BREAKING highlights: All EU governments complete approval of Russian oil price cap, says report

BREAKING highlights: All EU governments complete approval of Russian oil price cap, says report
  • Dec 03, 2022 10:51 PM IST

    Nothing wrong in people assuming Congress will make an OBC CM: Gujarat party chief Jagdish Thakor

    Nothing wrong in people assuming Congress will make an OBC CM in Gujarat says state party chief Jagdish Thakor, as reported by PTI.

  • Dec 03, 2022 10:21 PM IST

    Pakistan should go to India & India should come to Pakistan to play: Former Pak bowler Md Irfan

    Pakistan should go to India & India should come to Pakistan to play. This increases love b/w people from both countries. Cricket should be separate from politics. Don’t go with statements that Pakistan won’t come to India, let the Board decide it, former Pakistan bowler Md Irfan told ANI.

  • Dec 03, 2022 09:43 PM IST

    All EU governments complete approval of Russian oil price cap

    All EU governments complete approval of Russian oil price cap, reports Reuters.

  • Dec 03, 2022 09:23 PM IST

    Kerala HC holds special sitting to hear pleas on Sabarimala

    The Kerala High Court on Saturday held a special sitting to hear pleas on the appointment of the chief priests and transport facilities for pilgrims to the famous Sabarimala temple at Pathanamthitta district, ANI reports.

  • Dec 03, 2022 08:35 PM IST

    Campaigning ends in Mainpuri LS seats, 6 assembly constituencies

    Rampur and Khatauli in Uttar Pradesh, Padampur in Odisha, Sardarshahar in Rajasthan, Kurhani in Bihar and Bhanupratappur in Chhattisgarh are the assembly seats where campaigning ended and the 48-hour silence period started.

  • Dec 03, 2022 07:20 PM IST

    Brazil soccer legend Pele under palliative care amid cancer battle: Report

    Brazil soccer legend Pele under palliative care amid cancer battle, reports Reuters.

  • Dec 03, 2022 06:45 PM IST

    Navy to induct women in all branches from next year: Navy Chief

    “Come next year, we are looking at women officers being inducted across all branches and not just seven or eight branches that they are restricted to as of today. Next year onwards, all branches will be opened for women officers as well,” the Navy Chief said in a press conference.

  • Dec 03, 2022 06:12 PM IST

    4 killed, 3 injured as car falls into gorge in Uttarakhand’s Almora

    Four people including two women were killed when a car carrying members of a marriage party fell into a gorge in Uttarakhand’s Almora district on Saturday, PTI reports.

  • Dec 03, 2022 05:22 PM IST

    Iranian security body says 200 people lost lives in ongoing riots: Report

    Iranian security body says 200 people lost lives in recent riots, according to a report by Mizan news agency.

  • Dec 03, 2022 04:17 PM IST

    Delhi’s Court discharges Umar Khalid and Khalid Saifi in the Feb 2020 riot case

    Delhi’s Karkardooma Court discharges Umar Khalid and Khalid Saifi in a riot-related case in February 2020, reports ANI.

  • Dec 03, 2022 03:39 PM IST

    “Go to Bangladesh…,” Assam BJP MLA hits out at AIUDF’s Badruddin Ajmal on “Muslim formula”

    Assam Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Diganta Kalita on Saturday lashed out at Badruddin Ajmal for his remarks suggesting that Hindus should adopt the “Muslim formula” for marriage and stated that All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) chief Ajmal should go to Bangladesh, reports ANI.

  • Dec 03, 2022 02:57 PM IST

    Sidhu Moosewala’s murder accused Lawrence Bishnoi’s NIA remand extended by 4 days

    A Delhi court extends by four days the NIA remand of gangster Lawrence Bishnoi, in connection with the Sidhu Moosewala murder case, reports ANI.

    Bishnoi was produced before the court through video conference today at the end of his 10-day remand. NIA while seeking the remand of Lawrence Bishnoi stated that contract killing is happening in the neighbouring state of Rajasthan. Bishnoi’s involvement is also suspected in Raju Thet’s killing in Rajasthan.

  • Dec 03, 2022 02:11 PM IST

    AIUDF President & MP Badruddin Ajmal apologises for his statements on Friday

    AIUDF President & MP Badruddin Ajmal on Saturday said “If my words hurt anyone’s sentiments, I take back my words. I had no intention to hurt anyone’s sentiments. I only want that the govt should do justice to minorities & give them education & employment,” ANI reported.

