Comment by Riaz Haq on April 17, 2021 at 6:48pm

#Pakistani, #Chinese firms to make #coronavirus jab in #Pakistan . Searle Pakistan will be the first company to manufacture a #COVID19 #vaccine in Pakistan, said the jab has shown promising results in Phase 1 and 2 trials. #pandemic #pharmaceutical

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/pakistani-chinese-firms-to-ma...

A Pakistani pharmaceutical company has signed a deal with a Chinese firm to produce a COVID-19 vaccine in the country, according to an official announcement on Thursday.

In a letter to the Pakistan Stock Exchange, Searle Company Limited said it had finalized an agreement with China’s Livzon Mapharm Inc. to manufacture a novel coronavirus vaccine – V-01 – in Pakistan.

“The Searle Company Limited has successfully concluded an exclusive licensing and supply agreement with Livzon Mapharm Inc. for the Recombinant Novel Coronavirus Vaccine (V-01),” read the letter.

“The licensing agreement also covers the manufacturing transition of (V-01) in Pakistan.”

Searle, which will be the first company to manufacture a COVID-19 vaccine in Pakistan, said the jab has shown promising results in Phase 1 and 2 trials.

“The Phase Ill clinical study will include multiple countries and enroll more than 20,000 subjects, with the aim to evaluate the efficacy, safety, and immunogenicity of V-01 program,” the letter said.

According to the company, the vaccine has “many potential advantages such as strong safety profile … long durability, and easy to scale up for manufacturing.”

Searle said it was hopeful that “the relevant authorities will take up the matter on urgent basis and support fast-track approval to carry out Phase 3 clinical trials in Pakistan.”

Pakistan has so far approved four COVID-19 vaccines for use in the country – China’s Sinopharm and CanSino, along with Russia’s Sputnik V and the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab.


Infections hitting new highs

Pakistan on Friday reported 5,234 new COVID-19 cases, the highest daily spike since June 20 last year, raising its overall tally to 678,165.

Another 83 patients died in the last 24 hours, pushing the fatality count to 14,613, according to the Health Ministry.

As many as 607,205 patients have recovered so far, leaving the number of active cases at 56,347, latest data showed.

Infections have surged in the South Asian country of over 200 million in recent days, with more than 75,000 reported in March alone.

Asad Umar, the country’s planning minister who is leading its pandemic response, said the entire region has been experiencing a “severe” COVID-19 spike.

“It is vital that we all contribute to containing the spread by taking sensible precautions. Wear a mask, avoid crowded places, wash hands or sanitize often, reduce travel to only essential work,” he said on Twitter.

As part of efforts to stem surging infections, the government has reimposed a blanket ban on all kinds of public gatherings across the country and is enforcing expanded lockdowns in the worst-hit areas.

Educational institutes have also been closed until at least April 11 in districts with high infection rates.

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 17, 2021 at 6:54pm

Pakistan inaugurates 1st science tech park
Move is step toward creating knowledge-based economy, says Prime Minister Imran Khan
Islamuddin Sajid |
09.12.2019

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/pakistan-inaugurates-1st-scie...

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan on Monday inaugurated the country's first science and technology park in the capital Islamabad.

It was established at the National University of Science and Technology, a leading higher education institution of the country.

"This is a big achievement and we are determined to turn Pakistan into a knowledge-based economy and innovation by utilizing the energies of youth at proper platforms," Khan said, addressing the inaugural ceremony aired on state-run Pakistan Television.

The project would extend to the other parts of the country as well, he added.

The park will host start-ups in diverse areas, particularly agriculture, health and smart technologies.

"This park will serve as a launchpad for the country’s leading researchers, innovators, and entrepreneurs," said Technology Minister Fawad Hussain.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 11, 2023 at 7:19pm

Migration of academics: Economic development does not necessarily lead to brain drain

https://phys.org/news/2023-01-migration-academics-economic-necessar...

A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, Germany, developed a database on international migration of academics in order to assess emigration patterns and trends for this key group of innovators. Their paper was published in PNAS on Jan. 18.

As a first step, the team produced a database that contains the number of academics who publish papers regularly, and migration flows and migration rates for all countries that include academics who published papers listed on the bibliographic database Scopus. The migration database was obtained by leveraging metadata of more than 36 million journal articles and reviews published from 1996 to 2021.

"This migration database is a major resource to advance our understanding of the migration of academics," says MPIDR Researcher Ebru Sanliturk. Data Scientist Maciej Danko adds: "While the underlying data are proprietary, our approach generates anonymized aggregate-level datasets that can be shared for noncommercial purposes and that we are making publicly available for scientific research."

MPIDR Researcher Aliakbar Akbaritabar explains how they processed the bibliographic data in order to receive information about the migration patterns of academics: "We used the metadata of the article title, name of the authors and affiliations of almost every article and review published in Scopus since 1996. We followed every single one of the roughly 17 million researchers listed in the bibliographic database through the years and noticed changes in affiliation and, by using that tactic we know how many academics left a given country every year."

The researchers' empirical analysis focused on the relationship between emigration and economic development, indicating that academic setting patterns may differ widely from population-level ones.

Previous literature has shown that, as low-income countries become richer, overall emigration rates initially rise. At a certain point the increase slows down and the trend reverses, with emigration rates declining.

This means that favoring economic development has the counterintuitive effect of initially increasing migration from low- and middle-income countries, rather than decreasing it.

Is this pattern also generally valid for migration of scientists?

Not really.

The researchers found that, when considering academics, the pattern is the opposite: in low- and middle-income countries, emigration rates decrease as the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita increases. Then, starting from around 25,000 US Dollars in GDP, the trend reverses and emigration propensity increases as countries get richer.

MPIDR Director Emilio Zagheni adds, "Academics are a crucial group of innovators whose work has relevant economic effects. We showed that their propensity to emigrate does not immediately increase with economic development—indeed it decreases until a high-income turning point and then increases. This implies that increasing economic development does not necessarily lead to an academic brain drain in low- and middle-income countries."

Unveiling these and related patterns, and addressing big scientific questions with societal implications, was possible only because of painstaking work in preparing this new global database of migration of academics. "We are putting the final touches on an even more comprehensive database, the Scholarly Migration Database, which will be released on its own website soon," says software developer Tom Theile.

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