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“Gram-negative bacteria” pose a huge threat to public health. With deathly adaptability, these types of bacteria are able to develop resistance to many antibiotics and survive in a wide range of conditions. In particular, Acinetobacter baumannii, also known as CRAB, is one of clinical medicines most antibiotic resistant pathogens, killing hundreds in the U.S. every year with estimated mortality rates ranging from 26.0% to 55.7%. But a new antibiotic from Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche could change the future of how we treat Gram-negative bacteria. Roche announced on Monday that its antibiotic zosurabalpin will enter phase 3, late-stage human trials, by the end of this year or early next year. If successful, the drug will be the first new class of antibiotics targeting Gram-negative bacteria to be developed in over 50 years. What makes Gram-negative bacteria so hard to treat? Antibiotics treat illness by killing bacteria or suspending bacterial growth. But in order to access and attack crucial parts of the bacteria, most antibiotics must first pass through their outer membranes. However, Gram-negative bacteria are distinguished from other forms of bacteria because they are protected by a second outer membrane. These outer membranes are covered in protective molecules called lipopolysaccharides (LPS), which stabilize the membranes and create a barrier to most drugs and antibiotics. This resistance makes Gram-negative bacteria extremely tricky to treat, especially with patients who are already immunocompromised. It causes around a fifth of ICU infections, and most cases of ventilator-associated pneumonia, bloodstream infections related to catheters, and sepsis developed from the ICU. How does zosurabalpin help? Roche collaborated with Harvard researchers to develop a new way to stop Gram-negative bacteria. They found that the key was to inhibit the transportation of LPS molecules, the armor that creates the structure of the bacterias outer membrane. Zosurabalpin is able to destroy Gram-negative bacteria by jamming LPS molecules inside the bacteria, weakening its membrane. It is the first of its class of antibiotics, and the first new class of antibiotics for Gram-negative bacteria since 1968. This antibiotic is important, but it can also serve as a catalysis point for future innovation, said Michael Lobritz, global head of infectious diseases at Roche, to the Financial Times. There are very few [new classes of antibiotics] . . . that have been discovered in the last 15 years. So if you are able to launch a new one, we can build off that for decades to come. Basel-based Roche has a vast portfolio that includes treatments for cancer, severe eye diseases, and multiple sclerosis. The company reported sales of roughly $68.7 billion in 2024, marking growth of 7% over the previous year on a constant exchange rate basis.
Category:
E-Commerce
David Hogg, the Parkland school shooting survivor turned Democratic activist and rainmaker, likes to say that the only good politician is a scared politician. His day job at Leaders We Deserve, the political action committee he co-founded straight out of Harvard in 2023 with veteran campaign manager Kevin Lata, is helping recruit and elect into office the next generation of young Democrats. But he spends just as much time antagonizing his partys leadership and hectoring them about doing some post-election soul-searching. Shortly after his successful run in February for one of five vice chair positions with the Democratic National Committee, Hogg announced that Leaders We Deserve would spend $20 million backing midterm primary challengers in safe Democratic districts represented by aging incumbents who, in his estimation, havent fought back hard enough against Donald Trump. He expected a backlash, and he got it. DNC chair Ken Martin demanded that he sign a neutrality pledge or step aside, but Hogg declined to do either. Meanwhile, one of the defeated candidates in the vice chair election filed a protest of the outcome, arguing that the results violated DNC rules regarding gender representation. Hogg believes that party leaders have seized on this procedural issue as a means of ousting him from his position, as punishment for his primary plans. It might work, toothe complaint remains under review, and a vote about whether to redo the vice chair election is scheduled for between June 9 and June 11. But even if they boot Hogg from the DNC, he says, hell just focus on his day job booting feckless incumbents from Congress. Hogg, who appeared on Fast Companys July 2024 cover for a story about his and Latas work getting Generation Z into politics, checked back in with us about the tempest hes triggered, and where Democrats should go from here. Fast Company: Given all thats transpired between you and the DNCs leadership, do you think youll be re-elected if it comes to it? David Hogg: Honestly, its anybody’s guess at this point. There’s people who don’t agree with what I’m doing with the primaries, but they also don’t think that we should have another election. And there’s people who think we should have another election, but agree with what Im doing. There’s so many different camps here. But just so I understand, is it your view that this complaint was mounted specifically to get rid of you? Or is the DNC leadership just latching onto this because it provides an opportunity to accelerate something they already wanted to do? Its certainly provided an opportunity. In order to remove me as an officer, one, I would need to be breaking a rule, and two, it would go through a committee and then it would require a two-thirds vote of the DNC membership. This gives them the opportunity to remove me with only a simple majority. I ask because the other DNC vice chair elected along with you, Malcolm Kenyatta, a state senator from Pennsylvania, who would ordinarily be a natural ally of yours, has criticized your response to this complaint and accused you of making it all about yourself. Have you spoken to him? Yes, we’ve discussed it a bit, and I’m not going to talk publicly about those conversations, but what I will say is that there’s disagreements that we have, obviously, but ultimately, I still maintain a high level of respect for Malcolm. I don’t take it personally. I see this as a strategic disagreement. What were your goals were in joining the DNC in