Covid-19 patients in the UK are being treated with dexamethasone today after a UK trial of the drug found it could save lives. "The treatment is immediately available and already in use on the NHS," said health minister Matt Hancock. "It is not by any means a cure but it is the best news we have had," Hancock told parliament today. The UK's chief medical officers say it should be used immediately, according to the BBC. A preliminary study found that the steroid, which is already widely prescribed for treating allergies and asthma, reduces the risk of dying from covid-19 by a third for patients on ventilators, and by a fifth for those receiving oxygen. Dexamethasone should only be taken if prescribed by a doctor. Officials in Beijing, China confirmed 31 new coronavirus cases today, bringing the total to 137 in the last six days. The city is again restricting all non-essential travel. Schools, swimming pools and gyms are all closed from today.

RALEIGH – A startup in Raleigh backed by investor and Sprout Pharmaceuticals CEO Cindy Eckert, is unveiling Thursday a different approach to dealing with Alzheimer's that is powered by artificial intelligence, not drugs. And its solution is part of a new effort launched by the Women's Alzheimer's Movement Prevention Center at Cleveland Clinic, an internationally respected medical institution. ExtND is among the offerings from the Women's Alzheimer's center, which also was unveiled today in Las Vegas, according to a spokesperson for uMETHOD. Several medical institutions already are deploying the method. More than 5 million people are currently afflicted with Alzheimer's and the disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the US, according to the Alzheimer's Assocation.

A deadly new virus circling the globe makes many people more anxious. The pandemic's psychological toll can be particularly weighty for people with an existing mental health condition. One 25-year-old on the US East Coast seeing a therapist for help with anxiety found additional support from an unexpected source: a chatbot. "Therapy twice a month was fine before, it's just now sometimes I have days where I feel like I need something extra," says the person, who identifies as gender nonbinary, and asked to remain anonymous. Their budget didn't allow more frequent therapy sessions, making them receptive when a friend mentioned Woebot, a chatbot built on Stanford research that delivers a digital version of cognitive behavioral therapy.

A new video game is just what the doctor ordered, at least for some kids. For the first time, the Food and Drug Administration has approved a prescription video game. Now, physicians may prescribe Akili Interactive's EndeavorRx, formerly known as Project EVO, to children between the ages of 8 and 12 who struggle with ADHD. The game challenges users to dodge obstacles and collect targets as they navigate icy winter wonderlands and lava rivers, guided by aliens who zip around on flying saucers. The developers say the game stimulates neural systems that are intrinsic to attention function.

We're proud to make history today with FDA's decision,

The coronavirus pandemic is one of the most difficult collective challenges facing humanity since the last world war. In the midst of the turmoil, national health authorities, pharmaceutical companies, universities, and research institutes are racing to find therapies to save lives and contain the grave social and economic consequences of the pandemic. As organizations and experts scramble to innovate therapies, they are also redefining innovation. The conventional approach to innovation in the pharmaceutical industry is to conduct a lengthy process that starts with the discovery and generation of potential drug compounds and moves through a meticulous refinement and selection phase toward gradual development, clinical testing, and market approval. Although this model will continue to be the most effective in future drug development, it is now being complemented with an ultrafast approach to innovation centered on the repurposing of readily available ideas, knowledge, and technologies.

Save your business while saving lives,

Learning accurate drug representation is essential for tasks such as computational drug repositioning and prediction of drug side-effects. A drug hierarchy is a valuable source that encodes human knowledge of drug relations in a tree-like structure where drugs that act on the same organs, treat the same disease, or bind to the same biological target are grouped together. However, its utility in learning drug representations has not yet been explored, and currently described drug representations cannot place novel molecules in a drug hierarchy. Here, we develop a semi-supervised drug embedding that incorporates two sources of information: (1) underlying chemical grammar that is inferred from molecular structures of drugs and drug-like molecules (unsupervised), and (2) hierarchical relations that are encoded in an expert-crafted hierarchy of approved drugs (supervised). We use the Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) framework to encode the chemical structures of molecules and use the knowledge-based drug-drug similarity to induce the clustering of drugs in hyperbolic space. The hyperbolic space is amenable for encoding hierarchical concepts. Both quantitative and qualitative results support that the learned drug embedding can accurately reproduce the chemical structure and induce the hierarchical relations among drugs. Furthermore, our approach can infer the pharmacological properties of novel molecules by retrieving similar drugs from the embedding space. We demonstrate that the learned drug embedding can be used to find new uses for existing drugs and to discover side-effects. We show that it significantly outperforms baselines in both tasks.

Unnecessary restrictions on blood donors should be removed to maximize the blood and plasma available for use. With a vaccine for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) likely more than a year away, we must identify effective therapies for patients now. One promising approach is the use of plasma from patients who have recovered from COVID-19 (1, 2). To facilitate this strategy, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently revised some of the restrictions on blood donation, including a decrease in deferral time for men who have sex with men (MSM) to 3 months (3). This is a positive change to an outdated guideline, but it does not go far enough.

"We didn't learn the lesson on SARS and MERS," UK prime minister Boris Johnson said today as he faced questions from the House of Commons Liaison Committee, referencing the government's pandemic planning and a lack of capacity at Public Health England to detect outbreaks of coronavirus around the country. He also said that there would not be an official inquiry to investigate whether his senior aide Dominic Cummings broke lockdown rules. More than 40 Conservative party MPs have now called for Cummings' resignation. During the meeting, Johnson announced that England's test and trace system will be launched tomorrow. Under the new system, contact tracers will ask people who test positive for coronavirus to self-isolate for 14 days, regardless of symptoms, and to provide details of any recent close contacts. The secretary of state will have the power to "mandate" people to isolate if they do not isolate voluntarily. The government announced earlier today that localised lockdowns, ...