Agent Orange trial, pipeline cyberattack, dogecoin back to earth

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Here’s what you need to know

BioNTech and Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical are forming a joint venture. The German and Chinese drugmakers will set up a facility in China to produce up to 1 billion Covid-19 vaccine doses a year. Meanwhile, the EU put new AstraZeneca vaccine orders on hold after signing a deal with Pfizer-BioNTech.

Pro-independence parties won a majority in Scotland. After her party’s success in last week’s local elections, first minister Nicola Sturgeon said another independence referendum is now a question of “when, not if.”

France rules on a landmark Agent Orange case. A woman who says she is a victim of the US military’s use of the toxic herbicide during the Vietnam War brought the suit against 14 companies, including the US multinational Dow, in 2014.

A bomb attack in Afghanistan killed dozens. Almost all the victims from the explosions outside a Kabul school on Saturday were schoolgirls going home after class, according to an eyewitness.

Israel’s top court delayed hearing a Palestinian appeal on settlements. Hundreds of Palestinians have been injured in clashes with Israeli security forces as they protested planned evictions to make way for Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem.

A key US fuel pipeline was shut down after a cyberattack. Federal officials issued emergency legislation to allow gasoline to be transported by road as work continues to restore service to the East Coast system.

China’s “out-of-control” rocket landed. After parts of it plunged into the Indian Ocean over the weekend, NASA lambasted Beijing for failing to meet “responsible standards” on space debris.

Dogecoin prices plummeted during Elon Musk’s SNL hosting gig. Tesla’s CEO called the cryptocurrency a “hustle” during his Saturday Night Live appearance, triggering a selloff.

What to watch for

Roblox, the popular online children’s game, will report its first quarter earnings after markets close today, its first report since its March IPO. Free to play, Roblox’s continued success relies heavily on its ability to monetize its users (with a parent or supervisor’s permission, of course.)

Users purchased $12.4 billion worth of Robux, the game’s currency, over the first three months of 2020, more than in the last two years combined. Still, that leaves the company making considerably less per user than Farmville creator Zynga.

With 37 million daily active users of its own through September and millions of developers at work to expand its universe, Roblox’s easiest path to increased monetization might be making its game more palatable to players unburdened by parental supervision: Just 15% of core users are over age 25.

Charting Malaria, with hope

Though Covid-19 has resulted in an estimated 122,600 deaths in Africa since the onset of the pandemic, malaria, a disease that is particularly prevalent and deadly in the continent, took more than 400,000 lives in 2019 alone, according to the World Health Organization, with 94% of cases and deaths in sub-Saharan Africa.

A global group of researchers recently released a preliminary study reporting that their malaria vaccine, heralded as a breakthrough due to its safety profile and low production costs, showed up to 77% efficacy in a one-year preliminary clinical trial involving 450 children in Burkina Faso.

If a peer review confirms the results, it would have exceeded the 75% effectiveness target for vaccines set by the WHO.

The future of RNA-based medicine

Decades of work on genetic medicine have led us to a golden age of precision genetic medicine, writes Katherine Foley. There are three fields for which genetic medicine offers particularly promising innovations:

🚫Immunizations: RNA-based vaccines work by instructing our cells to make the spike protein found on the SARS-CoV-2 virus, spooking the immune system into action. The biggest challenge in immunizing against HIV, tuberculosis, and the flu is that these pathogens have multiple proteins to code for, not just the one in SARS-CoV-2. With mRNA, however, it’s easy to include the code for several kinds of proteins in a single injection.

👀 Cancer Therapies: Cancer is caused by genetic code that’s gone haywire. The most sinister aspect of cancer is how it evades our immune systems. Personalized cancer vaccines would effectively lift cancer’s camouflage. These vaccines would introduce mRNA that codes for one of the unique proteins the cancer produces, called a neo-antigen, that the body could then recognize and attack. Instead of flooding the body with toxic chemicals that kill cells with abandon, cancer vaccines could target only the cancer itself.

☝️ Cures or treatments for genetic diseases: For more common rare diseases, a single treatment may work for multiple people. Nucleic acid therapies like ASOs and RNAs that can correct or silence errors in genetic code are a beacon of hope. mRNA won’t be just for rare orphan diseases, either; Ionis Pharmaceuticals has drugs in the pipeline for Alzheimer’s disease, cystic fibrosis, and Hepatitis B—all of which are relatively common—as well as a therapy that could treat high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease.

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Surprising discoveries

Archaeologists unearthed nine Neanderthals in an Italian cave. The ancient humans, who died about 40,000 years ago, may have been killed by hyenas.

AI outscored human crossword savants. The bot, named “Dr. Fill,” beat 1,000 participants at the American Crossword Puzzle tournament.

A local news station caught a dog thief. A man was charged with larceny after a Boston news crew filmed him with a stolen German shorthaired pointer named Titus.

The Kentucky Derby winner failed a drug test. Medina Spirit’s trainer Bob Baffert has been banned from Churchill Downs after seeing five of his horses fail tests in little over a year.

The FBI released case files on Kurt Cobain’s 1994 suicide. The files contained letters written to the agency from fans who believed the Nirvana frontman was murdered.

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