Publisher Health

As Streptococcus A cases continue to be prevalent in Queensland and internationally, a new nasal vaccine could provide long-term protection from the deadly bacteria.
Associate Professor Manisha Pandey, Professor Michael Good, and their team from Griffith University’s Institute for Glycomics, are leading the development of a Strep A vaccine which is currently in Phase 1 clinical trials in Canada and quickly advancing to Phase 2 efficacy trials.
The team’s new preclinical research, recently published in Nature Communications, shows an experimental liposome-based vaccine approach incorporating a conserved M-protein epitope from Strep A and an immunostimulatory glycolipid (3D(6-acyl) PHAD) administered via the nasal passage, can provide long-term mucosal protection against Strep A.
Lead author Dr Victoria Ozberk said studies have shown most pathogens enter or colonise via the soft tissue in the upper respiratory tract, which is essentially the highway to the rest of the body.
“This has the potential to be a world-first as there are currently no subunit vaccines that target the upper respiratory tract due to a lack of licenced immunostimulants suitable for human use,” Dr Ozberk said.
“We demonstrated that a liposomal mucosal vaccination strategy can induce robust local protective immunity.”
Associate Professor Pandey said the team found PHAD plays an augmenting role in inducing enduring humoral and cellular immunity, which was evident for at least one-year post-vaccination.

The process of updating the healthy eating recommendations has become more transparent in recent years, but conflicts persist.It is a long-running concern of government watchdogs: Some of the experts responsible for helping to craft the U.S. dietary guidelines also take money from big food and drug companies.A report published Wednesday by the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know makes those concerns plain. Nine of the 20 experts on the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee have had conflicts of interest in the food, beverage, pharmaceutical or weight loss industries in the last five years, the report found.Gary Ruskin, the executive director of the nonprofit, said the finding “erodes confidence in the dietary guidelines,” which provide recommendations on how people can eat a healthier diet. The guidelines are widely used by policymakers to set priorities in federal food programs, health care and education — and questions about industry influence could damage the public’s trust that the recommendations are based in science rather than reflecting corporate interests, Mr. Ruskin said.What the new report foundFor the report, Mr. Ruskin and his colleagues scoured publicly available records and identified financial relationships with industry groups and for-profit food and pharmaceutical companies. Those relationships included research funding from infant formula companies, the U.S. Egg Nutrition Center and the California Walnut Commission; paid consulting positions with companies that manufacture weight loss drugs; and advisory board roles at WeightWatchers and the National Dairy Council.One committee member, for example, received a $240,000 grant from Eli Lilly, one of the top insulin manufacturers, to research better ways for diabetes patients to manage their blood sugar through their diets. The current committee members have far fewer industry ties than those in years past, said Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University who served on the 1995 committee and is a frequent critic of the guidelines. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services, which jointly revise the dietary guidelines every five years, appointed the current committee members. The members reported their financial disclosures to the agencies, who released a combined list of conflicts for the group — but not for individuals — in June.Why conflicts of interest are a concernWhen committee members receive funding from certain industry groups or organizations, it raises the concern that they may be biased toward them, Dr. Nestle said. “Part of the problem is the influence is unconscious,” she said. “People don’t recognize it,” she added, and will often deny it.Even if such relationships do not influence the experts, Mr. Ruskin said, they can create the appearance that they do — which can seed doubt about how independent the committee’s recommendations actually are.Christopher Gardner, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and a current member of the dietary guidelines committee, said it would be difficult to find enough nutrition experts for the 20-member committee who had not taken money from industry groups. Federal funding for nutrition research is limited, he said, and many researchers accept industry grants for research studies so they can keep their jobs in academia. “We have to publish or perish,” Dr. Gardner said.The Right to Know report identified one major conflict of interest for Dr. Gardner: a research grant from Beyond Meat, which makes plant-based meat alternatives.Despite that conflict, Dr. Gardner said he believed he could remain objective in his committee duties, which will include reviewing the relationship between what people eat and the risk of various diseases. And, he said, the way the committee evaluates questions of diet and health, including by rigorously reviewing scientific evidence and holding committee discussions and public meetings, would prevent one person’s bias from swaying the committee’s decisions. “I have full faith that this group is going to very objectively consider all the evidence for every question,” he said.Even with significant conflicts among members of the 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, Dr. Nestle said they did a “pretty good job” of evaluating the evidence. Yet industry influence can still creep in later in the process, she said, when the U.S.D.A. and the H.H.S. produce the final guidelines based on the committee’s advice. The 2020 guidelines, for example, disregarded the committee’s recommendation for stricter limits on sugar and alcohol. And the 2015 edition omitted the committee’s advice on limiting the consumption of red and processed meats after intense lobbying by the meat industry.Why the Dietary Guidelines are importantThe Dietary Guidelines for Americans influence federal policies and food programs, physician guidance and how nutrition is taught in schools. They are also used for meal planning in schools, the military, prisons and hospitals.“You can’t overestimate how important they are,” Dr. Nestle said.The current committee is evaluating the research on a number of issues, including on the health effects of ultraprocessed foods, which include most packaged foods and drinks.That is a topic Dr. Nestle said she would follow with interest, given her concerns that the foods are harmful to people’s health.

