news 2020

Today, virologists at the KU Leuven Rega Institute published the results of their pre-clinical study into a Covid-19 vaccine candidate in  Nature . Their paper builds on a preprint that the team shared on bioRxiv earlier this year, and that  we reported on. The vaccine candidate is based on the yellow fever vaccine and thus also protects against yellow fever.

UAntwerp involved in large-scale international research to be published in The Lancet. School-aged children who are given anti-malaria drugs preventively are only half as likely to catch the disease. And that's not all: their risk of anaemia decreases by 15%, and their school performance improves. All this has been demonstrated by international research in which the University of Antwerp was also involved.

Virologists at the Rega Institute have shown that the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine does not limit SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus replication in hamsters. A high dose of the anti-flu drug favipiravir, by contrast, has an antiviral effect in the hamsters. The team published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) .

ExeVir Bio, a technology platform with potential to generate robust antiviral therapies. ExeVir Bio announces today a first closing of a EUR23 million Series A financing led by Fund+, with the participation of VIB, UCB Ventures, the Belgian Federal Government via SFPI-FPIM, V-Bio Ventures and several Belgian family offices.

Virologists at the Rega Institute at KU Leuven (Belgium) have developed a vaccine candidate that protects hamsters from infection with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Theirs is one of the first vaccine candidates that is proven to protect lab animals from infection. The team aims to start clinical trials next Winter.

Breast cancer patients who are overweight or obese might benefit less from treatment with docetaxel, a common chemotherapy drug, than lean patients. An international team of researchers based this conclusion on a retrospective analysis of data from a large clinical trial. Their study was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology .

They did not sit back during the lockdown! As scientists worldwide, the UNamur researchers were in the battle against Covid-19 since the beginning of the crisis. Their expertise bore around 20 research projects, often in collaboration with other Belgian or foreign universities. Thanks to their initiatives and work, society becomes aware of the importance of research and the numerous disciplines involved when fighting a pandemic.

The costs of bringing a new drug to market may be lower than has been previously claimed by the pharmaceutical industry, according to a study published today (Tuesday March 3, 2020) in the journal JAMA.

Chloroquine, an antimalarial medicine that has been on the international market since 1934, proves to be active against the novel SARS coronavirus type 2 (COVID-19).

The lab of professor Xavier Saelens (VIB-Ghent University) is quickly mobilizing to try to find a treatment for the viral infection caused by the corona virus. Since the coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak was reported by China in December 2019, the number of confirmed cases of the virus is increasing rapidly, with cases now reported in 28 countries.

In brief  (18 seconds of reading): Olivier Feron , a UCLouvain researcher, studies how cancer spreads through the body via metastasis His major discovery was that cancer cells multiply by using lipids as food. His latest discovery, published in the scientific , is that lipid storage promotes cancer invasiveness A new drug currently being tested to treat obesity may also help fight metastasis Olivier Feron, a researcher at the University of Louvain (UCLouvain) Institute of Experimental and Clinical Research, seeks to understand how metastases form from a tumour.

Researchers from KU Leuven and University Hospitals Leuven have managed to engineer living implants in the lab by mimicking how bone tissue is created in an embryo. The technology paves the way for bone-regenerating tissue implants created on an industrial scale using 3D bioprinting. The researchers expect the first living implants to be available to patients in four years.