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huge bid! Boom!!
Yeah i hope so too. The 8-k had the merger anticipated to close by September 20th which is Sunday so hopefully we get something on that soon.
Nice close here today $PPCB
Don't miss the huge run!!!!
Needs to get out of this .0027 - .0035 flip zone.
Looks like bottom is in. Faucet is turned off for now. Penny coming.
Looks like bottom is in. Faucet is turned off for now. Penny coming.
Bottoms looks to be in here. We should get nice update soon!!
Penny bound!!
Nice news out!
$DPWW volume should break records today.
Acquisition completed.
This is worst than an internet romance scam.
I agree. This turd can't find a bottom.
That's $160k!
20 million on Bid!!!!!!!!
Hope it stays that way honestly. It means good.
L2 looks cleaner today.
I sure hope we saw the last of CFGN and OTCX yesterday.
This deserves to close at LOD. lol
I'll say hang on. Still got at least a bounce left. Doubt we see .02 again though.
whoever called trips may be right here. Just terrible. Those 2 crooks belong in jail.
Company needs to hire better pumpers. The current ones are just making loud noise here.
They are back. uh oh
There is no way the company would let this hit triple within a month imo. It doesn’t make sense if you have a major platform launching this month and a possible awareness campaign. Once they get done with the little note left. It moves. All you can do is average down here. I have seen this type moves before. Buy the fear!!
Yeah when it is done, this is going to explode.
Obviously you haven't done your DD. $PTSC will have its time. Duly
Dilution done IMO!!
Woot Woot!!!! Finally came to life!!
Must read on Incoming merger company and it's Covid-19 patch
https://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressrelease/a-nanomaterial-path-forward-for-covid-19-vaccine-development
A Nanomaterial Path Forward for COVID-19 Vaccine Development
From mRNA vaccines entering clinical trials, to peptide-based vaccines and using molecular farming to scale vaccine production, the COVID-19 pandemic is pushing new and emerging nanotechnologies into the frontlines and the headlines.
Nanoengineers at UC San Diego detail the current approaches to COVID-19 vaccine development, and highlight how nanotechnology has enabled these advances, in a review article in Nature Nanotechnology published July 15.
“Nanotechnology plays a major role in vaccine design,” the researchers, led by UC San Diego Nanoengineering Professor Nicole Steinmetz, wrote. Steinmetz is also the founding director of UC San Diego’s Center for Nano ImmunoEngineering. “Nanomaterials are ideal for delivery of antigens, serving as adjuvant platforms, and mimicking viral structures. The first candidates launched into clinical trials are based on novel nanotechnologies and are poised to make an impact.”
Steinmetz is leading a National Science Foundation-funded effort to develop—using a plant virus— a stable, easy to manufacture COVID-19 vaccine patch that can be shipped around the world and painlessly self-administered by patients. Both the vaccine itself and the microneedle patch delivery platform rely on nanotechnology. This vaccine falls into the peptide-based approach described below.
“From a vaccine technology development point of view, this is an exciting time and novel technologies and approaches are poised to make a clinical impact for the first time. For example, to date, no mRNA vaccine has been clinically approved, yet Moderna’s mRNA vaccine technology for COVID-19 is making headways and was the first vaccine to enter clinical testing in the US.”
As of June 1, there are 157 COVID-19 vaccine candidates in development, with 12 in clinical trials.
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Nanoengineering Professor Nicole Steinmetz is using a plant virus to develop a COVID-19 vaccine patch.
“There are many nanotechnology platform technologies put toward applications against SARS-CoV-2; while highly promising, many of these however may be several years away from deployment and therefore may not make an impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic,” Steinmetz wrote. “Nevertheless, as devastating as COVID-19 is, it may serve as an impetus for the scientific community, funding bodies, and stakeholders to put more focused efforts toward development of platform technologies to prepare nations for readiness for future pandemics,” Steinmetz wrote.
To mitigate some of the downsides of contemporary vaccines—namely live-attenuated or inactivated strains of the virus itself—advances in nanotechnology have enabled several types of next-generation vaccines, including:
Peptide-based vaccines
Using a combination of informatics and immunological investigation of antibodies and patient sera, various B- and T-cell epitopes of the SARS-CoV-2 S protein have been identified. As time passes and serum from convalescent COVID-19 patients are screened for neutralizing antibodies, experimentally-derived peptide epitopes will confirm useful epitope regions and lead to more optimal antigens in second-generation SARS-CoV-2 peptide-vaccines. The National Institutes of Health recently funded La Jolla Institute for Immunology in this endeavor.
Peptide-based approaches represent the simplest form of vaccines that are easily designed, readily validated and rapidly manufactured. Peptide-based vaccines can be formulated as peptides plus adjuvant mixtures or peptides can be delivered by an appropriate nanocarrier or be encoded by nucleic acid vaccine formulations. Several peptide-based vaccines as well as peptide-nanoparticle conjugates are in clinical testing and development targeting chronic diseases and cancer, and OncoGen and University of Cambridge/DIOSynVax are using immunoinformatics-derived peptide sequences of S protein in their COVID-19 vaccine formulations.