  • Dec 03, 2022 12:58 PM IST

    BJP declares new unit for Punjab, Congress crossovers in the list

    The Bharatiya Janata Party has declared a new unit for Punjab, the party said Saturday.

  • Dec 03, 2022 12:51 PM IST

    US reveals world’s first sixth-generation aircraft B-21 bomber in California

    The United States has unveiled the B-21 Raider stealth bomber, the world’s first sixth-generation aircraft.

  • Dec 03, 2022 12:23 PM IST

    Bihar begins preparing for meetings of G20 ‘engagement groups’

    The Bihar government has begun preparations for the meetings of the G20 ‘engagement groups’, scheduled to be held in the state in March, reports PTI.

  • Dec 03, 2022 11:51 AM IST

    Leopard attack victims’ families to get 15 lakh compensation: Karnataka CM

    Karnataka Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai on Saturday announced a compensation of 15 lakh for families of those killed in the attacks by leopards in the state.

  • Dec 03, 2022 11:18 AM IST

    In West Bengal, two killed in blast near venue of TMC’s Abhishek Banerjee’s rally

    At least two people were killed and several others injured in a blast near the venue of senior TMC leader Abhishek Banerjee’s scheduled rally in Bengal on Saturday.

  • Dec 03, 2022 10:50 AM IST

    Hyderabad: University professor taken into custody after student alleges molestation

    Cyberabad Police have taken a professor of University of Hyderabad into custody after a student alleged that he molested her, reports ANI.

  • Dec 03, 2022 10:29 AM IST

    Raids at residence of exec engineer caught taking 2 lakh bribe continue today

    Exec engineer in Building Construction Dept, Sanjeet Kumar caught by Vigilance Team while he was accepting 2 lakh bribe. Approx 1 cr cash recovered from his residence as raid also to continue today, reports ANI.

  • Dec 03, 2022 10:11 AM IST

    Beijing, Shenzhen sigh with relief as China eases Covid-19 curbs

    Beijing residents cheered the removal of COVID-19 testing booths while Shenzhen followed other cities in announcing it would no longer require commuters to present their test results to travel, Reuters reported.

  • Dec 03, 2022 09:51 AM IST

    Mohammed Shami ruled out of ODI series against Bangladesh due to injury

    Senior fast bowler Mohammed Shami has been ruled out of the ODI series against Bangladesh that is scheduled to start on Sunday, due to a hand injury, PTI reported citing BCCI sources.

  • Dec 03, 2022 08:57 AM IST

    Chhattisgarh Assembly clears two amendment bills on reservation

    Chhattisgarh has unanimously passed two bills related to reservation in government jobs and admission in educational institutions in proportion to population, taking the total quota in the state to 76 per cent.

  • Dec 03, 2022 08:28 AM IST

    Vande Bharat: WR to spend 264 crore to build fences along Mumbai-Ahmedabad route

    The Western Railway (WR) said it would install fences along the Mumbai-Ahmedabad route by May next year to stop animals from straying onto the tracks and getting run over by trains.

  • Dec 03, 2022 08:03 AM IST

    US names 4 militants in Afghanistan, Pakistan ‘terrorists’

    The United States has added four top Islamic militants operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan to its list of “global terrorists”.

  • Dec 03, 2022 07:42 AM IST

    IMF says it fully supports India’s G20 agenda

    The IMF “fully supports” the G20 agenda of India, which is planning to use the ongoing global crises as an opportunity to seek consensus on issues that require urgent attention, a senior official said.

  • Dec 03, 2022 07:09 AM IST

    Indian ambassador to US Taranjit S Sandhu hands over Padma Bhushan to Sundar Pichai

    Indian ambassador to US Taranjit S Sandhu handed over Padma Bhushan to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

  • Dec 03, 2022 06:50 AM IST

    Macron holds ‘clear and honest’ talk with Elon Musk in New Orleans

    French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday said he had a “clear and honest” discussion with Twitter owner Elon Musk during an unannounced face-to-face meeting in New Orleans.

  • Dec 03, 2022 06:10 AM IST

    FTX’s LedgerX is up for sale as restructuring process picks up

    LedgerX, one of the few solvent pieces of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crumbled FTX empire, is up for sale.

  • Dec 03, 2022 05:51 AM IST

    G7 group agrees $60 per barrel price cap for Russian oil

    The Group of Seven (G7) nations and Australia on Friday said they had agreed a $60 per barrel price cap on Russian oil, reported Reuters.

