Inhaled COVID-19 vaccine; KRAS and GPCR maps and more

The Janssen Vaccines and Prevention B.V. unit of Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) and collaborators at  Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center showed in Nature that intratracheal boosting with a bivalent Ad26-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccine resulted in better protection against a SARS-CoV-2 BQ.1.1 challenge than boosting via intramuscular or intranasal routes.

Co-founders of ALLOX, a Centre for Genomic Regulation spinoff, published a map of inhibitory allosteric binding sites on KRAS. The authors quantified the effect of over 26,000 mutations on the folding of KRAS and its binding to six interaction partners, as well as free energy changes of 22,000 genetic interactions. The platform could be broadly applicable, as “using the approach described here it should be possible to rapidly and comprehensively identify allosteric target sites in many proteins,” said the authors of the Nature paper...