Health News Weekly Links 3/9/2025
Big news on mRNA vaccines for cancer, how indoor air quality affects health, the Texas measles outbreak, new antibiotics, and more.
A new white paper from the Brown University Pandemic Center proposing actions to improve indoor air quality: “Americans spend 90% of their time indoors, but often indoor air can be 2 to 5 times—or even 100 times—more polluted than outdoor air. However, most buildings have not been designed to be healthy, and we do not have health-based indoor air quality standards or targets. Just as past public health initiatives have provided us with clean water, eliminated indoor smoking, and improved fire safety, there is an opportunity to bring cleaner air to buildings across America, especially for schools and other public buildings.”
“A personalized mRNA vaccine against pancreatic cancer created a strong anti-tumor immune response in half the participants in a small study. The vaccine will soon be tested in a larger clinical trial. The approach may also have potential for treating other deadly cancer types…It is designed to help immune cells recognize specific neoantigens on patients’ pancreatic cancer cells.” This kind of progress is why NIH-funded basic and applied research is so valuable!
The Texas measles outbreak has grown to nearly 200 cases while neighboring states report dozens of illnesses: “Childhood vaccination rates across the country have declined as an increasing number of parents seek exemptions from public school requirements for personal or religious reasons. In Gaines County, Texas, which has the majority of cases, the kindergarten measles vaccination rate is 82 percent — far below the 95 percent needed to prevent outbreaks.” Between 2000 and 2023, measles vaccination saved an estimated 60 million lives worldwide.
Is a new class of antibiotics on the way? Let’s hope so. “Antibiotic resistance, according to the World Health Organization, was responsible for more than a million deaths worldwide in 2019 and contributed to nearly 5 million deaths. Meanwhile, new classes of antibiotics are being approved at very low rates. Between 2017 and 2022, just a dozen antibiotics were approved worldwide and only two of those were from new classes that work in a different way than existing medicines…The startup [Kinvard Bio] is creating a new class of antibiotics in the hopes of treating drug-resistant infections and diseases.”
Matthew McKnight’s Five Observations on and Predictions for Biosecurity for 2025: A key excerpt: “…every time a naturally derived biothreat evades our public health and biosecurity infrastructure, we are inadvertently exposing massive vulnerabilities that can be leveraged for bioweapons. This is happening more and more. Just like satellite and surveillance planes (IMINT, MASINT, GEOINT) were urgently needed to monitor the development and deployment of nuclear weapons in the last strategic arms race, we will unfortunately need a new discipline and significant investment in a new domain of BIOINT.”
DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office Director Michael Koeris on the automation of biology lab work: “Lab automation isn't keeping pace with AI advancement - and that's both a challenge and an opportunity. While pioneering work from Emerald Cloud Lab (https://buff.ly/3XaBVKs) showed us the potential of fully automated facilities, we're still far from true closed-loop scientific discovery…”
