University of Oxford researchers working in an unprecedented vaccine development effort to prevent COVID-19 have started screening healthy volunteers (aged 18-55) for their upcoming ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine trial in the Thames Valley Region. The vaccine based on an adenovirus vaccine vector and the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is already in production but won’t be ready for some weeks still.

The National Institutes of Health and the Foundation for the NIH (FNIH) are bringing together more than a dozen leading biopharmaceutical companies, the Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency to develop an international strategy for a coordinated research response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

An international team including McMaster University researchers has come together to issue guidelines for health-care workers treating intensive care unit (ICU) patients with COVID-19. The Surviving Sepsis Campaign COVID-19 panel has released 54 recommendations on such topics as infection control, laboratory diagnosis and specimens, the dynamics of blood flow support, ventilation support, and COVID-19 therapy.

Houston Methodist received FDA approval Saturday to become the first academic medical center in the nation to transfuse donated plasma from a recovered COVID-19 patient into a critically ill patient. This treatment was fast-tracked to the bedside over the weekend as the death toll in the COVID-19 pandemic soared to more than 2,000 people across the United States, with more than 100,000 Americans sick from the virus.

According to the multiple news articles the drug favipiravir (sold under the brand name Avigan), developed by Fujifilm Toyama Chemical, had produced encouraging outcomes in clinical trials in Wuhan and Shenzhen involving 340 patients.

The Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, met President Xi Jinping of the People's Republic of China in Beijing. They shared the latest information on the novel coronavirus 2019 (2019-nCoV) outbreak and reiterated their commitment to bring it under control.

Anticancer vaccines have gained a new lease of life with techniques to personalise them to individual patients. Cutting edge developments in this re-energised field were revealed at the ESMO Immuno-Oncology Congress in Geneva, Switzerland. The original anticancer vaccines, launched in the late 1990s, were based on shared tumour antigens and failed to induce a potent immune response.