Rubbing our faces in it:
"Calif. biotech with Cambridge operations is testing another possible COVID-19 vaccine" by Jonathan Saltzman Globe Staff, January 19, 2021
Another biotech company with a presence in Massachusetts is working on a COVID-19 vaccine, with help from the federal government.
Gritstone Oncology, based in Emeryville, Calif., plans to start an early-stage clinical trial by the end of March of a vaccine that it says would protect people from more contagious strains of coronavirus that have emerged. About 60 of its 170 employees are in Cambridge, where they use artificial intelligence to determine the best targets on the virus for antibodies to attack.
Gritstone, a five-year-old company with no approved products, is getting help from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. That agency, which has been headed since 1984 by Dr. Anthony Fauci, collaborated with Cambridge-based Moderna on its COVID-19 vaccine, the second vaccine authorized for emergency use against the coronavirus, after the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
No conflict-of-intere$t for Fraudci the flip-flopper.
The small biotech’s share price rose more than 248 percent on Tuesday following news of the collaboration with the government, closing at $22.27.
Anyone investigating like over Gamestop?
The company says it has developed a novel vaccine with the distinctive spike protein of the coronavirus that the first two vaccines cleared for emergency use target, but Gritstone wants to use other parts of the coronavirus to provoke a type of white blood cells called T cells to attack the pathogen.
Another mRNA therapy masquerading as a "vaccine?"
“The approach is to direct more guns against different parts of the virus and hit them in multiple places,” said Dr. Andrew Allen, Gritstone’s cofounder and chief executive. The goal is to protect people against multiple variants of the coronavirus, including strains that first surfaced in the United Kingdom and South Africa and are more contagious.
NIAID is helping to fund the early-stage clinical trial through the Infectious Diseases Clinical Research Consortium, a network that conducts such studies.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is contributing money to the undertaking, although Allen declined to say how much.
Takes the face right off of you, doesn't it?
The experimental vaccine would require two shots. The first would rely on an adenovirus, which typically can cause a cold, to make the body produce a coronavirus protein that stimulates an immune response. That’s similar to an experimental vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The second shot would rely on messenger RNA, as do the vaccines developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.
Because that is what it has mutated into and I've lo$t mt $en$e of $mell for the Globe.
