Tag: Vaccines

Moderna spars with U.S. scientists over COVID-19 vaccine trials

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Moderna spars with U.S. scientists over COVID-19 vaccine trials

The federal government is supporting Moderna’s vaccine project with nearly half a billion dollars and has chosen it as one of the first to enter large-scale human trials.

But the company – which has never produced an approved vaccine or run a large trial – has squabbled with government scientists over the process, delayed delivering trial protocols and resisted experts’ advice on how to run the study, according to three sources familiar with the vaccine project.

GMO tomato as edible COVID vaccine? Mexican scientists work to make it a reality

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

GMO tomato as edible COVID vaccine? Mexican scientists work to make it a reality

While large companies and public sector consortiums in the United States, Canada, China and Europe are running at full speed to develop a vaccine grown in genetically modified (GM) tobacco plants, a research group at a Mexican university is working toward the same objective, but with a different and innovative strategy. They are using bioinformatics and computational genetic engineering to identify candidate antigens for a vaccine that can be expressed in tomato plants. Eating the fruit from these plants would then confer immunity against COVID-19.