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#science

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When Spanish colonizers established a town in the mountains of Bolivia in the 1500s, they might have expected to expand their communities by having babies, but they could not. While Indigenous folks raised families, not a single child of European descent was born for decades. It was all down to the lack of oxygen at altitude, which the settlers were not genetically adapted to deal with. @KnowableMag reports on how scientists are now studying this to see if they can help pregnant people whose bodies are struggling to provide enough oxygen to their fetuses, at any altitude.

knowablemagazine.org/content/a

Knowable Magazine | Annual ReviewsBorn in thin air: Overcoming the challenges of pregnancy at high elevationIn people not adapted to life at altitude, the sparse oxygen can impair fetal growth, causing problems that can last a lifetime. Researchers are searching for remedies.
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Last week, Aix Marseille University in France offered funding to American scientists who feel like their work is being censored. It’s already seeing great interest from researchers at NASA, Yale and Stanford, and the program may extend through more universities across Europe. “We are witnessing a new brain drain,” Éric Berton, Aix Marseille University’s president, said in a press release. Here’s more from @emanuelmaiberg for @404mediaco

404media.co/nasa-yale-and-stan

404 Media · NASA, Yale, and Stanford Scientists Consider 'Scientific Exile,' French University Says“We are witnessing a new brain drain.”

The mRNA technology behind coronavirus vaccines is now being used to create bespoke vaccines for cancer patients.

"Cancer vaccines weren’t a proper field of research before the pandemic. There was nothing. Apart from one exception, pretty much every clinical trial had failed. With the pandemic, however, we proved that mRNA vaccines were possible.

mRNA cancer vaccines work by giving the body instructions to make a harmless piece of a cancer-related protein. This trains the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells carrying that protein. Think of it like a training manual for security guards. The vaccine gives the immune system a guide on what cancer looks like, so it knows exactly who to watch for and remove.

Going from mRNA Covid vaccines to mRNA cancer vaccines is straightforward: same fridges, same protocol, same drug, just a different patient.

In the current trials, we do a biopsy of the patient, sequence the tissue, send it to the pharmaceutical company, and they design a personalized vaccine that’s bespoke to that patient’s cancer. That vaccine is not suitable for anyone else. It’s like science fiction.

The UK was ready. We had fridges and we had world-class manufacturing and research facilities. During the pandemic, we had proven we could open and deliver clinical trials fast. Also, the UK had established a genomic global lead with Genomics England and the 100,000 Genome Project. All doctors and nurses in this country are trained in genomics.

So the UK government signed two partnerships: one with BioNTech to provide 10,000 patients with access to personalized cancer treatments by 2030, and a 10-year investment with Moderna in an innovation and technology center with capacity to produce up to 250 million vaccines. The stars were aligned.

For many years, we believed that research is inherently slow. It used to take 20 years to get a drug to market. Most cancer patients, unfortunately, will succumb by the time a drug gets to market. We showed the world that it could be done in a year if you modernize your process, run parts of the process in parallel, and use digital tools.

We have a trial to stop skin cancer coming back after you cut it out. It’s now completed. We over-recruited again, just like every single one of the trials that we ran, and the trial finished one year ahead of schedule. That’s completely unheard of in cancer trials because they normally run over-long.

What will happen now is that, over the next six to 12 months, we will monitor the people in the trial and work out if there’s a difference between the people who took the cancer vaccine and the ones who didn’t. We’re hoping to have results by the end of the year or beginning of 2026. If it’s successful, we will have invented the first approved personalized mRNA vaccine, within only five years of the first licensed mRNA vaccine for Covid. That’s pretty impressive."

- Dr. Lennard Lee, UK National Health Service oncologist and medical director at the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford

wired.com/story/wired-health-l

WIRED · Covid Vaccines Have Paved the Way for Cancer VaccinesBy João Medeiros

‼️ Cause of post-#COVID inflammatory shock in children identified: Reactivation of the Epstein-Barr virus appears to cause the rare condition #MISC. The findings, uncovered by a team from #CharitéBerlin & the DRFZ, have now been published in #Nature.

💡 These insights open the door to new treatment methods, potentially not limited to MIS-C.

👉 charite.de/en/service/press_re

#CharitéPaper #Science #Research #Medicine #EBV #PIMS #SARSCoV2 #COVID19 #corona
@nature.portfolio

National Cancer Institute Employees Can’t Publish Information on These Topics Without Special Approval

Vaccines. Fluoride. Autism. Communications involving these and 20 other “controversial, high profile, or sensitive” topics will get extra scrutiny under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

propublica.org/article/nationa

ProPublicaNational Cancer Institute Employees Can’t Publish Information on These Topics Without Special Approval
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