11/06/2018 | Page 2 of 2

European Union and Japanese plans to form the world’s largest free trade area cleared a significant hurdle Monday when EU lawmakers specializing in trade backed a deal that could enter force next year.

The European Parliament’s international trade committee voted 25 in favor to 10 against to clear the deal for a final vote in the parliament’s full chamber set for December 13.

An agreement would bind two economies accounting for about a third of global gross domestic product and also signal their rejection of protectionism.

Both have faced trade tensions with Washington and remain subject to U.S. tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump on imports of steel and aluminum.

Japan had been part of the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership that Trump rejected on his first day in office, turning Tokyo’s focus to other potential partners – such as the European Union.

The EU has also sought other partners after freezing TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) negotiations with the United States in 2016. It concluded an updated trade deal with Mexico earlier this year.

Both have since agreed to start trade talks with Washington.

The EU-Japan agreement will remove EU tariffs of 10 percent on Japanese cars and 3 percent for most car parts. It would also scrap Japanese duties of some 30 percent on EU cheese and 15 percent on wines, and open access to public tenders in Japan.

It will also open up services markets, in particular financial services, telecoms, e-commerce and transport.

The EU is mindful of protests against and criticism of the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) in 2016, which culminated in a region of Belgium threatening to destroy the deal. It finally entered force in 2017.

Critics say the EU-Japan agreement will give too much power to multinationals and could undermine environmental and labor standards, the latter because they say Japanese employees face tougher conditions and less adequate union representation.

Belgium’s regions have given their backing.

Both Brussels and Tokyo want the agreement to enter force early in 2019, before Britain leaves the EU at the end of March.

If it does, it could apply automatically to Britain during a transition period until the end of 2020 and offer comfort to the many Japanese car makers serving the EU from British bases.
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The largest study to date of the genetic makeup of parasitic worms has found hundreds of new clues about how they invade the human body, evade its immune system and cause disease.

The results point to potential de-worming treatments to help fight some of the most neglected tropical diseases — including river blindness, schistosomiasis and hookworm disease — which affect around a billion people worldwide.

“Parasitic worms are some of our oldest foes and have evolved over millions of years to be expert manipulators of the human immune system,” said Makedonka Mitreva of Washington University’s McDonnell Genome Institute, who co-led the work with colleagues from Britain’s Wellcome Sanger Institute and Edinburgh University.

She said the results of this study would lead to both a deeper knowledge of the biology of parasites and a better understanding of how human immune systems can be harnessed or controlled.

Parasitic worm infections can last many years and can cause severe pain, physical disabilities, retarded development in children and social stigma linked to deformity.

Current medicines to combat them — including drugs made by Sanofi, GSK and Johnson & Johnson — can be moderately effective and are often donated by drugmakers or sold at reduced prices to those who need them. But the spectrum of drugs to treat worm infections is still limited.

To try to improve the potential drug pipeline and to understand how worms invade and take up residence inside humans and other animals, the research team compared the genomes of 81 species of roundworms and flatworms, including 45 that had never previously had their genomes sequenced.

The analysis found almost a million new genes that had not been seen before, belonging to thousands of new gene families, and identified many new potential drug targets and drugs.

“We focused our search by looking at existing drugs for human illnesses,” said the Sanger Institute’s Avril Coghlan, who worked on the team. She said this offered a possible fast-track route “to pinpointing existing drugs that could be repurposed for deworming.”

The study’s findings were published Monday in the journal Nature Genetics.
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