Whether shuttling between their lab’s two locations, in Boston’s Longwood Medical Area and Cambridgeport, or visiting the offices of Tome, their gene-editing startup, Gootenberg and Abudayyeh have become as well known in science circles for their friendship as their research and business ventures.
“Science is difficult, and it’s great to have someone to do it with,” said Gootenberg. “You got to work with people you enjoy hanging out with.” Read Full Article
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“The reason why it hasn’t been eliminated is because there’s an animal reservoir. The bacteria can infect animals, and because we can’t treat all animals in the wild, it persists in nature and thus occasionally causes a limited number of human cases,” said Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who is not involved in the Oregon case.
Barouch thinks it is “very unlikely” that the plague will spread beyond the person in Oregon. “As long as the person and their immediate contacts are treated — which did occur in this case — the chance it will spread any further is very, very low. So I think that people should not be worried, but if people want to reduce their risks, then they should avoid contact with rodents and fleas and sick animals,” he said. “It turns out cats can be infected quite easily because cats have a difficult time controlling the bacteria themselves,” Barouch said. “Dogs can be infected too, but cats can be infected even more easily. Squirrels, chipmunks, rodents are typically the animals that are infected in the wild.” Read Full Article.
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Dr. Dan Barouch, who runs the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, which helped develop a COVID vaccine for Johnson & Johnson, said that coronavirus vaccines were among the most lucrative pharmaceutical products ever. But, he said, “that will not likely be replicated unless we have another global pandemic, which, of course, we hope we won’t.” Read Full Article
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“We are not going to be able to completely stop transmission, and we’re not going to be able to get rid of this virus in the human population,” said Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “Then, the decision of how to bring something into policy is really a summation of the medical risks as well as the risks to society as a whole.” Read Full Article
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It also appears that HV.1 could also be slightly better at escaping prior immunity to COVID-19, but not enough to cause alarm, Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, told NBC News. Read Full Article…
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“Whenever a new variant dominates, then by definition it has an advantage,” said Dr. Dan Barouch, the head of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Read Full Article…
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Vaccination rates have bottomed out just as some experts predict a COVID surge over the holidays. The JN.1 variant, which has triggered steep increases in waste water levels across Europe and is now becoming dominant in the United States, has developed mutations that make it more transmissible or better able to evade defenses, said Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Since more people will be infected, COVID-19 related deaths will inevitably rise. Yet the new boosters are a good match for the variant, making it especially important that those most at risk get the shot. Read Full Article…
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Dozens of mucosal COVID-19 vaccines are in development (see ‘High hopes’) and several have been approved in countries including China and India. But according to an 8 December report by the London-based data and analytics firm Airfinity, the efficacy of existing mucosal COVID-19 vaccines has been disappointing and the available data suggest that “they do not offer a meaningful increase in protection against infection”.
However, the latest studies in monkeys and other laboratory animals offer hints on how these vaccines might be improved. A team led by Dan Barouch, a vaccine scientist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, tried two approaches in monkeys that had previously received COVID-19 jabs: squirting a liquid vaccine into the animals’ noses, or applying it directly to their tracheae1.
Only the trachea-delivered vaccine substantially boosted mucosal immunity and protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection. “We think that the problem with intranasal delivery is that most of the vaccine is either swallowed or sneezed out,” Barouch says. The results were published in Nature on 14 December. Read Full Article…
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At this point, it’s clear from all the infections that the vaccine isn’t living up to early hopes. “The initial impression that these vaccines were 95% effective against symptomatic infection and 100% effective against severe disease are no longer accurate,” said Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a professor at Harvard Medical School. That’s because our antibodies wane over time and the virus mutated much faster and more radically than scientists had expected.
Barouch thinks a better booster is possible. In a study published last week in Nature, he and colleagues showed that in monkeys, an inhaled vaccine had strong protection against infection, a nasal vaccine intermediate protection, and an injection very little or no protection. Read Full Article…
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“When we gave the vaccine directly to the lung, we saw a dramatic improvement in … immunity and protection in thelung itself and in the nose, leading to near complete protection against infection,” said Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the senior author on the paper. Current vaccines raise antibodies in the blood, he said, but have a minimal effect in raising antibody and T-cell responses in the nose and the lungs — “where it really matters if you want to block infection.”
The results, Barouch argues, provide a powerful “proof of concept” for the idea that future boosters should be delivered using a device similar to an asthma inhaler. Read Full Article…
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