The headlines are still covering the cyclosporiasis outbreak from lettuce, but let's talk about a different summer, long ago. The headlines in Bavaria would have called it "summer diarrhea" & it was killing babies. Enter our hero, Professor Theodor Escherich of the Julius Hospital, Würzburg.

MIT Professor Susumu Tonegawa, renowned molecular biologist and Nobel laureate, dies at 86 news.mit.edu/2026/mit-pro... #neuroscience

MIT Professor Susumu Tonegawa, renowned molecular biologist and Nobel laureate, dies at 86

Susumu Tonegawa, a renowned MIT professor of biology and neuroscience and a Nobel laureate, has died at the age of 86. His discovery of how the immune system generates many different antibodies earned...

news.mit.edu

This is fascinating “curiosity puts the entire brain into a mode of heightened receptivity — not just for the specific thing you want to know, but also for everything around it. Curiosity opens a window, and while the window is open, learning deepens across the board.”🧪

Opinion | We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask

nytimes.com

Excited to share our new paper in @mucosalimmunol.bsky.social ! How do CD4 T cells behave directly inside inflamed intestinal tissue in IBD? Find out below 🧵! paper: sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"Despite years of failure...doubts about what I was doing with my life...years of lackluster results...my PhD research is not a complete waste" Max's story of how we got checkpoint inhibitors should inspire any PhD worried their work's going nowhere theimmunebeyond.substack.com/p/a-brief-hi...

A Brief History of Checkpoint Blockade

A major medical breakthrough, interrupted

theimmunebeyond.substack.com

In a phase 3, randomized trial involving children with achondroplasia (3 to 17 years of age), once-daily oral infigratinib for 1 year significantly increased the annualized height velocity as compared with placebo. Full PROPEL 3 trial results: https://nej.md/4w8vTJc #ICCBH2026

3D reconstruction reveals highly conserved vascular network architecture despite phylogenetic diversity spanning >300M years of evolution. Moer here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

If you’ve built DNA-barcoded antibody panels, you know the pain: every barcode means another conjugation. In our new preprint we introduce UnO, which transforms antibody conjugation problem into a universal barcode conversion workflow, enabling rapid panel generation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Universal oligo adapters for high-efficiency DNA-barcoded antibody panel generation

DNA-barcoded antibodies are central to a broad range of spatial and dissociative assays and applications, including multiplexed imaging, single-cell profiling, and proximity detection. Direct modifica...

biorxiv.org

"Thus, PD-1 signaling is not simply a brake. It also preserves stemness...therapies such as interleukin-7 that restore or stabilize these renewable compartments may extend the long-term benefit of checkpoint inhibition." 🧪🩺

Stemness as the Engine of Checkpoint Durability | NEJM

The clinical benefits of checkpoint inhibitors in the treatment of cancer often wane. A preclinical study points to a potential strategy for a more durable effect.

nejm.org

Reminder — UW #Microbiology has an open search for an Assistant Professor, focusing on fundamental problems in #bacteriology! If you or someone you know would be suitable, here's the ad: apply.interfolio.com/185622

Over the last month I saw that human editors are now stripped of control. I could no longer stop the system from auto-inviting "reviewers" with zero relevant expertise. Even worse - the AI began actively revoking the invitations I manually sent out to actual, qualified experts.

ICYMI, Hopkins will provide $280M in mid-size and large grants to support faculty for 2 years (1) $160M for all life scientists (from basic to bioengineering, from policy to translation) (2) $120M for all science and engineering. This cannot replace federal funding, not even close, but it helps.

Very excited to be sharing our new paper, just out in Nature Cell Biology! The big question we investigate: How do migrating cells put their front 🔴 and back 🔵 in the right place?

I am BEYOND thrilled to share my article for Public Health mag: Baltimore has cut its homicide rate by almost 60% (!!!!) by supporting those most at risk of suffering from or committing gun violence. Other cities, take note: magazine.publichealth.jhu.edu/2026/baltimo...

A Contagious Peace: Behind Baltimore’s Historic Homicide Reduction | Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health Magazine

Baltimore cut its homicide rate by 60% from 2021 to 2025—largely through a public health approach to gun violence.

magazine.publichealth.jhu.edu

"Kaminski, Naji and their colleagues have since treated four more people with CAR-T therapy, one of whom received a transplant last month after waiting 20 years for a donor kidney. The team expects to enrol another four people by the end of this year."🧪🩺

‘Transformative’ CAR-T therapy allows three people to receive kidney transplants

They had ‘highly sensitized’ immune systems that usually reject donated organs, leaving them with few options for survival.

nature.com

After the catch-up in testing, the number of new daily cases has stayed near 20/day. Not rising is a really good thing.

The molecular biology KJV:

A lot of anti-vaccine rhetoric accelerated during the pandemic - but for one anti-vax mom, it was a turning point back to vaccines. Loved this interview with Heather Simpson and @aboutpediatrics.bsky.social! www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2...

