Just a few short weeks after the highly irreverent yet still important Ig Nobel Ceremony, the science community recognized the cream of its crop with the 2023 Nobel Prizes in the first full week of October. The dates for the official announcements are aligned with their usual order throughout the years, always announcing Physiology and Medicine first, then Physics, then Chemistry. The Nobel Committee will transition toward the Literature and Peace prizes to round out the week before Economics is announced on the following Monday. As usual, these prizes recognize a lifetime of work that has given the greatest benefit to humanity. Click the links to check out some of our picks for greatest Nobel science achievements as well a look at last year's Nobel winners, but here we go for this year's running tally of scientific legend.

It has been a very trying time for all of us across the planet, with COVID-19 still lurking around as new variants pop up, while having to also deal with the growing spread of monkeypox. As for me, I’ve had a couple of bad colds since the start of the pandemic, but one was before commercial testing was available (maybe COVID? But probably not!), and the other was more recent and was definitely not COVID (lucky me!). In fact, I have to say that because of certain choices I have made to avoid the big bad disease as well as other preventable diseases, this has been the least I’ve experienced illness in quite some time.

In November 2021 we hosted a Lab Member of the Year contest. This contest allowed for various members of the research community to be highlighted for their contributions to their respective labs. At the end of it all Dr. Francesc X. "Xavi" Ruiz Figueras, an assistant research professor at Rutgers' Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine, took first place and became ABclonal's Lab Member of the Year.

Dr. Ruiz Figueras is a highly skilled scientist who has made significant scientific contributions to the fields of enzymology and structural biology studying the structure and function of human and viral proteins, especially HIV-1 reverse transcriptase and human aldo-keto reductases, with an emphasis on catalysis and inhibition for drug discovery¹. In his spare time he enjoys playing basketball, reading, and spending time with his family. Currently, he is reading a book about philosophy, which he feels has applications to living during these pandemic times. He believes we should take whatever the life lessons we can take from this book in order to hopefully be more resilient.

We sat down with Dr. Ruiz to discuss his lab life at Rutgers, his current research, and what he is looking forward to researching in the future. 

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 has raised global health concerns. As case numbers continue to climb, there is an urgent need for an active drugs against SARS-CoV-2. The development of new drugs is time-consuming and costly, and the safety of new drugs is paramount. Therefore, the strategy of drug repurposing represents one of the fastest approaches to have an active drug to fight SARS-CoV-2 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a matter of fact, in silico repurposing approaches have found increasing popularity during the COVID-19 epidemic [1], especially with the great breakthrough achieved using 3CLpro as a target to screen drugs. By the end of 2021, the FDA has authorized the first oral antiviral drug Paxlovid, produced by Pfizer, to treat COVID-19. Due to that much of the scientific and clinical work on drug repurposing or drug screening against SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 is still ongoing, in this blog we will review the latest progress on the potential targets, including 3CLpro, for the drug discovery or intervention of COVID-19.

Having been over a year since COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic, we here at ABclonal have had the chance to compile and explore a wide range of information, resources, and breakthroughs related to the novel coronavirus through our blogs. Below, we've organized and selected five recommended pieces of reading related to COVID-19, covering topics including asymptomatic cases, the different detection methods (PCR vs. antibody testing), as well as a one-year-mark review of the impact of COVID-19.

It has now been over a year since March 2020, when the World Health Organization determined that the growing spread of COVID-19 would be officially characterized as a global pandemic. The year that followed challenged humanity with a public health crisis on a scale that few could even imagine, with far-reaching social and economic impacts still being felt across the globe. And yet, this past year also brought out the best in many of us, with medical professionals diligently fighting the pandemic on the front lines and researchers collaborating to progress our global recovery. Owing to the relentless work of researchers making breakthroughs in vaccine research, it appears that the long road to recovery has finally begun.