U.S. Army scientists have launched a phase 1 clinical trial of an experimental vaccine against the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus, DoD News reported Feb. 17.

Cheryl Pellerin writes researchers at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research will administer the GLS-5300 vaccine in 75 trial participants at the institute’s clinical trial facility in Maryland.

Inovio Pharmaceuticals and GeneOne Life Science teamed up to develop the DNA vaccine candidate against MERS coronavirus.

“One of the benefits of a DNA vaccine is that you don’t need any kind of culture system, like eggs, and you can produce it very quickly,” said Kayvon Modjarrad, the trial’s lead investigator and associate director for the emerging infectious disease research program at WRAIR.

Modjarrad told DoD News that the vaccine candidate could be used by the Defense Department as a countermeasure in an effort to protect U.S. service personnel in the Middle East against the virus.

MERS is a severe respiratory condition that has infected over 1,600 individuals since its discovery in Saudi Arabia in 2012.

Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services believe that a transparent reporting structure can be a tool to strengthen the cybersecurity posture of HHS and its component agencies, Federal Times reported Monday.

Aaron Boyd writes HHS recorded a total of 26,381 computer security incidents across the department’s four key components between January 2013 and September 2015.

Incident data obtained by Federal Times showed malware was the most common attack vector within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.

“One of the great things about this report and the other reports, tools and alerts that we have is we use them in aggregate,” Beth Anne Killoran, acting chief information officer of HHS, told the publication.

“While this might be one mechanism to alert us, we have others as well,” Killoran added.

She noted that HHS components also use the Einstein government network monitoring tool.

Eight African-American military leaders were honored at the U.S. Navy-hosted annual “Stars and Stripes” awards program in recognition of their contributions to the military and to the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, the Defense Department reported Monday.

Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. Bill Moran delivered the keynote speech during the dinner and awards program held Friday in Philadelphia as part of the 30th Black Engineer of the Year Award STEM conference.

C. Todd Lopez writes approximately 140 senior STEM professionals and active and retired service personnel also mentored over 300 students at the event.

The awardees are:

• Navy Capt. Mark Glover, program manager for Navy communications and global positioning system
• Navy Fleet Master Chief Petty Officer April Beldo at the office of the chief of naval operations.
• Navy senior executive Jimmy Smith, director of integrated nuclear weapons safety and security, strategic systems programs
• Army Brig. Gen. Carl Alex, assistant deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Army Forces Command
• Air Force Lt. Col. Keithen Washington, assistant director for officer commissioning programs at the office of the defense undersecretary for personnel and readiness
• Marine Corps Lt. Col. David Everly, junior military assistant to the defense secretary
• Coast Guard Capt. Jason Merriweather, chief of the office of military personnel
• Air Force Brig. Gen. Leonard Isabelle, commander of the Michigan Air National Guard

The U.S. Air Force has concluded a flight test of the Boeing-built Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile system.

The ICBM weapon platform with the test re-entry vehicle reached its target area in the Marshall Islands following its launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, the Air Force said Friday.

Minuteman III is a land-based weapon system that works to deter nuclear threats.

Boeing collaborates with Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and other companies as part of the ICBM team that works to provide development, engineering, deployment and sustainment support for the Air Force’s ICBM weapon system.

Renee Wynn, chief information officer at NASA, has said her office has begun to leverage cloud platforms in an effort to optimize operations and improve the space agency’s enterprise information technology infrastructure, FedTech magazine reported Thursday.

Wynn told FedTech managing editor David Stegon in an interview that her office also has started to implement an architecture that seeks to equip employees with collaborative platforms for use in instant messaging, telephony, video communications and Web collaboration.

“We want to ensure the infrastructure supports not only internal NASA collaboration requirements, but also external partner collaboration,” she added.

Wynn, former acting assistant administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, noted that the space agency also has established a laboratory at Johnson Space Center in order to expand the use of Internet of Things platforms within the agency.

She also cited in the interview that big data is one of the areas of data management that she wants to focus on.

Ann Barron-DiCamillo, the retiring director of the Department of Homeland Security‘s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, plans to establish a cybersecurity venture firm with partners to finance cyber technologies, FCW reported Friday.

Sean Lyngaas writes Trend Micro Chief Cybersecurity Officer Tom Kellermann and Booz Allen Hamilton Principal Hank Thomas will join Barron-DiCamillo to launch Strategic Cyber Ventures.

Kellermann will serve as CEO, Thomas as chief operating officer and Barron-DiCamillo as chief technology officer, the report said.

“All three of us have cyber operational backgrounds, and I think having a venture capital group that’s run by actual cyber operators is really unique and is a differentiator,” Barron-DiCamillo told FCW.

Strategic Cyber Ventures will draw funding from private equity sources and cover international markets such as Britain and Israel, Lyngaas reports.

“I think there are some great technologies that are coming out of both of those domestic spaces that fit in with what I see as… growth areas for cyber,” Barron-DiCamillo said.

The General Services Administration‘s Digital Analytics Program has introduced 10 agency-specific dashboards to an online tool that works to collect analytics data on Web traffic to government agencies’ websites.

An article posted Thursday said the dashboards added to the analytics.usa.gov aim to provide information on the public’s interaction with websites of specific agencies.

Tim Lowden, DAP team lead, co-wrote the post with GSA’s 18F organization innovation specialists Gabriel Ramirez, Gray Brooks, Eric Mill, Colin Craig and Julia Winn.

Agencies that volunteered to take part in the initial release of the dashboards are NASA, Environmental Protection Agency, National Archives and Records Administration, Small Business Administration and the departments of Commerce, Veterans Affairs, Education, Energy, Interior and Justice.

Each dashboard shows visits to agency websites over the past three months as well as locations of online visitors in the U.S. and overseas.

The types of devices, browsers and operating systems that online visitors used to access government websites are also provided in the dashboards.