Biotechnology

23 deaths in Greece from streptococcus, 11 of the victims are minors - Health authorities are alert to cover the vaccination and immunity gap

The Health Ministry has set up a task force to increase the number of people getting vaccinated against measles, and is preparing an information and vaccination campaign in regions with low inoculation rates, following an outbreak in Romania, and other European countries.

Athanasia, Marilena and Adamantia leaned carefully over the laboratory equipment. They were completing the final experiments before closing the envelope for the competition. From there, the three students and the rest of the team would travel to Paris and the iGEM international synthetic biology competition to present their groundbreaking idea: Can certain probiotics cure depression?

Türkiye's first astronaut Alper Gezeravcı, who will conduct 13 experiments over 14 days, has investigated CRISPR-GEM on Jan. 23, gene modification efficiency in plants under microgravity and the potential of microalgae to be used in space.

In the midst of an escalating crisis with protesting doctors and nurses in major cities and the looming threat of a nationwide strike from February 1, Romania finds itself on the brink of a potential double epidemic. Following the declaration of a national measles outbreak in December, the country now faces the imminent possibility of a flu epidemic, as reported by Digi24.

181 new cases of COVID-19 have been diagnosed in Bulgaria in the past 24 hours. 13 of them have been confirmed with PCR, and 168 with rapid antigen tests. 66.30% of the new cases identified in the last 24 hours are of individuals who have not received any dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Scientists in China on Jan. 16 announced that they have cloned the first healthy rhesus monkey, a two-year-old named Retro, by tweaking the process that created Dolly the sheep.

Primates have proved particularly difficult to clone, and the scientists overcame years of failure by replacing the cloned cells that would become the placenta with those from a normal embryo.

"Climate change and greenhouse gas emissions are political, not technical problems," highlighted W.H. Dow Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at MIT Gregory Stephanopoulos in his speech on the prospects of metabolic engineering at the EmTech Europe Conference on Wednesday.

The Panhellenic Medical Association (PIS) has expressed its disagreement with the Health Ministry's stated intention to allow the administration of Covid-19 vaccinations by pharmacies. 

In a letter to Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis, the association cited both the safety and economic reasons.

Following her completion of a double master's degree in architecture and synthetic biology in the U.S. after graduating from the Faculty of Architecture, Gizem Gümüşkaya innovatively merged her dual expertise, creating a living robot from human DNA dedicated to repairing damaged tissues in the field of medicine.