The Love Drug.

Apple makes its move into finance.

1. Before a patient can undergo T cell therapy designed to target cancerous tumors, the patient's entire immune system must be destroyed with chemotherapy or radiation. The toxic side effects are well known, including nausea, extreme fatigue and hair loss. Now a research team, led by UCLA's Anusha Kalbasi, MD, in collaboration with scientists from Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania, has shown that a synthetic IL-9 receptor allows those cancer-fighting T cells to do their work without the need for chemo or radiation. T cells engineered with the synthetic IL-9 receptor, designed in the laboratory of Christopher Garcia, PhD, at Stanford, were potent against tumors in mice, as published yesterday in Nature. (Sources: uclahealth.org, nature.com)

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2. Moderna has said its new two-strain Covid-19 booster increases people’s immunity against the dominant Omicron variant, bolstering the company’s hopes to roll it out as a fourth dose in the late summer. The US biotech company is the first to report preliminary results from a clinical trial of a vaccine targeted to Omicron. It said on Wednesday that the trial showed the “bivalent booster” — which contains the genetic code of the Omicron variant and the original strain of the virus — was safe and well tolerated. Moderna’s bivalent booster elicited an eight-fold increase in antibodies to tackle the Omicron variant, compared to pre-booster levels, when administered as part of a four dose regimen. It produced 1.75 times more antibodies than people who received a booster shot of Moderna’s existing vaccine. (Source: ft.com)

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3. Shanghai and Beijing went back on fresh Covid-19 alert on Thursday after parts of China's largest economic hub started imposing new lockdown restrictions while the most populous district in the Chinese capital shut entertainment venues. Both cities had eased widespread Covid curbs recently after a decline in new cases. However, the country has stuck with a "dynamic zero-Covid" policy aimed at shutting down transmission chains as soon as possible. The sprawling Minhang district in Shanghai, home to more than 2 million people, said on Thursday it will conduct nucleic acid tests for all residents on June 11 and ordered residents to stay home during the period. Several other street-level government authorities in other districts of the city have also issued notices saying residents will be subject to two days of confinement and another 12 days of rigorous testing starting from Thursday. (Source: reuters.com)