China reported fewer COVID cases on Friday as several cities held back moves, while a senior official warned hospitals not to turn away patients after a woman miscarried during A lockdown in the city of Xian sparked outrage.
China reported 116 locally transmitted infections with confirmed clinical symptoms as of Thursday, mainly in Xian and Henan province, up from 132 a day earlier, according to official data released on Friday.
Xian, a city of 13 million people in northwestern China, has entered its 16th day of containment, although officials have said the outbreak has been brought under control there. Xian is in Shaanxi province which borders Henan.
“The risk of a large-scale rebound in (Xian’s) epidemic has been largely contained,” Xinhua’s official news service said quoting Li Qun, a disease control and prevention official, in an article published Thursday evening.
During Xian’s lockdown, residents complained about restricted access to food and medical care, and the story of a pregnant woman who lost her unborn baby after waiting outside a local hospital for two hours angered on Chinese social media and led to the punishment of city officials.
Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan said she was “painted and deeply ashamed” of the difficulties people have in obtaining hospital services in Xian, the Xinhua News Agency said.
“Medical institutions (…) should not just turn away patients under any excuse during COVID screening,” Sun said.
The city government said on Friday that people without proof of a negative test result within 48 hours should not be barred from leaving their residential complexes to go to hospital, overturning a previous requirement.
Outbreaks in China remain minimal compared to many overseas, and the highly transmissible variant of Omicron has yet to be announced among local infections in Henan or Xian, but local governments have maintained a large vigilance.
A Chinese national and former Monsanto employee pleaded guilty to conspiring to steal trade secrets from the company to help the Chinese government, the U.S. Justice Department said Thursday.
Xiang Haitao, 44, was employed by the St. Louis company and subsidiary The Climate Corp. from 2008 to 2017, where he worked as an imaging scientist, the Justice Department said. Monsanto is now part of German pharmaceutical and chemical company Bayer AG.
Mr. Xiang pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit economic espionage and is scheduled to be sentenced April 7.
He faces a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison and a potential fine of $5 million, the department said.
French drugmaker Sanofi SA will partner with British AI firm Exscientia Plc to develop up to 15 drug candidates across oncology and immunology, in a deal worth up to $5.2 billion in milestone payments, the two companies said on Friday.
Exscientia will get an upfront cash payment of $100 million, leading discovery and design of small molecule drugs up to nomination of the candidate most likely to be viable. After that, Sanofi will take charge of clinical development.
Sanofi is among the many pharmaceutical giants venturing into artificial intelligence to improve accuracy and reduce time spent on research, with investment firms like SoftBank also betting big on the space.
Exscientia, which went public on the Nasdaq in October, uses artificial intelligence to discover drug molecules, especially focused on treating cancer and immune disorders, through partnerships with pharma firms such as Roche and Bristol Myers Squibb.
Sanofi and Exscientia have been working together since 2016, and if the French company commercializes a drug from the partnership, Exscientia will also be eligible for royalty payments of up to 21% of net sales.
"Typically, we have to synthesize 5,000 molecules to find that one right molecule which will be then become the clinical candidate. By applying AI, you can potentially do this by just looking at 500... So that can shorten timelines," said Frank Nestle, global head of research and chief scientific officer at Sanofi.
In November, the company invested $180 million for a 10% to 15% stake in French startup Owkin, whose predictive algorithms aim to improve the research and development of new cures against cancer.
He’s right — and Catholic schools have demonstrated that most of the two years of lost learning and socializing, along with the attendant burdens families faced, were unnecessary.
While public schools got bogged down in pandemic politics, union-driven closures and a year and a half of mostly ineffective remote learning, Catholic schools in major cities have been continually open for in-person instruction since September 2020.
They followed the science: Faculty and students adapted to masking, social distancing, teaching in small cohorts and contact tracing. They demonstrated that safe in-person learning was possible despite the pandemic.
In the 2020-2021 school year, only one case of COVID-19 in New York’s Catholic schools was traced to in-school transmission. Similarly in Boston, Catholic schools reopened almost a year ahead of public schools without any COVID-19 outbreaks.
With New York schools adopting safety measures similar to the proven Catholic-school measures, Adams can say that “the safest place for children is inside school.”
When public schools shut down in early 2020 and fumbled with remote learning, Catholic schools scrambled to get students tablets and Wi-Fi hotspots. They kept regular schedules, traditions and instruction remotely while using technology to digitize schoolwork.
Catholic schools in major cities have been able to stay open by following COVID-19 protocols for most of the pandemic.Matthew McDermott
With the pandemic persisting, Catholic schools used summer 2020 to prepare to reopen safely with most students in class and a remote option for families uncomfortable with in-person schooling. For these remote students, Catholic schools did synchronous instruction as the best alternative to in-person participation, with uniforms and cameras on for virtual class.
Upon reopening, Catholic schools added counseling for the serious student problems closings caused, particularly for those from troubled homes and neighborhoods for whom their schools’ structure, activities and values provide safe passage through the day. On the academic side, Catholic schools used cutting-edge technology to identify and remedy individual education deficits resulting from closings and remote learning.