the first place? And given whats transpired, do you still think you can achieve them? Hogg: Oh, we’re still going to achieve them no matter what happens. The reason I ran for the DNC was that I think we need to build a culture in our party of telling people what they need to hear for example, telling a former president that he should not run again. And if I do get removed, I think it only proves my point. I ran to play a role in making our party stronger. We can’t protect the status quo of a 26% approval rating. We’re losing voting share with nearly every single demographic, and its not a matter of our message. Its our messengers. But why the DNC specifically? Why this vice chair position? Because I believe in the party that we could be. And I didn’t want to continue being in a position where, for example, even after Id raised nearly $1 million for Vice President Harris when I was on her National Finance Committee, Id ask a question about what are we doing about young men and theyd say it was a ridiculous question. Like, why would we ever need to care about young men? This position forces people to listen to some of these real concerns. It was ridiculous because they thought Biden had young men sealed up? Or because young men dont vote?Hogg: To be honest with you, Devin, it’s because for a long time there’s been a taboo in the party of talking about young men, because we think empathy is a zero-sum game, so its to the detriment of young women. We’ve got to get out of that binary thinking. Caring about one doesn’t mean we inherently don’t care about the other. What should that message be? I’m not saying crank out a slogan on the spot, but how should Democrats be appealing to young men?Hogg: I’ll tell you what the message is not it’s not paying $20 million to figure out how to talk to young men. The message isn’t saying: Here is our plan for men. If we have a good plan for men, we don’t need to say out loud that it’s for men. For the past five months we keep hearing that elected Democrats are not fighting back hard enough. And while that may be true, it reminds me of what you were saying its easy to sit on the sidelines and say whats wrong. So what should Democrats be doing? Im not going to sit here and act like any single person, including myself, knows the full plan of how we fix this because, frankly, this is bigger than just the U.S. Every single developed country around the world has gender polarizationwhere young men are becoming more conservative and young women are becoming more liberal. This is not just a U.S. problem. Part of the answer is showing how we are rejuvenating ourselves and getting people elected to positions of leadership in Congress based off effectiveness and not this culture of seniority politics. One reason for some of the anxiety among Democrats could be that your criteria for challenging an incumbent feels a bit subjective. When you talk about people fighting back effectively against Trump, what does that look like right now? Prt of our strategy here is to not have a specific set of criteria, like, These are the three things that you need to do to be considered effective. Because the reality is nobody is meeting this moment as effectively as we need to. Certainly, some members are fighting back harder than others. There are members who are literally going to El Salvador, not just sitting on their hands and saying, We can’t do anything in the minority. We cant just hope that Donald Trump screws everything up so much that voters come begging back to us for any alternative. We dont want people to feel like theyre just voting for the less bad of two options. What we’re trying to do is light a fire under everybody’s ass in our party. And frankly, if that makes you uncomfortable, maybe you should question whether or not you should run. This reminds me of that op-ed James Carville wrote in The New York Times a couple months ago that Democrats should roll over and play dead and just let Trump screw everything up. About six weeks later, you were quoted in the Times saying more than anything it is, do you want to roll over and die or do you want to fight? I wondered if you were referring specifically to what Carville said? Yes, I was, but I think it goes beyond him, because that notion doesn’t just come out of nowhere. I think it comes out of the exhaustion that a lot of our leaders are feeling. And look, if you’re exhausted, that’s fine. Just don’t be in politics, because this is not a time for people to be exhausted. Another veteran Democrat, Philippe Reines, a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton, recently told New York Magazine that we can’t be the party of pronouns and land acknowledgements. Look, I think it’s important that we maintain our values as a party and we not abandon any group for some perceived gain or political expediency. That’s not what Democrats do. I think we need to focus on the fact that in this election voters told us two things. They said the president is too old. And we said, No, he’s not. And they said prices are too high. And we said, No, they aren’tlook at these graphs. The broader issue we have is that people feel unheard by us, and they feel like we are not addressing a lot of the real issues that they’re facing on a day-to-day basis. You told the Times that Democrats continue to treat politics like a debate club and Republicans treat it like WrestleMania. Are you endorsing the WrestleMania approach or implying we need a third way? What I was actually getting at, more than anything, is: lets say you ask voters, if Democrats are an animal, what animal would they be? The most common answer is a turtle or a slug or something like that. Some kind of weak, vulnerable animal. Whereas for Republicans, it’s like a shark or a lion. People like to see a fight. And for us, were like, Oh, we can’t raise the minimum wage because the parliamentarian in Congress says that we can’t. Thats the type of shit that kills me. So you want Democrats to get in the ring a little bit more? I want us to get in the ring more. After Parkland, all these Democratic consultants came around and said, You can’t talk about banning the AR=-15. You can’t talk about taking on the NRA. It’s too unpopular, it’s too red of a state, all this stuff. If we listened to them, we wouldn’t have changed shit. Right now we have a real problem with cowardice in our party. Thats the resource we lack. It’s not cash, its courage.