Especially in California, people could experience delays in appointments or test results and even have medical procedures postponed after thousands of health care workers walked out.More than 75,000 Kaiser Permanente health care workers began a three-day strike after contract negotiations failed over wages and staffing shortages.Damian Dovarganes/Associated PressTens of thousands of Kaiser Permanente workers, including pharmacists, lab technicians, therapists and housekeepers, went on strike Wednesday morning. Kaiser patients in California, Colorado, Oregon, Virginia and Washington State, where Kaiser health care workers are walking out, will be affected.Kaiser, whose health plans cover nearly 13 million people through a network of hospitals and clinics, says its hospitals and emergency departments remain open. But patients should expect delays in scheduling appointments, and procedures that are not considered urgent could be postponed. Doctors and many nurses are not on strike.What services are affected?In an earlier statement, Kaiser emphasized that “a strike should not dissuade anyone from seeking necessary care.” But an array of services, such as lab tests, imaging and the filling of prescriptions, could be delayed because of the walkouts. Some clinics and pharmacies could be closed, and Kaiser said it would contact patients with any cancellations.Kaiser’s hospitals are open. But some people seeking care could be directed to a hospital outside of Kaiser’s usual network if their doctors thought it was necessary. Kaiser’s hospital-based pharmacies also remain open, though the health system is urging people to use its mail order pharmacy if they can wait. Some patients may also be able to go to an outside retail pharmacy to fill a prescription.Patients may feel the effects of the strike in other ways: Hospital rooms may be cleaned less frequently, and the outside workers that Kaiser has brought in to help may not be as familiar with the way a facility operates.Where did Kaiser workers walk out?Kaiser Permanente operates in eight states and the District of Columbia, with 39 hospitals and more than 600 medical offices. Most of the striking workers are in California, where the health system is based. The system operates nearly all of the hospitals in the state, as well as more than 500 medical buildings there.There are no strikes in Georgia, Maryland and Hawaii, according to Kaiser officials, and few walkouts occurred in Washington State. In Virginia and the District of Columbia, only pharmacists and optometrists took part on Wednesday, and they were expected to return to work after a day.What are the main labor issues?The coronavirus pandemic exacerbated staffing shortages that even Kaiser officials acknowledge still plague hospitals and other medical centers around the country. Patients and workers have had to deal with fewer nurses, aides and support staff members, according to many accounts.Kaiser’s union representatives said a lack of adequate staffing created unsafe conditions for patients, and argued that better wages would lure workers to close the gaps created by burnout and the exodus of employees in the last few years.Under a proposed four-year contract, the union had sought a $25 hourly minimum wage and additional increases over the next few years.Kaiser had countered with minimum hourly wages of between $21 and $23 next year, increasing by a dollar a year. Raises would vary, it proposed, depending on locations.How long will the strike last?The strike started on Wednesday morning and could last through Saturday morning, with the exception of Virginia and the District of Columbia. The two sides were still in talks on Wednesday, so it’s possible that a settlement could be reached before then.

From Impossible Burger to “Meatless Mondays,” going meat-free is certainly in vogue. But a person’s genetic makeup plays a role in determining whether they can stick to a strict vegetarian diet, a new Northwestern Medicine study has found.
The findings open the door to further studies that could have important implications regarding dietary recommendations and the production of meat substitutes.
“Are all humans capable of subsisting long term on a strict vegetarian diet? This is a question that has not been seriously studied,”said corresponding study author Dr. Nabeel Yaseen, professor emeritus of pathology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
A large proportion (about 48 to 64%) of self-identified “vegetarians” report eating fish, poultry and/or red meat, which Yaseen said suggests environmental or biological constraints override the desire to adhere to a vegetarian diet.
“It seems there are more people who would like to be vegetarian than actually are, and we think it’s because there is something hard-wired here that people may be missing.”
Several genes involved in lipid metabolism, brain function
To determine whether genetics contribute to one’s ability to adhere to a vegetarian diet, the scientists compared UK Biobank genetic data from 5,324 strict vegetarians (consuming no fish, poultry or red meat) to 329,455 controls. All study participants were white Caucasian to attain a homogeneous sample and avoid confounding by ethnicity.

