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Imagine a world in which a vaccine is a cream you rub onto your skin instead of a needle a health care worker pushes into your one of your muscles. Even better, it’s entirely pain-free and not followed by fever, swelling, redness or a sore arm. No standing in a long line to get it. Plus, it’s cheap.

Thanks to Stanford University researchers’ domestication of a bacterial species that hangs out on the skin of close to everyone on Earth, that vision could become a reality.

“We all hate needles — everybody does,” said Michael Fischbach, PhD, the Liu (Liao) Family Professor and a professor of bioengineering. “I haven’t found a single person who doesn’t like the idea that it’s possible to replace a shot with a cream.”

Just 37% of kids have gotten flu shots this year, according to new CDC data. That’s down seven percentage points, from 44% of kids getting shots by this same time last year.

The data concerns health officials, especially since a record number of children died of flu-related causes last year.

Ultimately, 55% of kids got vaccinated against the flu during the 2023–24 flu season, which was the lowest rate in 12 years, a CDC official told NBC News. Vaccination rates have fallen for a variety of childhood vaccines in recent years. The trend has been blamed on vaccine fatigue after the pandemic as well as misinformation about the safety of childhood shots.

MIT researchers have developed an environmentally friendly alternative to the harmful microbeads used in some health and beauty products.

These new polymers break down into harmless sugars and amino acids and could also encapsulate nutrients for food fortification, showing promise in both cosmetic and nutritional applications.

Biodegradable Solutions by MIT.

Finding a reasonable hypothesis can pose a challenge when there are thousands of possibilities. This is why Dr. Joseph Sang-II Kwon is trying to make hypotheses in a generalizable and systematic manner.

Kwon, an associate professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University, published his work on blending traditional physics-based scientific models with experimental data to accurately predict hypotheses in the journal Nature Chemical Engineering.

Kwon’s research extends beyond the realm of traditional chemical engineering. By connecting physical laws with machine learning, his work could impact renewable energy, smart manufacturing, and health care, outlined in his recent paper, “Adding big data into the equation.”

A study in mice has found that maternal gut microbiome composition during pregnancy has long-term effects on offspring stem cell growth and development. The researchers, headed by Parag Kundu, PhD, at the Institut Pasteur of Shanghai-Chinese Academy of Sciences, found that treating pregnant mice with the common gut microbe Akkermansia muciniphila resulted in offspring that had more active stem cells in both the brain and intestinal tract. As a result the offspring were less anxious and recovered quicker from colitis, and these differences were still evident at 10 months of age.

The team showed that Akkermansia muciniphila impacted stem cell growth by altering the abundance of other gut microorganisms and increasing the microbial production of metabolites that cross the placenta and induce stem cell growth and proliferation. Exposing offspring to the bacterium after birth did not result in the same stem cell activation.

“This is a major advancement in developing microbiota-based intervention strategies to improve child health,” said Kundu, who is senior author of the team’s published paper in Cell Stem Cell, titled “Maternal gut microbiota influence stem cell function in offspring.” In their report the team stated, “These results suggest a fundamental role of the maternal microbiome in programming offsprings’ stem cells and represent a promising target for interventions.”

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Vaccines have advanced the field of health and medicine throughout the last century. They are commonly given before a disease can occur to expose individuals to invading pathogens. Vaccines given as a preventative treatment helps the immune system build an immune response against disease that the person may encounter in the future. When an individual gets a shot at the doctor’s office they are injecting an attenuated version of the disease. The body will then recognize this pathogen as foreign and build an immune response against it. This is why many times a person feels sick after a few days from a vaccination – the body is activating the immune system to eliminate the disease.

Many types of vaccines exist and are developed to optimize delivery of attenuated pathogen. Arguably, the most well-known type of vaccine uses messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA). These vaccines work by delivering mRNA of a virus, which allows human cells to produce viral protein. The immune system responds strongly to the viral proteins and targets them with different immune cells, while also generating antibodies against it. Once the body has built this response, the immune system can more easily target the same virus in the future. This recognition of specific infections is referred to as immunological memory. Currently, the only mRNA vaccines Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved are for COVID-19. However, the efficient use of mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 have scientists wondering if this format can be used in other disease settings, including cancer.

A recent article in Nature Communications, by Dr. Damya Laoui and others introduce a novel therapeutic approach in which mRNA is integrated into nanoparticles to overcome tumor progression. Laoui is a group leader at Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie (VIB) in Brussels, Belgium. Her work focuses on immune cell activation through specific immune cells known as macrophages and dendritic cells. Laoui also works on developing novel personalized immunotherapies for patients with hard-to-treat cancers.

Researchers think certain common viruses may trigger some autoimmune conditions—alone or in concert with other factors. A recent Office of Autoimmune Disease Research (OADR)-Office of Research on Women’s Health Science Talks series focused on understanding the triggers of autoimmunity and advancing research.

Almost 80 percent of people living with an autoimmune disease are women. It’s estimated there are 80–120 autoimmune diseases. These chronic and often debilitating diseases have no known cures. Some combination of genetics, immune regulation and the environment work together to form an “endotype” for each autoimmune disease patient, explained Dr. Judith James of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation.

Her presentation focused on lupus, or systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), which disproportionately affects women. Nine women are diagnosed with SLE for every male. In SLE, the immune system attacks healthy tissue, causing inflammation and occasionally permanent damage.

Saar Yoskovitz is Co-Founder & CEO at Augury, a pioneer in AI-driven Machine Health and Process Health solutions for industrial sectors.

American manufacturers are at a crossroads, needing to decide between evolution and obsolescence. The tools that historically drove profitability and efficiency are no longer having an impact. Labor is hard to find and harder to keep. The National Association of Manufacturing projects that 2.1 million manufacturing roles will go unfilled by 2030. This hard truth is compounded by findings in Augury’s State of Production Health report, which reveals that 91% of manufacturers say that the mass exodus of industry veterans will worsen the knowledge gap.

An alarming rate of brain drain is looming over the industrial sector. As tenured employees reach retirement age and fewer professionals line up to take their place, more manufacturers are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to bridge the gap.