Former anti-vax influencer now provides support to parents deciding to vaccinate

Heather Simpson was convinced that if she vaccinated her child, the little girl would die. She also remembers pro-vaccine parents attacking her on social media, calling her a 'baby killer' and repeati...

wbur.org

Can I use this opportunity to recommend a well-reviewed book on the history of our attempts to understand, explain, treat and prevent lung cancer? academic.oup.com/shm/article-...

Carsten Timmermann, A History of Lung Cancer: The Recalcitrant Disease

Despite having been the most common and deadly cancer of the twentieth century (first in the western world and later worldwide), lung cancer never attracte

academic.oup.com

Our World in Data@ourworldindata.org · 2mo ago

Lung cancer deaths trace the rise and fall of smoking— Lung cancer kills more than two million people every year, making it the most fatal cancer globally. While a number of factors increase the risk, the 20th century brought one like no other: smoking.

This is very cool "Although β-arrestins interact with a wide array of signalling effectors at many GPCRs, it is unclear how β-arrestins promote such varied functions. Here we show that β-arrestins undergo liquid–liquid phase separation, forming condensates that regulate GPCR function."🧪

β-Arrestin condensates regulate G-protein-coupled receptor function - Nature

β-Arrestins, multifunctional adaptor proteins that regulate G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), form phase-separated condensates, suggesting that β-arrestin liquid–liquid phase separation o...

nature.com

Spoiler alert: it wasn't. 'Shinya Yamanaka didn’t want to get ahead of himself the first time he looked at induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) through a microscope. “Don’t be excited,” he told his colleague Kazutoshi Takahashi. “There’s a 99.9% chance this is a mistake,” said Yamanaka'

Twenty years of induced pluripotent stem cells

Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka discusses the therapeutic and drug discovery applications for induced pluripotent stem cells.

nature.com

Dravet syndrome is a rare, often fatal form of childhood epilepsy. Exciting new research from #HHMIInvestigator David Liu & collaborators found that a single dose of base editing can correct its underlying mutation in mice, reducing seizures & extending survival: bit.ly/4nLvIAM.

“Where were we? Oh, yes, in the Pit of Despair.”

Nicholas Grossman@nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 2mo ago

What's an out-of-context movie line you find yourself thinking about or saying from time to time? I've got: "The lice hate the powdered sugar" And occasionally "you look better than Veronica Lake" (my wife looks nothing like Veronica Lake or Kim Basinger)

Paper drop where we question the mechanism of action of sotatercept. Think this will only get more important as the drug does lots of interesting things. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42160453/

Sotatercept reduces bone morphogenetic protein signaling in patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension - PubMed

Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is a rare, life-limiting disease where imbalances in the transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) and bone morphogenetic protein receptor type II (BMPR-II) superfamil...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Evidence of off-target probe binding affecting 10x Genomics Xenium gene panels compromise accuracy of spatial transcriptomic profiling

Evidence of off-target probe binding affecting 10x Genomics Xenium gene panels compromise accuracy of spatial transcriptomic profiling

Computational assessment identifies probe binding errors in a widely used commercial platform for spatial transcriptomics.

buff.ly

'We primarily do comparative analysis using human stem cells/organoids and genetically modified mouse models, with some minor use of frog models. We use this approach because, for developmental anomalies, it is impossible to assess true function without in vivo models' @karenjliu.bsky.social

Why in vivo models of disease remain indispensable

Summary: The call to arms for alternatives to model organisms of disease will fail without ongoing integration with – and validation against – complex animal models and support from the animal modelli...

journals.biologists.com

“Evidence suggests that the Bundibugyo virus has been spreading for around two months, WHO officials said at the briefing.”🧪🩺

Richard Van Noorden@richvn.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Oof, this chart comparing this Ebola outbreak to past ones is truly concerning. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The MOSAIC swiss army knife microscope (its previous name) has been published in @natmethods.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A multimodal adaptive optical microscope for in vivo imaging from molecules to organisms - Nature Methods

MOSAIC is a versatile multimodal microscope that allows seamless transition between various light-sheet, two-photon, label-free and super-resolution modalities. It is demonstrated in various systems r...

nature.com

Okay this is very cool “Here we describe computational de novo design methods and a high-throughput “receptor diversion” microscopy-based screen for generating GPCR binding miniproteins with high affinity, potency and selectivity.”🧪

Important to read the seminal paper on the discovery of the Bundibugyo virus. It is a different species from Zaire Ebola virus, differing in its genome by up to 32%. The vaccines and monoclonal antibodies for Zaire virus are unlikely to be effective here. journals.plos.org/plospathogen...

Newly Discovered Ebola Virus Associated with Hemorrhagic Fever Outbreak in Uganda

Author Summary In this report we describe a newly discovered ebolavirus species which caused a large hemorrhagic fever outbreak in western Uganda. The virus is genetically distinct, differing by more ...

journals.plos.org