Top 10 science stories of 2020

HISTORY OF COVID

COVID-19

On January 7, 2020 Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), officials announced they had identified a new virus and named it 2019-nCoV.

COVID Vaccine

On Nov. 9, New York-based Pfizer and the German company BioNTech made history by presenting preliminary data indicating that their coronavirus vaccine was over 90 percent effective.

On Nov. 30, the Boston-based company Moderna announced it was applying to the Food and Drug Administration for an emergency use authorization, less than a year after it launched the first clinical trial for a coronavirus vaccine. Moderna reported 94.5% efficacy. The Gamaleya Research Institute, part of Russia’s Ministry of Health, has created a vaccine with an efficacy rate of 91.4 percent, according to a Dec. 14 announcement.

On Dec. 8, researchers with the University of Oxford and the British-Swedish company AstraZeneca published the first scientific paper on a Phase 3 clinical trial of a coronavirus vaccine. The trial demonstrated that the vaccine can protect people from Covid-19, but it left many questions unresolved about the results.

New cancer vaccine ready for human trials

A team of researchers has designed a novel cancer therapeutic vaccine that has the potential to treat numerous blood cancers as well as solid malignancies including breast, lung, renal, ovarian and pancreatic cancers. It works by targeting cancers that express a highly immunogenic tumor? associated antigen transcription factor Wilms' tumor 1 (WT1). The team published findings from a preclinical study in July 2020.

First animal-to-human transmission of deadly hantavirus identified in Germany