Lisa Jarvis

Moderna Inc. dropped a lawsuit on Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE, claiming the technology in their Covid-19 shots infringes on its messenger RNA patents. The legal battle will surely be protracted and expensive. What it won’t do is slow the pace of innovation in mRNA, if gene editing tool Crispr’s…

Pfizer continues to spend its Covid windfall wisely. The pharma company said it would spend $5.4 billion to buy Global Blood Therapeutics, which has one approved drug to treat sickle-cell disease and two more in development. It’s a smart deal for both companies. Pfizer can put needed marketing…

Last month, Alphabet’s artificial intelligence subsidiary, DeepMind, stunned the world of science by presenting something truly spectacular: a snapshot of nearly every existing protein on Earth — 200 million of them. This machine-learning feat could speed the creation of new drugs. It has…

After weeks of frustration, commercial testing for monkeypox is now going strong in the US and has reduced the backlog. The tests show that, as of Monday, the US had nearly 3,500 cases, among the most in the world. Yet wider access to existing tests hasn’t made it possible to diagnose infections…

Long Covid is making it hard for millions of Americans to return to normal life, pushing some out of the workforce altogether, sometimes permanently. Yet medical efforts to figure out how best to help these patients are proceeding only slowly. Research has zeroed in on a few probable causes of…

In the month since I last wrote about the dearth of data on Paxlovid’s benefit for vaccinated and younger Covid-19 patients, infections have soared and prescriptions of the antiviral have skyrocketed. As of June 1, more than 1 million courses of the drug have been administered in the US. Roughly…

The world is waiting for a new generation of Covid-19 vaccines that last longer and can actually prevent infections. The existing shots have averted millions of deaths and hospitalizations, but the public’s willingness to get vaccinated seems to shrink with each new round of boosters. A new…

A silver lining to the inconvenience of a mild Covid-19 infection is that for most people it is followed by a honeymoon period — an idyllic time when the immune system is firing on all cylinders and preventing reinfection. But all good things must come to an end. At some point, the surge of…

Arcturus Therapeutics, a San Diego biotech company, may have just laid out a template for how to make vaccines for the next pandemic. Its new vaccine, which uses self-copying mRNA, appears to work well against current strains of Covid. It’s just that the product is coming in too late to matter in…

Texas-based InspectIR Systems’ breath test for Covid-19 — the first such test to get emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration — will probably have limited use at first. But it is nevertheless an important step toward expanding the toolkit available to prevent outbreaks of…