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Happy Birthday to Taylor Swift! She’s now old enough to run for President of the United States (not that she SHOULD, just that she CAN…)
And congratulations on my article from a year ago about a little girl named Shelby, whose one-time gene therapy miracle cure took place over the course of a grueling year. (Don’t miss Taylor Swift’s name in the piece itself!)
Solution to the bird flu mystery: no bird flu, but also no flu. Maybe.
If you’ve been following the story of the child in California who was thought to have contracted bird flu after drinking raw milk, we have a rather unsatisfying conclusion for you. Although one test on a sample from the child tested positive for influenza A, confirmatory testing from the CDC was negative for all influenza viruses and failed to identify the disease.
This outcome does not definitively rule out the possibility that the child had an H5N1 infection, so the child will be counted as a suspected case, said Lisa Santora, public health officer for Marin County. She also said she was not surprised by the outcome because the amount of virus in the original test sample was low and the samples deteriorate over time.
The child has since recovered, so the disease will remain a mystery. Read more from STAT’s Helen Branswell about the lessons learned, further details of the case and the likely future of human H5N1 cases.
When prizes beget prizes
The prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a major funder of scientific research, will change its criteria for the 2027 funding round in an effort to diversify its recipients and the institutions they come from. Currently, only ten institutions (led by Stanford) employ more than half of the HHMI’s principal investigators. Before 2027, institutions that already have two or more HHMI researchers are not eligible.
But does this move spread wealth or unfairly penalize elite institutions where talent is concentrated?
“People might say, ‘This is not a creditable way to distribute money.’ What I would say to that is that the system we have now is not meritorious in the way we distribute the funding in the first place,” said Christine Yifeng Chen, a geochemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who has addressed racial bias at NSF studied. financing.
Read more from STAT’s Anil Oza about the consequences of the ‘Matthew effect’ and HHMI’s intriguing method for democratizing funded research.
A new antiviral class… and half a bridge to nowhere
To stop viruses, antiviral drugs such as the Covid-19 drug Paxlovid target a class of enzyme in a virus’ machinery called a protease. But at one Nature paper Published earlier this week, researchers at Rockefeller University proved that targeting another part of the virus machinery – a methyltransferase enzyme – is another promising strategy for new antiviral drugs.
Human methyltransferases and virus methyltransferases look significantly different – meaning the antiviral candidate can efficiently target that virus and not cause many side effects. Researchers noted that this method could be effective against other RNA viruses such as Ebola and dengue, as well as poxviruses.
This research was funded in part by the Biden administration’s antiviral pandemic program, which was intended to provide a bold defense against both Covid and future pandemics. However, as STAT’s Jason Mast told us earlier this year, the program’s funding was cannibalized by Omicron’s responses and other efforts. What was supposed to be a five-year, $1 billion effort will run out of funding next spring, leaving the country with a “half bridge to nowhere” of $577 million.
The Syrian-American Dream
When M. Ihsan Kaadan came to the U.S. after completing his medical training in Syria, he recalls, “I quickly realized that the American dream is a reality.” He earned a master’s degree in international healthcare policy and management and completed his residency and fellowship at highly respected hospitals in Boston. While working at Massachusetts General Hospital, his research group included an Israeli and an Iranian in addition to himself – three people who would never work together anywhere else. The US accepted him regardless of his background or religion.
He’s not sure if any of that could happen today.
In a STAT First Opinion, Kaadan lays out the problems the first Trump administration’s “Muslim ban” created for international physicians who helped fill gaps in the U.S. physician workforce. He is excited to use his American medical training to help rebuild Syria’s health care system, but fears for immigrant doctors like him if a new travel ban is imposed in the new administration. Read more here, including statistics on international physicians in the US workforce.
‘Another can to kick a can’ against leukemia
No matter what therapy patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia receive, the expectation is that they will eventually relapse if they live long enough. STAT’s Angus Chen reports that there is new hope – including remission – for patients whose cancer is resistant to other therapies.
In a small phase 1/2 trial, 61% of 23 patients responded to AbbVie’s drug Epkinly, which is already approved for some lymphomas, and 39% had a complete response. This is a very important achievement, says Alexey Danilov, a hematologist-oncologist and cancer researcher at City of Hope, because this is a very difficult patient population to treat.
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t always hope this would be the last therapy, no more fluctuations,” says Brian Koffman, a patient who has relapsed several times. “The reality is you kick the can down the road. But you hope there’s still a can to kick by the end. He is now in remission thanks to the new therapy.
Read more here.
Correction: Yesterday’s edition misspelled the name of Marin County Public Health Officer Lisa Santora.
What we read
- Patients could not pay their utility bills. One hospital turned to solar energy for help, WBUR/KFF Health News
- Inside Isomorphic Labs: Demis Hassabis’ lab-free vision of biotech’s AI future, Endpoints
- A ‘second tree of life’ could cause major damage, scientists warn: New York Times
- I have a rare form of ALS. My insurance company’s approach to covering my medications is cruel, STAT
- With no approved treatments and little support, people with Long COVID are turning to online drug markets. The sick times
- Centene warns Republicans against cutting Medicaid or allowing ACA subsidies to expire, STAT