OPEC, Russia approve 'historic' oil cuts amid coronavirus

Canadian researchers are developing a DNA vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and has currently infected nearly 5,00,000 people worldwide and crippled the global economy.

Entos Pharmaceuticals, a health-care biotechnology company headed by a University of Alberta researchers, develop new therapeutic compounds using the company's proprietary drug-delivery platform and has begun manufacturing vaccine candidates against the novel coronavirus.

"Given the urgency of the situation, we can have a lead candidate vaccine within two months. Once we have that it's a race to get it into clinical trials," said John Lewis, CEO of Entos and a Professor at the University of Alberta in Canada.

Lewis said in comparison to a traditional vaccine, DNA-based vaccines hold several advantages.

Nucleic acids are introduced directly into the patient's own cells, causing them to make pieces of the virus--tricking the immune system into mounting a response without the full virus actually being present, the researcher said.

According to the company, the approach is recognised as being easier to move into large-scale manufacturing, offers improved vaccine stability and works without needing an infectious agent.

In the current absence of a vaccine for COVID-19, several companies around the world are mounting efforts to begin similar work.

The first clinical trial using a DNA-based vaccine developed by Moderna Inc.in the US on March 13.

Their approach allows for antibodies to be made in the human trial volunteers against a specific protein on the surface of the coronavirus that lets the virus enter human cells.

The hope is that the antibodies will stop the interaction.

Though this approach is designed to be effective against COVID-19 specifically, Lewis said Entos is taking a different tack.

The company plans to use plasmid DNA to amplify the production of key coronavirus surface and structural proteins with each injection, with an eye to the bigger picture.

"Many of the structural proteins in the virus are pretty well conserved across all the coronaviruses, including SARS and MERS," said Lewis.

"We're hoping that if we express more of the structural proteins that are common to most coronaviruses, we can inhibit the current COVID-19, and also potentially protect against all coronaviruses both past and future," Lewis added.

To move the project forward quickly, the company is seeking financial support from both provincial and federal levels of government.

"We have the opportunity to save a lot of lives, and I think it's really upon us and governments to find solutions for that," Lewis said.

China is aggressively pursuing a diverse range of tactics -- from cyber-attacks to recruiting insiders for economic espionage, Indian security agencies have warned. The specific alert circulated among key stakeholders suggests that Chinese operatives are not only planning to steal classified cutting-edge defense technology but also eyeing to recruit best academicians and researchers around the globe, especially from the US.

Sources said they have noticed that China has authorized an "aggressive program of stealing US science and technology information by recruiting Americans in the technology sector with access to trade secrets".

In the technology sector of the US, many Indians scientists are working at the forefront. "This is a serious matter for Indian government and security establishments," said a top source further adding that Chinese always pursue economic espionage because it suits their low cost manufacturing sector on the basis of stolen research and costly design developed by top companies across the globe.

"An alert was also issued in early January about Chinese cyber intrusion attempts at several companies where Indian researchers are working. The espionage attempt was to target UAV technology and certain top-end military equipment designs. After stealing the techniques and design, China starts producing these equipment domestically and sells at a cheaper rate, inflicting irreparable damage to the original equipment manufacturers," the sources in the security establishment observed.

Recently, the US accused China for targeting academia by sending researchers to American labs and using talent recruitment programme to steal scientific analysis. The US has also found that young recruits of the People's Liberation Army posing as students are entering into various universities across the globe to get research papers and recruit academia.

Earlier this year, the US charged a former Boston University student of visa fraud for failing to disclose the status as a lieutenant in the China's People's Liberation Army.

The US intelligence agencies have found that their "universities have become a soft target in the global espionage war with China".

In January this year, the US Department of Justice charged a leading academician at the Harvard University for hiding his alleged role in a Chinese government programme.

In July last year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray had revealed that the FBI is probing nearly 1,000 cases of economic espionage and attempted intellectual property theft, nearly all of them leading back to China.

Accordingly, Indian Missions have been informed about the threats being posed by Chinese spies and attempts to recruit Indian scientists and technologists working in the US and other parts of the world.

Sources further stated that security establishments in India have informed the scientist fraternity to be on alert amid threat posed by Chinese spies.

The Chinese had earlier recruited a personnel, Dongfan Chung, working at Boeing for economic espionage. Chung had stolen secret technology to benefit Chinese government and during the raid at his house more than 2.5 lakh classified pages related to Boeing were recovered.

