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Moderna starts human trials of an mRNA-based flu shot
Moderna gave its mRNA-based seasonal flu vaccine to the first set of volunteers in a clinical trial, the pharmaceutical company announced today. The start of the trial marks the next stage of the company’s work on this type of vaccine technology after the overwhelming success of its COVID-19 vaccine, which was built using the same strategy. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, mRNA vaccines were still largely experimental, even as they were heralded as the future of vaccine development. People who get an mRNA vaccine are injected with tiny snippets of genetic material from the target virus. Their cells use that genetic information to build bits of the virus, which the body’s immune system learns to fight against. The high efficacy of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer / BioNTec...
Wuhan’s coronavirus survivors share lessons one year on
In late 2019, Wuhan businesswoman Duan Ling and her surgeon husband Fang Yushun began to hear snippets in hospital chat groups about a disease emerging in the city’s respiratory wards. Duan didn’t pay much attention at first. Fang had that year returned from a stint studying in the United States, and the pair, both 36-years-old, were planning a family, starting a costly round of fertility treatments. “But as more and more news came, we began to realise this was something different from previous infectious diseases,” said Duan. In just over a month, Fang would become one of the first people in the world to contract what came to be known as COVID-19, which has since infected over 74 million worldwide and killed more than 1.5 million. During the early days of the outbreak, the city’s hospital...