Meanwhile, New York’s public schools stumbled into the 2020-2021 school year woefully unprepared and two weeks late. Then, many schools still closed due to the low 3% positivity-rate threshold for closures the teachers union won by threatening an illegal strike.
Roughly 70% of the city’s students spent the school year entirely remote. It was a lost year for most, followed by weak catch-up programs.
It wasn’t for lack of funding: New York City spends the most of any large school district in the country, $28,000 per pupil — almost three times the $10,000 per student cost of the city’s Catholic schools, which have higher graduation and college matriculation rates generally and for similarly disadvantaged students.
Concerned parents voted with their feet. Gotham schools have lost 50,000 students since fall 2019, a 4.5% drop or quadruple the rate of decline from the two prior non-pandemic school years. Parochial-school enrollments, by contrast, were up for the first time in 27 years, with 2,500 students transferring from public schools despite the burden of tuition. In Brooklyn and Queens, after years of steady decline, 60% of parochial schools have expanded enrollments, with the share of non-Catholic students at an all-time high of 20%.
Boston’s parochial schools added more than 5,000 new students the last two school years, with 80% transferring from public schools. At about 32,500 students, Boston’s parochial-school system is a sizable alternative to Boston’s 46,000-student public-school system.
Mayor Eric Adams has remained committed to keeping schools open during the COVID-19 surge.Matthew McDermott
Without teachers unions and stifling bureaucracies, Catholic schools outperform public schools in good times — but institutions are truly tested in bad times, and under the stress of a once-in-a-century pandemic, Catholic schools stayed true to their charges, adapted and proved what worked.
For public schools, it’s a question of having the political will to stand up to teachers unions: Under public pressure for exploiting the pandemic to shutter schools to the detriment of our children’s education and well-being, unions have publicly changed their tune — but they still threaten closures.
After eight years of obeisance to the teachers union, it’s refreshing to have a mayor who puts students first.
Ed Cox was a founder and the co-chairman of SUNY’s Charter School Committee and has been involved with Catholic schools since 1985 as a founding director of Student Sponsor Partners, which sponsors needy students in Catholic high schools.
The Chief Executive Officer of Moderna said that he anticipates people will need a second COVID-19 booster shot this fall as the vaccine’s efficacy wanes over the next few months.
Stephane Bancel, speaking at a Goldman Sachs-organized healthcare conference on Thursday, said Moderna is working on a booster shot focused on the omicron variant of COVID-19, however it’s unlikely that it will be available in the next two months.
“I still believe we’re going to need boosters in the fall of ’22 and forward,” Bancel said.
A new study from Israel showed that a fourth dose of the vaccine boosts antibodies five-fold, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced on Tuesday. The country has already begun dosing immunocompromised individuals.
Moderna announced during its third quarter earnings results that commercial booster market sales could reach $2 billion in the United States in 2022.
The school closures in spring 2020 had a negative effect on the health and well-being of many young people. But homeschooling also had a positive flipside: Thanks to sleeping longer in the morning, many teenagers reported improved health and health-related quality of life. The study authors from the University of Zurich therefore believe school days should begin later in the morning.
The first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic led to the closure of all schools nationwide from 13 March to 6 June 2020. According to multiple studies, symptoms of depression and anxiety among young people increased during this time, while satisfaction and quality of life decreased. The schoolchildren were also less physically active and spent more time sitting in front of screens.
Now, a study by the University of Zurich (UZH) has shown that the homeschooling phase also had a positive effect on the health and well-being of many teenagers. "The students got about 75 minutes more sleep per day during the lockdown. At the same time, their health-related quality of life improved significantly and their consumption of alcohol and caffeine went down," says the study's co-leader Oskar Jenni, UZH professor of developmental pediatrics. Because they no longer had to travel to school, they were able to get up later.
More sleep on school days improves young people's health-related quality of life
The researchers conducted an online survey with 3,664 high school students in the Canton of Zurich during the lockdown, asking about their sleep patterns and quality of life. They then compared the answers with a survey from 2017 with 5,308 young participants. The results showed that during the three months in which the schools were closed, the adolescents got up around 90 minutes later on school days, but went to bed only 15 minutes later on average -- meaning their total amount of sleep increased by about 75 minutes a day. On weekends, there was little difference in the sleep times of the two groups.
The students in the lockdown group rated their health-related quality of life higher, and the amount of alcohol and caffeine they reported consuming was less than the pre-pandemic group. "Although the lockdown clearly led to worse health and well-being for many young people, our findings reveal an upside of the school closures which has received little attention until now," says Jenni.
Unique opportunity to investigate the effect of later school starting times
Sleep deficits in adolescents can lead to general tiredness, anxiety and physical ailments. These in turn have a detrimental effect on cognitive functions such as concentration, memory and attention, making it significantly harder to function in everyday life. The early start of the school day in Switzerland conflicts with the natural, biologically determined sleeping habits of teenagers. Because they have to get up early for school, many young people therefore suffer from chronic lack of sleep. The topic has recently made its way onto the political agenda in several cantons across the country.
"Our findings clearly indicate the benefit of starting school later in the morning so that youngsters can get more sleep," says Jenni. He speculates that the positive effects on health and health-related quality of life would have been even greater had there not also been the negative effects of the pandemic on mental health.
