- by Asthma is a worldwide problem, and there seems to be little doubt that it’s getting worse: even though the disease is known from ancient descriptions, rates have increased notably in recent decades in the industrialized world. It appears to be a chronic inflammation condition of the lungs and airway, where bronchospasms can significantly narrow the lung passages and cause breathing problems that can be quite severe. In some cases there’s a genetic background that can be pointed to as part […]
- by (Part I is here, and Part II is here. But now we're faced with a whole new issue. . .) Late on Friday came the unexpected and unwelcome news that the NIH is trying to cut the overhead payments in its external grants. If you’re not part of this ecosystem, that might sound like a pretty dull accouncement, but unfortunately, it’s anything but. If they manage to follow through on this (see later in this post for more on that), […]
- by The disease formerly known as NASH (non-alcoholic steatohepatitis) was recently renamed in the medical literature to the more descriptive MASH (metabolic-dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis). In its advanced stages, this is what's commonly referred to as cirrhosis of the liver, and in its earlier stages is often called "fatty liver disease". There are a number of other fatty-liver conditions that can come under that title, with various causes, but I think it's safe to say that the most widespread is indeed the standard […]
- by Now here's some natural products work whose direction I didn't see coming: the bacterium Morganella morganii is considered to be a common part of the gut microbiome and an opportunistic pathogen in conditions like IBD and urinary tract infections. But in the (large and difficult) task of figuring out what the connections might be to that microbiome and human health (and human disease), M. morganii had an unusual turn in the spotlight a couple of years back. This paper identified […]
- by "Chemical biology" is a bit of a nebulous term, but for me, one of the things that lands squarely in any reasonable definition of it is the idea of conjugating synthetic molecules to biomolecules in order to make a species that shows activities that neither would show on their own. Antibody-drug conjugates are one of the classic examples, where you use an antibody to direct the localization of what is often (but doesn't have to be) some nasty warhead compound […]
- by I've said it before (and I am an odds-on favorite to say it again), but one of the things that impresses me about the state of chemistry in the modern era is that we have some of the tools we need to actually understand what the heck is going on. By that I mean down at the molecular level, around single molecules, small clusters in solution, near surfaces and interfaces, and so on. It's hard to overstate just how much […]
- by I've been waiting to see the results of analyzing the samples of asteroid (101955) Bennu returned by the OSIRIS-REx mission, and they've just come out. At right is a shot of the probe collecting a sample in 2020; the capsule was returned to Earth in 2023. Here's the first paper on the organic molecules, and here's a paper on the water-derived minerals (both are open access). Bennu is a carbonaceous chrondrite, a very interesting class of object (which is why […]
- by Addendum, Wednesday Feb 5 Regrettably, I have to extend this post due to even more news. The assault on scientific funding and agencies continues, for one thing. Since I posted this, Elon Musk's team has entered the offices of NOAA, since their remit of weather forecasting and climate science has made them a target for the sort of people who believe that any talk of climate change is some sort of liberal plot. Granting opportunities having anything to do with […]
- by OK, let's have some science today, for sanity's sake. You may have heard about the latest software release from OpenAI, "Deep Research", a version of their OpenAI o3 model that is optimized to search through online sources and produce reports from them. It's billed as "An agent that uses reasoning to synthesize large amounts of online information and complete multi-step research tasks for you", and immediately I am reminded of why OpenAI gets on my nerves so much. I strongly […]
- by This will be part of a series of posts on the current crisis around the Trump administration and science funding. Part I is here, and I will continue to link through the whole series each time. I'm doing this because news continues to accumulate, and it's a situation of great importance. But at the same time I plan to keep posting actual science content as usual, to help maintain my own mental balance if nothing else (!) Please note that […]
- by We all got to learn about vaccines during the worst years of the pandemic (although it's clear that some people learned more than others, and a great many people "learned" a lot of things that aren't real). The mRNA vaccine platform is of course just the latest iteration in a long series of different vaccine varieties, and one of the earliest was the "live attenuated virus" technique. That one takes advantage of the actual pathogen, but modifies it so that […]
- by Huntington's disease (HD) is of course very bad news: it's a progressive and ultimately fatal neurodegeneration that has no cure. What's more, there's nothing available yet that can even slow it down or help with its symptoms. We know a fair amount about it – for example, we know that it's caused by mutations in the gene for the Huntingtin protein (HTT), and such mutations can either be inherited or arise spontaneously. These mutations cause a trinucleotide repeat (CAG) in […]
- by I was horrified by this article in the New York Times from John Carryerou (the reporter who broke the Theranos story). It's another shady-medical-device story, but this one, for better or worse, is not as off-the-charts crazy as Theranos. But it has more actionable lessons, I think. The Theranos scandal had takeaways like "Consider the possibility that the charismatic young founder of this hot company might have been lying about absolutely everything from Day One, over and over in every […]
- by Here’s an editorial by Adam Feuerstein at Stat that points out that in all the uproar about the Trump administration’s attacks on the NIH (and the NSF, and NOAA, and other science-based agencies), there’s a conspicuous zone of silence. And that’s the biopharma industry. It’s clear that almost everyone is keeping their heads down in the interest of “keeping lines of communication open” and so on. “Thanks for checking in. Nothing to share on this now,” a PhRMA media representative […]
- by I've written a lot around here about the use of ML/AI techniques for antibody design, and it's no wonder that a lot of money is being poured into this area. Proteins in general are riper territory for in silico design than small molecules (as witness the early successes of AlphaFold and RoseTTAFold), for a number of reasons. Chief among those is the way that we were able to train the models against a very large, very well-curated data set of […]
- by (This is part of a series of posts on the attacks on science and federally-funded research in the US. Part III is here). As many will have heard, the last few days have seen even more turmoil in the NIH and other federally funded science agencies. No one should have any doubt by this point: this is an unprecedented situation. There's no "Well, what was the result last time this happened", because there has never been anything to compare to […]
- by It is impossible to say how many human lives have been saved by antibiotics, and there are still a few people alive who lived through the introduction of things like penicillin and sulfanilamide. The dramatic change in the treatment of bacterial infection during that era really can't be overstated. Doctors knew exactly what a terminal infection looked like, because they saw such things frequently, and they knew that there was nothing they could really do about it. Until the advent […]
- by Note: I honestly planned to write about something else today. But as I seem to be saying a lot these days, here we are. . . I wrote here a week ago about the near-total silence from biopharma CEOs about what has been happening under the current administration, and called on people to speak up. We're starting to see some of that, such as this editorial by the CEO of Recursion Pharma. Chris Gibson says (correctly) that basic research funded […]
- by After that post on bacteria and antibiotics the other day, I thought I might give equal time to the antifungals. It's really hard to say which of those fields is harder to make headway in! As I've mentioned before around here, the continued use of as nasty (and as old) a drug as Amphotericin B really shows how much we need new drugs against fungal infections. I think it's safe to say, though, that the tools available in that research […]
- by Here's a new paper addressing something many of have wondered about. The clinical trials of Paxlovid (nirmatrelvir/ritonavir) showed reduced hospitalization and severe coronavirus among the unvaccinated patients studies, but the effect was not significant among vaccinated ones. But in those trials the median ages of the participants were in their 40s, and it's also been very clear that risks for severe disease increase with age. So what is Paxlovid's effect in older populations, and how does that correlate with vaccination […]
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