TiO2 ban
A committee of EU members has backed the European Commission’s proposal to ban the use of the common food additive titanium dioxide, paving the way for a potential ban in 2022. The European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) deemed it to be unsafe in May 2021.
Moderna’s African vaccine facility
US biotech Moderna is to develop a vaccine manufacturing facility in Africa with a capacity of at least 500m doses annually. The facility, located in a country and site yet to be disclosed, will expand Moderna’s capacity to manufacture its Covid-19 vaccine and other products in its mRNA vaccine portfolio.
Red but not dead
After the success of Curiosity, a new Mars rover Perseverance is on the planet’s surface and specifically looking for signs of life. Anthony King reports.
Biomedical
Biomedical highlights in C&I Magazine for November 2021 by Kevin Burgess for Texas A&M University, US.
Navigating supply
The UK is experiencing a ‘perfect storm’ of supply chain related disruption. As a result, the chemicals and other industries are subject to unprecedented challenges that are likely to continue into 2022.
Winning lipids
Lipid-based formulations offer a practical oral delivery solution for drugs with sub-optimal physical properties, say David Fulper and Jeff Browne
Biosimilar benefits
Earlier this summer, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) made the ground-breaking decision to recommend the expanded use of biosimilar medicines to treat moderate rheumatoid arthritis.
Reproducibility crisis
Reactions that fail to work consistently cause frustration and waste time, energy and expensive reagents. Even when it seems all variables are carefully controlled, yields can vary hugely, or reactions can fail altogether. In a survey of this ‘reproducibility crisis’ in science (Nature, 2016, 533, 452), almost 90% of chemists said they had failed to successfully repeat someone else’s experiment.
Water cleaning gel
A hydrogel tablet that rapidly purifies contaminated water could save lives. One tablet can disinfect a litre of water and make it suitable for drinking in under an hour, say its developers at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, US.
Super-stable glass
A new type of super-stable organic glass has been created by researchers in Sweden. The group at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg generated a material with the lowest recorded fragility for organic glasses, by mixing eight derivatives of perylene, a polycyclic aromatic molecule (Sci. Adv., 2021, 7, eabi4659).