A trial comparing the self-replicating mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine, developed by U.S. biotech Arcturus Therapeutics in collaboration with CSL, with BioNTech/Pfizer’s Comirnaty vaccine shows it is able to elicit better immune responses 12 months after vaccination than the approved mRNA vaccine. The self-amplifying technology developed by Arcturus allows quick and long-lasting…

Patients show substantial cognitive decline 12–18 months after hospitalization for COVID-19, a new year-long study of over 350 patients finds. The rate of decline, the researchers report, is comparable to 20 years of aging. Further, MRI scans and blood tests showed these patients had brain injury markers and reduced brain…

People with obesity have a higher risk of contracting SARS-CoV-2, according to a new study led by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. They used electronic medical record data on over 70,000 patients from their own hospital system.  Obesity is known to predict worse outcomes and…

A new study by researchers from the Gladstone Institutes and collaborators shows that the blood coagulation protein fibrin is the culprit that causes the unusual clotting and inflammation that are the primary symptoms of COVID-19. The discovery upends the prevailing view that blood clotting is a consequence of the inflammation…

A new nasal COVID-19 vaccine is ready for clinical trials, said K. Anand Kumar, managing director of Indian Immunologicals and one of the co-authors of a new report on the vaccine. Called CDO-7N-1, it “induces robust mucosal and systemic neutralizing antibody and T-cell subset responses, in mice, hamsters, and macaques…

A study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has found that while there are similar patterns of how long COVID affects virtually every organ system in both younger children and adolescents, younger children were more likely to experience headache, while those older were most likely to suffer from…

A new study reveals higher incidence of mental illness for up to a year following severe COVID-19 in unvaccinated people. Vaccination appeared to strongly mitigate mental illness. For example, the incidence of depression among the unvaccinated after hospitalization for COVID-19 was up to 16.3 times higher. This elevation in mental…

In a cohort study of over 10,000 participants with and without prior SARS-CoV-2 infection, a handful of routine clinical laboratory tests were unable to provide a reliable biomarker of SARS-CoV-2 infection’s post-acute sequelae (PASC), also known as “long COVID.” The researchers also showed that all 25 tests failed to provide…

By reanalyzing the AncestryDNA COVID-19 study, researchers have found that many genetic risk factors for COVID-19 and influenza do not overlap. The study found that risk factors for each of these respiratory illnesses do share a common feature—they are linked to cell surface proteins that may be required for viral…

New types of lung cells that can be infected by SARS-CoV-2 have been identified by scientists at the Sanford Burnham Prebys, the University of California San Diego, and their international collaborators. These cells include some without known viral receptors. Their work could not only lead to new discoveries about COVID-19…

A 2022 study by Ohio State University (OSU) researchers suggesting that blocking a single molecule could protect against severe illness from infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus has now led to a $15 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) aimed at finding ways to combat the effects of…

Research led by Helmholtz Munich in Germany showed COVID-19 infection in high-risk young people almost doubled the rate of progression to type 1 diabetes during the pandemic compared with those who were not infected with the virus. The pandemic showed that COVID-19 increased the risk of diabetes. A systemic review…

States with high rates of COVID-19 vaccination saw more pediatric asthma patients get a break from their symptoms, according to new research in JAMA Network Open from Nemours Children’s Health and Endeavor Health. With each increase of 10 percentage points in COVID-19 vaccination coverage, parent-reported child asthma symptoms decreased by…

People resistant to COVID-19 have “never-seen-before” immune responses and possibly high levels of HLA-DQA2. These findings come from researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, University College London (UCL), Imperial College London, the Netherlands Cancer Institute, and their collaborators who used data from a unique “challenge study.” Severe acute respiratory syndrome…

A new study of more than 4,700 people from the Collaborative Cohort of Cohorts for COVID-19 Research (C4R) reveals that more than one in five people who contracted COVID from 2020 to 2023 did not recover within 90 days after infection. The study also revealed that those people who had…