Category:
E-Commerce
A man says he was tortured for weeks in a New York townhouse. Another in Paris was held for ransom and his finger cut off. A couple in Connecticut were carjacked, beaten and thrown into a van.All, authorities allege, were victims tied to cryptocurrency-related crimes that have spilled out from behind computer screens and into the real world as the largely unregulated currency surges in value.While crypto thefts are not new, the use of physical violence is a far more recent trend, said John Griffin, a finance professor at the University of Texas in Austin who tracks financial crimes.“I think this kind of physical violence is a natural manifestation of the emboldened nature of crypto activities,” he said. “Things that might clearly be outside of social norms in other spaceslike robbing a bankare somehow just part of the game here.” Kidnapping, burglary and torture allegations In the New York case, two American crypto investorsJohn Woeltz and William Duplessiehave been arrested on kidnapping and assault charges in recent days after a 28-year-old Italian man told police they tortured him for weeks to get his Bitcoin password. Attorneys for both men declined to comment.While the allegations are still emerging, they come just weeks after 13 people were indicted on federal charges in Washington, D.C., accused of combining computer hacking and money laundering with old-fashioned impersonation and burglary to steal more than $260 million from victims’ cryptocurrency accounts.Some are accused of hacking websites and servers to steal cryptocurrency databases and identify targets, but others are alleged to have broken into victims’ homes to steal their “hardware wallets”devices that provide access to their crypto accounts.The case stemmed from an investigation that started after a couple in Connecticut last year were forced out of a Lamborghini SUV, assaulted and bound in the back of a van. Authorities allege the incident was a ransom plot targeting the couple’s sonwho they say helped steal more than $240 million worth of Bitcoin from a single victim. The son has not been charged, but is being detained on an unspecified “federal misdemeanor offense” charge, according to online jail records. Police stopped the carjacking and arrested six men.Meanwhile in France, kidnappings of wealthy cryptocurrency holders and their relatives in ransom plots have spooked the industry.Attackers recently kidnapped the father of a crypto entrepreneur while he was out walking his dog, and sent videos to the son including one showing the dad’s finger being severed as they demanded millions of euros in ransom, prosecutors allege. Police freed the father and arrested several suspects.Earlier this year, men in masks attempted to drag the daughter of Pierre Noizat, the CEO and a founder of the Bitcoin exchange platform Paymium, into a van, but were thwarted by a shopkeeper armed with a fire extinguisher.And in January, the co-founder of French crypto-wallet firm Ledger, David Balland, and his wife were also kidnapped for ransom from their home in the region of Cher of central France. They also were rescued by police and 10 people were arrested. Cryptocurrency crime likely fueled by big money, little regulation The FBI recently released its 2024 internet crime report that tallied nearly 860,000 complaints of suspected internet crime and a record $16.6 billion in reported lossesa 33% increase in losses compared with 2023. As a group, cryptocurrency theft victims reported the most lossesmore than $6.5 billion. The agency and experts say the crypto crime underworld is likely being fueled by the large amounts of money at stakecombined with weak regulation of cryptocurrency that allows many transactions to be made without identity documents.Violence may be increasing for several reasons including that criminals believe they can get away with crypto theft because transactions are hard to trace and often cloaked by anonymity, according to the crypto tracing firm TRM Labs. And crypto holders are getting easier to identify because of the prevalence of personal information online and people flaunting their crypto wealth on social media, the firm says.Phil Ariss, TRM Labs’ director of UK public sector relations, said crypto also may be attracting criminal groups that have long used violence.“As long as there’s a viable route to launder or liquidate stolen assets, it makes little difference to the offender whether the target is a high-value watch or a crypto wallet,” Ariss said in a statement. “Cryptocurrency is now firmly in the mainstream, and as a result, our traditional understanding of physical threat and robbery needs to evolve accordingly.” Dave Collin, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
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