new "antigens"—key viral proteins that induce immune responses, which vaccines use to train our bodies.

Databases of genetic sequences of animal coronaviruses can be used to model how they will evolve. And research into how immune systems decline with age can help improve vaccine design.

"This must be a worldwide effort. A roadmap is needed to lay out the core scientific issues as well as a framework for funding and sharing of information, data, and resources," said the scientists.

It won't be easy, they said, but "if we choose to wait for the next coronavirus to emerge, it may be too late, as it was with COVID-19."

More information: A universal coronavirus vaccine, Science,  19 Feb 2021: Vol. 371, Issue 6531, pp. 759, DOI: 10.1126/science.abh0447 , science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/759

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-02-scientists-universal-coronavirus-vaccine.html

Link between spinal antibodies and neurological COVID symptoms

 In March of 2020, Shelli Farhadian, MD, Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine (infectious diseases) and neurology, began to see parallels in her pre-pandemic research on neurologic effects in patients with HIV infection and the possibility of neurologic effects on patients with SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19.

"There was some literature out there that suggested that coronaviruses could have an effect on the brain. So, knowing that that was a potential possibility, even before we had our first case at Yale New Haven Hospital, I worked with other people to set up a protocol where we could consent patients to collect tissue specimens and information to try to see if this was also going happen with SARS-CoV-2," explained Farhadian.

The first COVID-19 positive patient was admitted to Yale New Haven Hospital (YNHH) on March 14, 2020. Farhadian and her infectious diseases colleagues encountered patients with neurological complaints with the absence of other traditional COVID-19 symptoms, who then later tested positive for the disease.

"Large cohort studies in China, France, and New York City, estimated that somewhere around 30% of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 have some sort of neurological component to their illness. So in that context and with our background in studying the neurological effects of systemic infections, we started to ask whether there was inflammation or some other consequence of this infection affecting the brain," said Farhadian.

Patients enrolled in the study underwent a lumbar puncture to drain cerebral spinal fluid from their back, the same fluid that surrounds the brain. Farhadian and her collaborators across Yale School of Medicine and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), knew that by looking at the spinal fluid, they would learn what is going on within the brain.

"We took the spinal fluid to try to see if we can get a window into what was going on in the brain.," said Farhadian.

The study, "Exploratory neuroimmune profiling identifies CNS-specific alterations in COVID-19 patients with neurological involvement," currently in preprint on bioRxiv found that unique immune responses were seen in the spinal fluid compared to what was going on in the rest of the body, including increased levels of antibody producing cells than would typically be expected in the spinal fluid. They also found a high level of autoantibodies in the spinal fluid, which suggests that these brain-targeting antibodies are a potential contributor for the neurological complications.

"We found that most of the patients we studied had autoantibodies, or antibodies that target brain tissue, circulating in the spinal fluid. In one case, we found that antibodies that are directed against the virus were also cross-reacting against the brain. We think this might prove to be a link between the virus and the high rates of neurological symptoms that people show during and after COVID-19." Now, Farhadian and Yale neurologists Dr. Serena Spudich and Dr. Lindsay McAlpine are seeing patients in the Yale Post-COVID neurology clinic who are two to six months out from their COVID diagnosis, and are still having neurological problems. "For example, I saw one a patient last week who is normally a vivacious and active woman, but after her COVID illness, is unable to work. She says she cannot think straight, gets lost easily, and can't do simple tasks like grocery shopping. Are those auto-antibodies contributing to that? That's something that we need to get to the bottom of," said Farhadian.

The researchers are actively enrolling patients with post-COVID neurological problems in their study. For more information on the COVID Mind Study at Yale, visit their website.

Farhadian commended the collaboration in this work, like UCSF neurologists Michael Wilson, MD, Samuel Pleasure, MD, Ph.D., and Christopher Bartley, MD, Ph.D., along with many colleagues at YSM, such as Eric Song, an MD/Ph.D. student in the Iwasaki Lab.

"My UCSF partners, Michael Wilson and Sam Pleasure, are leaders in their field. I knew of them, but hadn't worked with them before. We connected early on in the pandemic and were able to combine my background and interest in neuro-infectious disease with their expertise in auto-immunity, to bring this project together. Here at Yale, I was delighted to collaborate with Eric Song and Akiko Iwasaki in Immunobiology. Eric had been working to develop mouse models of SARS-CoV-2 infection, including mice that specifically had brain infection. It was good opportunity to study the similar phenomenon that we were seeing in our patients in that animal model."

