More than 400 years ago, two people living in modern day Chile died while infected with the smallpox virus. Viral DNA found in their mummified remains has now yielded genetic evidence of when the disease arrived in the Americas. The findings, published on 30 July in Science1, confirm that Orthopoxvirus variola ' the virus that causes smallpox ' arrived in the Americas from Europe. The study adds to a small but growing body of evidence that the smallpox virus lost genes as it adapted to human hosts, a mechanism that related viruses, such as the one that causes mpox, might also be using today. 'We don't know anything about the recent history of viruses,' says Terry Jones, a computational virologist at Charite ' University Medicine Berlin. Studies such as this provide a rare snapshot into a pathogen's past, he says. Smallpox was one of the deadliest diseases in the world. The virus killed an estimated 300 million people in the twentieth century alone. Historical records suggest that its introduction into the Americas was similarly catastrophic, killing millions of people across two continents....

'We did a retro, and wouldn't you know' The person who's asking for the new request was the new decision maker [we] didn't even realize existed,' said Kataria, co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Centralize, in an interview. 'We missed the fact that the prior person had left, and the context had shifted hands, and no one had tracked that.' The financing includes participation from Salesforce Ventures,1 Y Combinator, 20 Sales, Ritual Capital, Adverb Ventures and high-profile angel investors including former Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield and Scott Woody, CEO and founder of Metronome. Combined with a previous $4 million seed round led by Salesforce Ventures, Centralize has now raised $19 million since its 2023 inception to build what Kataria calls a 'deal GPS' for enterprise revenue teams. Both went on to build high-scale products across Big Tech. Kataria served as a founding engineer on Facebook Shops during Meta's e-commerce push during COVID-19, scaling the platform from zero to a quarter billion monthly active users in a year. Wang, meanwhile, created Slack Huddles, building the initial version alongside Slack executives Cal Henderson (CTO), Noah Weiss (VP of product), and Butterfield (CEO), and later leading engineering and product teams at Slack....

Growing evidence suggests that a diabetes drug and one used to treat mild-to-moderate COVID-19 can prevent the infection from developing into long COVID, a chronic condition that affects millions of people worldwide. In response to promising clinical-trial results, some physicians say that they will start prescribing the medications, but others are not convinced by the latest evidence. There is no universally agreed definition of long COVID, but it usually refers to symptoms that persist for more than three months after infection with the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. The most common symptoms are fatigue, shortness of breath and cognitive impairment. Observational studies have suggested that the antiviral Paxlovid1 and the diabetes drug metformin2 can reduce the risk of some long COVID symptoms. But until now, the drugs had not been tested in randomized, placebo-controlled trials in a broader group of participants ' the gold standard for evaluating treatment efficacy. The Paxlovid trial involved 144 people who had SARS-CoV-2 and investigated their risk of developing long COVID after three months. The drug reduced that risk by 40%, compared with a placebo. The study was published on 16 July in The Lancet Infectious Diseases3....

Four days ago, the first volunteer was vaccinated against Bundibugyo ebolavirus. That is just 68 days after the World Health Organization declared the current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda a public-health emergency of international concern. By 27 July, officials had confirmed 3,200 cases and 1,405 deaths in the DRC alone. The vaccine, called ChAdOx1, is being tested in a phase I clinical trial being run by the Oxford Vaccine Group at the University of Oxford, UK. ChAdOx1 uses the same vector platform as used in the Oxford'AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, but carries genetic instructions for Bundibugyo ebolavirus protein. Around 620,000 doses of the vaccine have already been manufactured. The trial aims to assess the safety of the vaccine and the immune response it generates before larger trials are rolled out in Uganda later this year. Two other vaccines are also in development: an mRNA vaccine developed by Moderna in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is expected to go into clinical trials next month; and a candidate being developed by the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative that is similar to the WHO-recommended one for the Zaire ebolavirus species. All three vaccines are being funded by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI)....