New class of cytosine base editors; plus new U.K. vaccine manufacturing facilities, scalable surrogate assay for COVID-19; combating antibiotic resistance and

New base editors widen template-free editing options
A Massachusetts General Hospital team co-led by Beam Therapeutics Inc. (NASDAQ:BEAM) co-founder Keith Joung, and a Chinese Academy of Sciences team have separately developed a new class of CRISPR DNA editors that make cytosine (C)-to-guanine (G) base changes, and don’t need a correction template. Earlier template-free C base editors are restricted to C-to-thymine (T) changes. The Mass General paper and the Chinese Academy of Sciences article describing the new C base editors -- which comprise a Cas9 nickase, a cytidine deaminase and a uracil-DNA glycosylase -- were published in Nature Biotechnology.

U.K. building more vaccine manufacturing facilities
The U.K. government is investing £100 million ($126 million) to create the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult Manufacturing Innovation Centre to accelerate mass production of a COVID-19 vaccine. Slated to open in December 2021 in Braintree, Essex, the facility will have the capacity to produce millions of doses per month for the novel coronavirus and other emerging infectious diseases. The government has already earmarked £93 million for the Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre (VMIC), which is being built in Oxfordshire, and plans to invest a further £38 million to open a rapid deployment facility this summer...