NEWS ROUND-UP 15 December 2021
Leti’s skull was found in Rising Star Cave.Credit: Wits University
The first partial skull of a 4- to 6-year-old Homo naledi child, who died almost 250,000 years ago, has been found in the depths of Rising Star Cave near Johannesburg, South Africa, where the ancient hominin species was first discovered in 2015.The skull comprises 28 fragments and 6 teeth that researchers have pieced together into this reconstruction (J. K. Brophy et al. Palaeoanthropology http://doi.org/g46n; 2021). The team named the skull’s owner Leti, after the Setswana word letimela, which means ‘the lost one’. It is a rare find — juvenile hominin remains are usually thin and extremely fragile.Merck’s COVID pill loses its lustreThings are looking less than rosy for molnupiravir, one of two antiviral pills that have caused excitement because preliminary clinical-trial results showed that they can significantly reduce hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19. A US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee that met on 30 November voted only narrowly to recommend that the drug candidate receive emergency authorization. As Nature went to press, the FDA itself had yet to issue a decision.The agency’s lengthy deliberations could signal uncertainties about the antiviral’s benefits: full trial data submitted to the FDA suggest that molnupiravir is less effective than originally thought, dampening scientists’ hopes that the relatively cheap and easy-to-administer treatment might change the course of the pandemic.The results showed that the antiviral, which was developed by the pharmaceutical firm Merck, based in Kenilworth, New Jersey, and the biotechnology company Ridgeback Biotherapeutics in Miami, Florida, decreased the risk of hospitalization from COVID‑19 by 30% — down from a 50% reduction observed early in the trial. ‘That’s not all that good,’ says Katherine Seley‑Radtke, a medicinal chemist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Monoclonal antibody treatments reduce the risk of severe COVID-19 by up to 85%, although they are costly and need to be administered intravenously.Nicholas Kartsonis, the senior vice-president of clinical research at Merck, told the FDA advisory committee that the company couldn’t explain the starkly different results, which have not been peer reviewed. Nature 600, 365 (2021) doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-03701-1 Drug discovery SARS-CoV-2 Palaeontology Drug discovery SARS-CoV-2 Palaeontology
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03701-1