"There has been intense debate on the international platforms regarding Chinese-sponsored theft of intellectual property. American agencies have gone on record to say that China was targeting trade secrets. In the backdrop of pandemic and global health crisis, Indian establishments in defence and technology sectors have been told to be extra cautious as China is planning to become the most advanced economy while the other countries are crippled by the highly contagious virus," the sources further added.

Berlin, Mar 28: The number of confirmed coronavirus infections worldwide topped 600,000 on Saturday as new cases stacked up quickly in Europe and the United States and officials dug in for a long fight against the pandemic.

The latest landmark came only two days after the world passed half a million infections, according to a tally by John Hopkins University, showing that much work remains to be done to slow the spread of the virus. It showed more than 602,000 cases and a total of over 27,000 deaths.

While the U.S. now leads the world in reported infections — with more than 104,000 cases — five countries exceed its roughly 1,700 deaths: Italy, Spain, China, Iran and France.

“We cannot completely prevent infections at this stage, but we can and must in the immediate future achieve fewer new infections per day, a slower spread,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is in quarantine at home after her doctor tested positive for the virus, told her compatriots in an audio message. “That will decide whether our health system can stand up to the virus.”

The virus already has put health systems in Italy, Spain and France under extreme strain. Lockdowns of varying severity have been introduced across Europe. Merkel's chief of staff, Helge Braun, said that Germany — where authorities closed nonessential shops and banned gatherings of more than two in public — won't relax its restrictions before April 20.

As the epicenter has shifted westward, the situation has calmed in China, where some restrictions on people's lives have now been lifted. Six subway lines restored limited service in Wuhan, where the virus first emerged in December, after the city had its official coronavirus risk evaluation downgraded from high to medium on Friday. Five districts of the city of 11 million people had other restrictions on travel loosened after their risk factor was downgraded to low.

For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. But for others, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, the virus can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia, and lead to death.

More than 130,000 people have recovered, according to Johns Hopkins' tally.

In one way or another, the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak have been felt by the powerful and the poor alike.

On Friday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson became the first leader of a major country to test positive for the virus. He said he would continue to work from self-quarantine.

Countries are still scrambling bring home some citizens stranded abroad by border closures and a near-shutdown of flights. On Saturday, 174 foreign tourists and four Nepali nationals on the foothills of Mount Everest were flown out days after being stranded on the only airstrip serving the world's highest mountain.

In neighboring India, authorities sent a fleet of buses to the outskirts of the capital to meet an exodus of migrant workers desperately trying to reach their home villages during the world's largest lockdown.

Thousands of people, mostly young male day laborers but also families, had fled their New Delhi homes after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a 21-day lockdown that began on Wednesday and effectively put millions of Indians who live off daily earnings out of work.

In a possibly hopeful sign, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cleared a new rapid test from Abbott Laboratories, which the company says can detect the coronavirus in about 5 minutes. Medical device maker Abbott announced the emergency clearance of its cartridge-based test Friday night, saying the test delivers a negative result in 13 minutes when the virus is not detected.

While New York remained the worst-hit city in the U.S., Americans braced for worsening conditions elsewhere, with worrisome infection numbers being reported in New Orleans, Chicago and Detroit.

New Orleans’ sprawling Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, along the Mississippi River, was being converted into a massive hospital as officials prepared for thousands more patients than they could accommodate.

In New York, where there are more than 44,000 cases statewide, the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 passed 6,000 on Friday, double what it had been three days earlier.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo called for 4,000 more temporary beds across New York City, where the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center has already been converted into a hospital.

The struggle to defeat the virus will take “weeks and weeks and weeks,” Cuomo told members of the National Guard working at the Javits Center.

President Donald Trump invoked the Defense Production Act on Friday, ordering General Motors to begin manufacturing ventilators. Trump had previously rejected Cuomo's pleas for tens of thousands more of the machines and the governor's calls to implement the Korean War-era production law.

Trump signed a $2.2 trillion stimulus package, after the House approved the sweeping measure by voice vote. Lawmakers in both parties lined up behind the law to send checks to millions of Americans, boost unemployment benefits, help businesses and toss a life preserver to an overwhelmed health care system.

Dr. John Brooks of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Americans remained “in the acceleration phase” of the pandemic and that all corners of the country were at risk.

"There is no geographic part of the United States that is spared from this," he said.