Student story: From refugee camps to Oxford | University of Oxford Sami Barkal is a 5th year medical student at Oxford's Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology and is a visiting student from Witten/Herdecke University in Germany. In this student story, Sami details his

Sami Barkal is a student at the Kennedy Institute @kiroxford.bsky.social. In his student story, Sami shares his journey from his home of Syria to Germany as a refugee, to where he is today studying for his degree.

Opinion | The Playbook Used to ‘Prove’ Vaccines Cause Autism (Gift Article) Data can easily be manipulated to show causation that doesn’t exist.

The Playbook Used to ‘Prove’ Vaccines Cause Autism www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Congratulations to newly minted Dr. Esther L. Jones @estherlj.bsky.social on her successful DPhil viva! A great collaborative project between the L. Dustin and Jelena Bezbradica @jelenalab.bsky.social labs. Many thanks to examiners Irina Udalova @udalovalab.bsky.social and Menna Clatworthy.

Vaccines are rigorously tested, they are effective, and they save lives. More than 150 million lives have been saved in the past 50 years thanks to vaccines!

But you may be worried about what's in them?
So, let’s break it down ⬇

Text reads: “Canceling clinical trials for life-saving treatments destroys families. Not autism.” Behind the text is an image of RFK Jr.

Canceling clinical trials for life-saving treatments destroys families. Not autism.

Seems like the light chain contributes more to antigen binding than the dogma claims it does

The opposite of fascism Living well and fighting back in a time of terrors

“The best revenge is to refuse their values. To embody the kind of living—free, colorful, open—they want to snuff out. So when they dehumanize, you humanize. When they try to fracture and divide people, you connect… When they try to make you cynical, you double down on hope.”
Anand Giridharadas

Bespoke vaccines can elicit long-lived immune activity against pancreatic cancer T cells induced by personalized pancreatic-cancer vaccines last for years.

A therapeutic cancer vaccine!

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Disease diagnostics using machine learning of B cell and T cell receptor sequences Clinical diagnosis typically incorporates physical examination, patient history, various laboratory tests, and imaging studies but makes limited use of the human immune system’s own record of antigen ...

Disease diagnostics using machine learning of B cell and T cell receptor sequences | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Marie Curie, Physicist and chemist.

Today is International Day of Women & Girls in Science.

Marie Curie, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. Her contributions have left an indelible mark on the world of science & health & continue to inspire generations of scientists & innovators. 🔬 #WomenInScience #WomenInSTEM

Vile

Exactly

Health Programs Shutter Around the World After Trump Pauses Foreign Aid (Gift Article) Lifesaving treatment and prevention programs for tuberculosis, malaria, H.I.V. and other diseases cannot access funds to continue work.

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/h...

Have you or a loved one been treated for cancer? Ever have a vaccine? Had someone you love revived by chest compressions? If so, then you have benefited from NIH-funded research, which has just been effectively shut down by the cancellation of NIH study sections. No new research allowed.

!!

Trump officials ask US health agencies to pause external communications, Washington Post reports The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has instructed federal health agencies to pause all external communications, such as health advisories, weekly scientific reports, updates to websites and social media posts, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, citing a dozen current and former officials and sources.

NEW: Trump orders federal health agencies to STOP communicating health advisories, weekly scientific reports, updates to websites, and to stop making social media posts. I said previously I was worried about the lack of reporting. Here it is. www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

Chemical Formulas xkcd.com/3040

An engineered immunogen activates diverse HIV broadly neutralizing antibody precursors and promotes acquisition of improbable mutations An immunogen engineered by computational and structure-based methods activated diverse B cell precursors and induced rare mutations in mouse models.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This is cool!

Coupling antigens from multiple subtypes of influenza can broaden antibody and T cell responses The seasonal influenza vaccine contains strains of viruses from distinct subtypes that are grown independently and then combined. However, most individuals exhibit a more robust response to one of the...

There's a really interesting new paper out in Science for people who care about immunity to flu (which should be everyone because flu is a VERY big problem):
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Here's my thread explaining this work🧵

now seems to be fixed

is the abstract attached to this preprint correct? It references protein structure prediction ("Recent breakthroughs have used deep learning to exploit evolutionary information in multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) to accurately predict protein structures....") rather than inflammatory syndromes.

Super important thread on why we must continue vaccinating against Polio

Fascinating

Yes please!

Chocolate intake and risk of type 2 diabetes: prospective cohort studies Objective To prospectively investigate the associations between dark, milk, and total chocolate consumption and risk of type 2 diabetes (T2D) in three US cohorts. Design Prospective cohort studies. ...

Finally, some good news! www.bmj.com/content/387/...

Antibody mimicry of a substrate to block flu neuraminidases!