Joëlle N. Albrecht, Helene Werner, Noa Rieger, Natacha Widmer, Daniel Janisch, Reto Huber, Oskar G. Jenni. Association of Adolescent Sleep Duration During COVID Pandemic High School Closure – Effects of homeschooling on adolescents’ sleep and health. JAMA Network Open, 2022 DOI: 10.100/jamanetworkopen.2021.42100
Not too long ago the idea of taking, for instance a skin cell and transforming it into a muscle cell was unthinkable. About 10 years ago, however, revolutionary research showed that it is indeed possible to reprogram differentiated adult cells into other types fully capable of conducting new functions.
Cell reprogramming is a main interest of the lab of Dr. Todd Rosengart, chair and professor of the Michael E. DeBakey Department of Surgery at Baylor College of Medicine, whose research focuses on finding innovative therapeutic approaches for heart failure.
"Heart failure remains the leading cause of death from heart disease," said Rosengart, DeBakey-Bard Chair in Surgery and professor of molecular and cellular biology at Baylor. "Nearly 5 million Americans can be expected to develop advanced congestive heart failure, and heart transplant or mechanical circulatory support implantation currently are the only options for patients with end-stage heart disease. However, these options are limited. We need to improve how to treat this devastating condition."
After a heart attack, the parts of the heart muscle that die do not regenerate into new heart tissue; instead, they are replaced by a scar that does not help the heart to beat. "The idea behind cell reprograming is to coach the heart to heal itself by inducing the scar tissue, which is made mostly of fibroblasts, to change into functional heart muscle," said Rosengart, professor of heart and vascular disease at the Texas Heart Institute.
Researchers have succeeded at reprograming fibroblasts from small animals to become heart muscle, with dramatic improvements in heart function. The challenge has been to apply this technology to human cells -- human fibroblasts are more resistant to reprograming. In this study, Rosengart and his colleagues explored a novel strategy to enhance the reprogramming efficiency of human fibroblasts.
"While human fibroblasts resist being reprogramed, endothelial cells, those that line the blood vessels, are known to be more flexible -- they have the capacity to naturally transdifferentiate or change into other cells," said co-first author Dr. Megumi Mathison, associate professor of surgery at Baylor. "This gave us the idea of using this endothelial cell plasticity to improve the reprograming efficiency."
The researchers' idea was to first induce fibroblasts to transition into an endothelial cell-like state and then treat these cells with their reprograming cocktail that directs them to change into cardiomyocytes. The expectation was that transitioning into endothelial cell-like cells, a cell type more open to reprogramming than fibroblasts, would facilitate the desired change into heart muscle.
"We were delighted to see that our approach significantly enhanced reprogramming efficiency both in human and rat fibroblasts," Mathison said. "Previously, inducing cardiomyocytes from fibroblasts directly was only 3% efficient. With our new approach, the efficiency increased 5 times. It took about two to three weeks for the fibroblasts to transition into cardiomyocytes in the lab. It was exciting to see the reprogrammed cells contracting in synchrony with surrounding cardiomyocytes."
The researchers' experimental results with the rat model show that their new strategy can revert large scar tissue into working muscle, supporting continuing their investigations to bring this procedure to the clinic.
"Although more research is needed, we anticipate that this novel approach can become part of the next generation of biological therapies," Rosengart said. "In a future scenario, patients with congestive heart failure would come to the catheterization laboratory, commonly referred to as the cath lab, in a hospital. The cath lab has diagnostic imaging equipment that helps surgeons visualize the chambers of the heart and surrounding blood vessels as they conduct procedures. Assisted by this equipment, the surgeon would inject the factors that promote the transition from fibroblasts to endothelial cells and then to cardiomyocytes directly into the heart. Follow ups would monitor the progress of the procedure."
This work strongly ties into the prominent role Baylor College of Medicine has played in the history of the artificial heart and heart transplants pioneered by Dr. Michael E. DeBakey and Dr. Denton A. Cooley in the 1950s and 60s.
"Years ago, Dr. Cooley said to me, regarding the next procedures needed to help people with heart failure, 'Todd, you got to do something that is dramatic.' For me, cell reprograming is a 21st century answer to this request," Rosengart said.
This study was funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (R01HL121294?01A1, R01HL 152280, 5T32HL139430), the Baylor College of Medicine Cytometry and Cell Sorting Core (National Institutes of Health grants P30AI036211, P30CA125123, S10RR024574; the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases grant AI036211), and the Baylor College of Medicine Integral Microscopy Core (NIH DK56338, CPRIT RP150578, and RP170719).
Story Source:
Materials provided by Baylor College of Medicine. Original written by Ana MarÃa RodrÃguez, Ph.D.. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
Megumi Mathison, Deepthi Sanagasetti, Vivek P. Singh, Aarthi Pugazenthi, Jaya Pratap Pinnamaneni, Christopher T. Ryan, Jianchang Yang, Todd K. Rosengart. Fibroblast transition to an endothelial “trans” state improves cell reprogramming efficiency. Scientific Reports, 2021; 11 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-02056-x