An intriguing class of nanotechnology for peptide vaccines is virus like particles (VLPs) from bacteriophages and plant viruses. While non-infectious toward mammals, these VLPs mimic the molecular patterns associated with pathogens, making them highly visible to the immune system. This allows the VLPs to serve not only as the delivery platform but also as adjuvant. VLPs enhance the uptake of viral antigens by antigen-presenting cells, and they provide the additional immune-stimulus leading to activation and amplification of the ensuing immune response. Steinmetz and Professor Jon Pokorski received an NSF Rapid Research Response grant to develop a peptide-based COVID-19 vaccine from a plant virus: https://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=3005. Their approach uses the Cowpea mosaic virus that infects legumes, engineering it to look like SARS-CoV-2, and weaving antigen peptides onto its surface, which will stimulate an immune response.
Their approach, as well as other plant-based expression systems, can be easily scaled up using molecular farming. In molecular farming, each plant is a bioreactor. The more plants are grown, the more vaccine is made. The speed and scalability of the platform was recently demonstrated by Medicago manufacturing 10 million doses of influenza vaccine within one month. In the 2014 Ebola epidemic, patients were treated with ZMapp, an antibody cocktail manufactured through molecular farming. Molecular farming has low manufacturing costs, and is safer since human pathogens cannot replicate in plant cells.
Nucleic-acid based vaccines
For fast emerging viral infections and pandemics such as COVID-19, rapid development and large scale deployment of vaccines is a critical need that may not be fulfilled by subunit vaccines. Delivering the genetic code for in situ production of viral proteins is a promising alternative to conventional vaccine approaches. Both DNA vaccines and mRNA vaccines fall under this category and are being pursued in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
DNA vaccines are made up of small, circular pieces of bacterial plasmids which are engineered to target nuclear machinery and produce S protein of SARS-CoV-2 downstream.
mRNA vaccines on the other hand, are based on designer-mRNA delivered into the cytoplasm where the host cell machinery then translates the gene into a protein – in this case the full-length S protein of SARS-CoV-2. mRNA vaccines can be produced through in vitro transcription, which precludes the need for cells and their associated regulatory hurdles
While DNA vaccines offer higher stability over mRNA vaccines, the mRNA is non-integrating and therefore poses no risk of insertional mutagenesis. Additionally, the half-life, stability and immunogenicity of mRNA can be tuned through established modifications.
Several COVID-19 vaccines using DNA or RNA are undergoing development: Inovio Pharmaceuticals has a Phase I clinical trial underway, and Entos Pharmeuticals is on track for a Phase I clinical trial using DNA. Moderna’s mRNA-based technology was the fastest to Phase I clinical trial in the US, which began on March 16th, and BioNTech-Pfizer recently announced regulatory approval in Germany for Phase 1/2 clinical trials to test four lead mRNA candidates.
Subunit vaccines
Subunit vaccines use only minimal structural elements of the pathogenic virus that prime protective immunity—either proteins of the virus itself or assembled VLPs. Subunit vaccines can also use non-infectious VLPs derived from the pathogen itself as the antigen. These VLPs are devoid of genetic material and retain some or all of the structural proteins of the pathogen, thus mimicking the immunogenic topological features of the infectious virus, and can be produced via recombinant expression and scalable through fermentation or molecular farming. The frontrunners among developers are Novavax who initiated a Phase I/II trial on May 25, 2020. Also Sanofi Pasteur/GSK, Vaxine, Johnson & Johnson and the University of Pittsburgh have announced that they expect to begin Phase I clinical trials within the next few months. Others including Clover Biopharmaceuticals and the University of Queensland, Australia are independently developing subunit vaccines engineered to present the prefusion trimer confirmation of S protein using the molecular clamp technology and the Trimer-tag technology, respectively.
Delivery device development
Lastly, the researchers note that nanotechnology’s impact on COVID-19 vaccine development does not end with the vaccine itself, but extends through development of devices and platforms to administer the vaccine. This has historically been complicated by live attenuated and inactivated vaccines requiring constant refrigeration, as well as insufficient health care professionals where the vaccines are needed.
“Recently, modern alternatives to such distribution and access challenges have come to light, such as single-dose slow release implants and microneedle-based patches which could reduce reliance on the cold chain and ensure vaccination even in situations where qualified health care professionals are rare or in high demand,” the researchers write. “Microneedle-based patches could even be self-administered which would dramatically hasten roll-out and dissemination of such vaccines as well as reducing the burden on the healthcare system.”
Pokorski and Steinmetz are co-developing a microneedle delivery platform with their plant virus COVID-19 vaccine for both of these reasons.
