PCR tests have been hailed as the gold-standard in detecting and isolating COVID-19 cases. But they are more expensive than antigen tests and need a laboratory to process.

As future covid-19 prevalence varies across time, health authorities must revolutionise testing to see if people are infected.

Viruses were unknown to science when Charles Darwin conceived the theory of evolution in the 19 th century. Yet, to understand how the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has spread and changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, we still need to use Darwin’s approach and think in evolutionary terms.

Viruses do not evolve with the purpose of being more or less infectious or dangerous: it is just natural selection at work. New random variants occur continuously and most of them are neutral or make the virus less infectious.

Since the World Health Organisation declared  COVID-19 a pandemic , progress has been made on testing, tracing and treating people infected with the virus, and industries have developed  several vaccines in a record time.

Darwin would be puzzled. He described natural selection as a slow process, selecting for the most suited organisms to a given environment.

Around 700,000 people are killed by antibiotic resistant infections in the world every year, estimates say. Antimicrobials are increasingly overused and misused, while some organisms are becoming more resistant to antibiotics.

“Let’s start from the end. Our project will not really end in our lifetime”. Puzzling as it may sound, the statement comes from Sarah Goldberg, researcher at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, one of the leading scientific institutions in Israel.

Genes are the latest trend in nutrition, at least going by the burgeoning  legion   of Internet companies offering diets tailored to our genetic make-up.  These services are relatively affordable and simple to use.

Fourteen pairs of identical twins joined the EU funded medical project “ Fight-MG ”, to fight Myasthenia Gravis . This rare autoimmune disease leads to abnormal fatigability of various skeletal muscles.

Myasthenia Gravis (MG) is a rare auto-immune disease—whereby patients’ immune systems attack their own bodies— arising from a breakdown in communications between the nervous and muscular systems.

Collaboration between research groups is key in tackling rare diseases such as auto-immune disease Myasthenia Gravis (MG). Indeed, the rarity of the disease means that it can be difficult to collect enough samples of blood and tissues to perform quality research.

Angeles suffers from a severe and rare genetic disease called Acute Intermittent Porphyria (AIP). This means, one of her genes restrains her liver to produce a specific protein needed for the metabolism of the blood.

Between 30 and 40 million people in Europe suffer from rare diseases —many of them children. As most of these diseases have genetic origins, gene therapy is a major hope for their future cure .

Patients with Acute Intermittent Porphyria (AIP) are permanently tired. They continuously suffer acute pain, severe motor affection and an array of neurological problems. AIP affects one in 10,000 people in the EU.

We age in two ways. There is the ageing we count by clock and calendar. And then there is biological ageing. The latter is written into our genes. But, it is also influenced by our lifestyle and history.

What makes us age biologically? We have always been intrigued by this question. Yet, it remains a fundamental research challenge.  Now, the EU-funded project, EurHEALTHAgeing , aims to draw together studies of early development with those on longevity and ageing.

Viruses often get bad press. Likened to Trojan horses they are often associated with disease. But, i t is precisely because of their infectious nature that they can potentially be used as gene vectors - which are vehicles loaded with good copies of malfunctioning genes - and delivered to cells.

Brain diseases are particularly challenging to treat. Every substance that has to be delivered to the brain needs to overcome several obstacles, such as the blood-brain barrier—a system that prevents potentially dangerous substances, but also many drugs, to enter this organ—,to get to its target.

Scientists in Würzburg, in Germany, have created living bone material from human stem cells in their laboratory. The discipline is called tissue engineering and the aim of the scientists is to produce the perfect substitute for bone transplantation.