  • Antibody levels might help speed up approval

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    New research suggests that antibody levels generated by vaccines could be an accurate way of measuring effectiveness. Image credit: Michaela Handrek-Rehle/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
    • Health authorities only approve the use of COVID-19 vaccines that have gone through rigorous clinical trials.
    • Scientists assess whether a vaccine is effective by checking whether participants in a trial develop the infection after having the vaccine.
    • In the present study, researchers find that a person’s antibody response could serve a correlate of effectiveness, instead of whether people develop the infection.
    • Using this proposed measure could speed up the regulatory approval of future vaccines.

    In a new study, scientists have found that antibody levels can help indicate the effectiveness of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.

    The research, published in the journal Science, may be the first step toward speeding up the regulatory approval process for future vaccines.

    In theory, scientists could use antibody levels to identify vaccine effectiveness, rather than clinical trials to investigate how many vaccinated people develop severe COVID-19.

    The speed with which scientists have developed vaccines for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is unprecedented.

    Previously, vaccine development typically took 10–15 years. By contrast, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine received emergency regulatory approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on December 11, 2020, less than a year after scientists first identified the virus.

    However, researchers are still eager to reduce the time it takes to develop future vaccines.

    Scientists may do this by identifying biomarkers that can stand in for the results of clinical trials. If these biomarkers can accurately predict how effective the vaccine is, it may obviate the need to see how many people develop the infection in a clinical trial.

    Speaking to Medical News Today, Prof. Florian Kern, chair in immunology at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, in the United Kingdom, said, “If it were possible to define a laboratory endpoint — in this case an immunological marker — that can tell us if someone is protected or not, it would be easier to measure the protective effect of a vaccine quickly and compare this effect to that of other vaccines.” Prof. Kern was not involved in the new study.

    In the study, the researchers wanted to see whether antibodies produced in response to the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine could accurately predict whether the vaccine was effective.

    They did this by analyzing data from the phase 3 trials of the vaccine. The researchers were looking at the level of binding and neutralizing antibodies produced and at certain properties of these antibodies.

    The team focused on these biomarkers assessed at the point of the second vaccination and 4 weeks afterward.

    The researchers found a clear link between higher levels of antibodies and greater protection against symptomatic COVID-19 .

    Participants with antibody levels in the top 10{cfdf3f5372635aeb15fd3e2aecc7cb5d7150695e02bd72e0a44f1581164ad809} had a 10 times lower risk of symptomatic COVID-19 compared with participants who had undetectable or negative antibody values. This was the case no matter which antibody biomarker the researchers focused on.

    MNT spoke with Dr. Peter Gilbert, a professor in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in Seattle, and the corresponding author of the study.

    Summarizing the findings, Dr. Gilbert explained, “Four separate tests used to measure antibody levels in the blood showed that the higher a vaccine recipient’s antibody response, the less likely [they were] to experience symptomatic COVID-19.”

    “The same measurements also indicated that higher antibody responses correlated with higher estimated vaccine efficacy against symptomatic COVID-19.”

    “The findings are based on data from the phase 3 COVE trial, which enrolled more than 30,000 adult volunteers and established 94.1{cfdf3f5372635aeb15fd3e2aecc7cb5d7150695e02bd72e0a44f1581164ad809} estimated vaccine efficacy against COVID-19 for the mRNA-1273 vaccine,” Dr. Gilbert added.

    He also noted that the findings may help accelerate the approval process for future vaccines.

    “Correlates of protection are surrogate markers of efficacy that can be used to reliably predict whether a vaccine will be protective, which can accelerate regulatory authorization and approval of vaccine candidates.”

    “Rather than conducting large-scale clinical trials to establish vaccine efficacy, which can require tens of thousands of volunteers and can take months to years to complete, data collected from blood samples from smaller cohorts of vaccinated individuals can be evaluated using a particular test that would indicate whether a vaccine is likely to have clinical benefit in that population.”

    – Dr. Peter Gilbert, corresponding author of the new study

    The study authors caution that their investigation had a short follow-up period and included a relatively small number of COVID-19 cases. Also, the group did not consider the effects of booster vaccines or different variants of the virus, as these had not emerged when the trial was conducted. The trial had sampled a large and ethnically diverse number of participants for its immunogenicity measurements.

    “While it may seem like an obvious finding that that more antibodies equates to higher levels of protection against COVID-19, this detailed analysis advances evidence toward establishing a correlate of protection that could be used to accelerate regulatory processes for variant-specific formulations of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, as well as authorization of prototype mRNA COVID-19 vaccines in children,” said Dr. Gilbert.

    For live updates on the latest developments regarding the novel coronavirus and COVID-19, click here.