This work is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF CMMI-2027668)
“Advances in bio/nanotechnology and advanced nanomanufacturing coupled with open reporting and data sharing lay the foundation for rapid development of innovative vaccine technologies to make an impact during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the researchers wrote. “Several of these platform technologies may serve as plug-and-play technologies that can be tailored to seasonal or new strains of coronaviruses. COVID-19 harbors the potential to become a seasonal disease, underscoring the need for continued investment in coronavirus vaccines
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Media Contact
Katherine Connor, 858-534-8374, khconnor@ucsd.edu
$PTSC Filings hit!!
Nice news out!!!
https://thedaily.case.edu/mosaic-immunoengineering-inc-signs-license-option-to-advance-novel-immunotherapy-to-treat-cancer-and-infectious-diseases/
Agreement with CWRU Technology Transfer Office and Dartmouth College
Mosaic ImmunoEngineering Inc., a private biotechnology company based in Novato, California, has signed a two-year option agreement with Case Western Reserve University and Dartmouth College, granting the company the exclusive right to license technology for a novel platform technology using virus-like nanoparticles (“VLP”) to treat and prevent cancer and infectious diseases in humans and for veterinary use.
The technology has broad potential to treat many different types of cancer and is supported by numerous scientific publications and grant funding. The technology also has direct application as part of a vaccine platform, which has generated promising data in both cancer and infectious diseases, including COVID-19, through research funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
An option agreement provides Mosaic two years to obtain a full license agreement. A license option typically is granted to a company interested in further evaluation of the technology before entering into a full license agreement that allows the company to commercially market it. The two-year option to license agreement, is managed through Case Western Reserve’s Technology Transfer Office.
“Along with providing world-class research in many areas, Case Western Reserve University and Dartmouth College are striving to translate these exciting discoveries into products that can make a difference in the lives of patients with life threatening illnesses,” said Wayne Hawthorne, senior licensing manager in the university’s Technology Transfer Office. “We encourage our faculty to conduct basic research which can become the basis of discoveries that have direct application to clinical needs such as the technology that Mosaic is seeking to advance. Considerable research and progress was made on the technology through internal awards and grants that funded early product development and clinical proof from organizations such Coulter Foundation, Council to Advance Human Health and Ohio Third Frontier Technology Validation and Start-Up Fund.”
The inventors of the technology include Nicole Steinmetz, professor in the Department of NanoEngineering and director of the Center for Nano-ImmunoEngineering at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), and Jonathan Pokorski, associate professor in the Department of NanoEngineering at UCSD. During their tenure at Case Western Reserve, they worked in conjunction with Steven Fiering, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine.
The researchers have collectively demonstrated that plant-derived, engineered VLP-based nanotechnologies stimulate a potent anti-tumor immune response in mouse models of metastatic melanoma, ovarian cancer, colon cancer, brain cancer and breast cancer, including companion dogs with metastatic melanoma. This data supports the potential to translate preclinical studies into veterinary applications, such as the treatment of cancer in companion animals, which has high relevance to human melanoma.
“We are pleased to have completed this agreement with CWRU and Dartmouth, and look forward to working closely with the university and Drs. Steinmetz, Pokorski and Fiering to rapidly advance the highly promising technology platforms into the clinic,” said Steven King, co-founder and chief executive officer of Mosaic. “This technology platform includes many opportunities in oncology and infectious diseases, including both human and veterinary applications. This is a very important milestone for Mosaic, and we are very happy to have the opportunity to work with prestigious universities and an impressive team of scientists.”
“This immuno-oncology approach provides a personalized treatment approach by relieving the patient’s tumor-mediated immunosuppression and potentiating anti-tumor immunity against antigens expressed by their own tumor,” said Steinmetz, a co-inventor of the technology and a co-founder and chief scientific officer of Mosaic. “The vaccine platform is a natural extension of the immune-stimulating properties of the VLP, combined with directing the response to pre-defined targets. Instead of being a personal vaccine, the modular approach of linking disease specific targets to the VLP allows the potential to rapidly develop countermeasures for pandemics such as COVID-19.”
Mosaic, through its founding team, has identified a lead oncology candidate for advancement into clinical trials and the ongoing NSF funded research is supporting the application of the technology toward the development of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine for the prevention of COVID-19. Over the past 10 years, the technology has been funded through numerous research grants totaling more than $20 million.
For more information, contact Bill Lubinger at william.lubinger@case.edu.
Full force is an understatement.
Penny break here!!!
Penny break here!!!
Remember Carlton Johnson vacates his duties as an executive tomorrow. Changes happening.
As part of the merger, Mr. Johnson will remain onboard in his executive duties through August 28th to ensure a smooth management transition.
Buy you some. New management taking over here.
$PTSC quiet loading. These prices will be unheard of in the next few months. IMO
Mosaic's current President and CEO Steven King was formerly CEO of then Peregrine Pharma now AVID Bioservices Inc trading NASDAQ:CMDO