More information: Eric Song et al. Exploratory neuroimmune profiling identifies CNS-specific alterations in COVID-19 patients with neurological involvement, biorxiv (2020). DOI: 10.1101/2020.09.11.293464

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-02-link-spinal-antibodies-neurological-covid.html

Fujifilm to restart Avigan COVID-19 trials in Japan

 Japan's Fujifilm Holdings will restart a clinical trial for its flu-fighting drug Avigan to treat Japanese COVID-19 patients as early as April, Nikkei has learned, giving new life to the medication that had been seen as a potential game changer in the early stages of the pandemic.

Avigan, which has already been approved in India and Indonesia for emergency use to treat COVID-19 patients, could not win the green light in Japan last year after a health ministry expert board postponed a decision in December. 

In Japan, two drugs -- remdesivir for pneumonia and dexamethasone for severely ill patients -- developed by U.S. company Gilead Sciences have been approved as COVID-19 drug.

If Avigan is approved, it will be the first drug targeting mildly ill patients. Avigan cannot be used on pregnant women, since it has been found to possibly affect the fetus.

Fujifilm had conducted clinical trials in Japan from March to September last year, but there was criticism that doctors knew which patients received the drug and which received a placebo. The health ministry said it was difficult to clearly determine Avigan's efficacy from the available data. If there is additional clinical trial data, it will be deliberated, the ministry suggested.

For the new round of trials, Fujifilm is consulting with the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare on the scope and methods. It is expected to be conducted on patients with mild symptoms who are 65 and older as well as mildly ill patients 50 and older who have existing health conditions such as kidney disease and diabetes.

The trial will divide patients who receive Avigan and those who receive placebo to confirm efficacy.

Fujifilm plans to seek approval again in October when the new trial is expected to end. A government process will most likely follow that.

Avigan has already been used in nearly 1,000 medical institutions to treat the coronavirus in a framework called observational study.

If approved, the drug would be used in a wide range of medical institutions. If the supply of therapeutic drugs increases, along with the vaccine rollout in Japan this month, more advanced medical countermeasures will be available to fight the virus, which has killed more than 2.4 million people and infected more than 110 million worldwide.

This time, the trial will be carried out in such a way that both doctors and patients will not know who is administered the drug or a placebo. The number of clinical trial participants will be about 270.

Generics of Avigan have been approved in some countries including India, China and Russia, but most European countries, and the U.S., have not given approval. Fujifilm hopes that it could promote the drug overseas once it is approved in Japan.

However the clinical trial in Japan could face hurdles. Last year's trial was scheduled to end in June, but a decrease in patients and a heavy workload on hospital staff caused a shortage of test patients, forcing the trials to drag on until September. The same could happen again this year, depending on how the nation's infections change. Data analysis and approval procedures after the clinical trials will also take time.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Fujifilm-to-restart-Avigan-COVID-19-trials-in-Japan

Another quiet week for the IPO market amid annual February slowdown

 The IPO market’s annual February lull is in full swing, with no IPOs currently scheduled for the week ahead.

While the calendar is quiet at the moment, a handful of IPOs could launch in the coming week, including health insurer Oscar Health (OSCR), which is on file for an estimated $600 million IPO, as well as senior care provider InnovAge Holding (INNV) which filed to raise $100 million. Additionally, with SPAC activity still reaching new highs, a number of blank check IPOs will likely launch and price.

Street research is expected for eight companies, and lock-up periods will be expiring for two companies. For access to Street research and lock-up expiration dates, sign up for a free trial of IPO Pro.

IPO Market Snapshot
The Renaissance IPO Indices are market cap weighted baskets of newly public companies. As of 2/18/21, the Renaissance IPO Index was up 12.8% year-to-date, while the S&P 500 was up 4.2%. Renaissance Capital's IPO ETF (NYSE: IPO) tracks the index, and top ETF holdings include Uber (UBER) and Zoom Video (ZM). The Renaissance International IPO Index was up 8.5% year-to-date, while the ACWX was up 6.3%. Renaissance Capital’s International IPO ETF (NYSE: IPOS) tracks the index, and top ETF holdings include SoftBank and TeamViewer.

Relevant Profiles: OSCR, INNV

https://www.renaissancecapital.com/IPO-Center/News/78046/US-IPO-Week-Ahead-Another-quiet-week-for-the-IPO-market-amid-annual-Februar