A research paper published today in Science Translational Medicine presents a significant breakthrough in the area of skin regeneration and wound healing by researchers at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM). The study, titled “Bioprinted Skin with Multiple Cell Types Promotes Skin Regeneration, Vascularization, and Epidermal Rete Ridge Formation in Full-Thickness Wounds,” shows the successful development of bioprinted skin that accelerate wound healing, support healthy extracellular matrix remodeling, and provide optimism for complete wound recovery. Anthony Atala, M.D., director of WFIRM and Adam Jorgensen, M.D., Ph.D., post-doctorate researcher at WFIRM, co-led the study.

Skin regeneration has long been studied with hopes of providing burn victims, wounded warriors, and those with skin disorders opportunities at complete healing. Available grafts are often temporary, or if permanent, have only some of the elements of normal skin, which often have a scarred appearance. The creation of full thickness skin has not been possible to date. This study involved the bioprinting of all six major primary human cell types present in skin combined with specialized hydrogels as a bioink. Multi-layered full thickness skin was created which contained all three layers present in normal human tissue: epidermis, dermis, and hypodermis. When transplanted in pre-clinical settings, the bioprinted skin formed blood vessels, skin patterns, and normal tissue formation. Additional arms of the study demonstrated improved wound closure, reduced skin contraction, and more collagen production to reduce scarring.
“Comprehensive skin healing is a significant clinical challenge, affecting millions of individuals worldwide, with limited options,” explained Dr. Atala, who is the primary author on the paper. “These results show that the creation of full thickness human bioengineered skin is possible, and promotes quicker healing and more naturally appearing outcomes.”
By leveraging existing bioprinting technology to address these limitations, the team at WFIRM has proven that fully functional skin regeneration is possible. The bioengineered skin grafts offer a triple-layer structure for full-thickness wound coverage.

A UCLA-led team of researchers has found nerve pathways that supply brown adipose tissue (BAT), a type of tissue that releases chemical energy from fat metabolism as heat — a finding that could pave the way toward using it to treat obesity and related metabolic conditions.
The researchers have for the first time detailed this nerve supply and provided examples of how manipulating it can change BAT activity, marking a first step toward understanding how to use it therapeutically, said senior author Dr. Preethi Srikanthan, professor of medicine in the division of endocrinology, diabetes & metabolism, and the director of the Neural Control of Metabolism Center at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. The largest deposits of BAT are in the neck.
“We know from previous literature that the sympathetic nerve system is the main ‘on switch’ for BAT activity,” Srikanthan said. “However, the sympathetic nervous system is also responsible for many other stimulatory effects on organs such as the heart and gut. Finding a way to increase activity of BAT alone has been challenging, so finding out the path these sympathetic nerves take to BAT will allow us to explore ways of using nerves to provide a very specific stimulus to activate BAT.”
The paper will be published Oct. 4 in the peer-reviewed PLOS One.
The researchers dissected the necks of eight cadavers to trace the distribution of sympathetic nerve branches in the fat pad above the clavicle. They found nerve branches in all the dissections from the third and fourth cervical nerves to BAT. Further, they demonstrated that BAT activity had changed in clinical cases where neck pathology, such as an increase in BAT temperature following removal of a tumor, had effected a change in the nerves.
“There is a need to find long-term solutions for obesity, and while we are lucky to have effective drugs such as Wegovy and Mounjaro, people need to take them long term for weight loss,” Srikanthan said.
The researchers hope to use the knowledge gleaned from this study to find a way to coax BAT into producing a constant source of fat-burning heat.

What if a vaccine, given to patients just before or after arriving at the hospital, could protect them against lethal superbugs that lurk in healthcare settings?
That’s the premise behind an experimental vaccine invented by a USC-led team and patented by the university. Researchers designed the formula to prevent serious infections from drug-resistant pathogens. A new study shows that a single dose, administered in mouse models, put immune cells into “Incredible Hulk” mode, providing rapid protection against eight different bacteria and fungi species.
“It’s an early warning system. It’s like Homeland Security putting out a terror alert. ‘Everybody, keep your eyes open. Keep an eye out for suspicious packages’,” said senior author Brad Spellberg, chief medical officer at the USC-affiliated Los Angeles General Medical Center (formerly LAC+USC) “You’re alerting the soldiers and tanks of your immune system. The vaccine activates them. ‘Oh my, there’s danger here. I better turn into the Hulk.’ I mean, when you have bad superbugs lurking, that’s when you want the Hulk waiting to pounce rather than Dr. Banner, right?”
The study appears October 4 in Science Translational Medicine.
The USC Stevens Center for Innovation, the technology licensing office for USC, successfully filed one patent for the vaccine and is pursuing others. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, gave the researchers’ startup, ExBaq LLC, nearly $1 million in the form of a small business grant, aimed at speeding up solutions to high-priority problems.
“The pandemic stimulated unprecedented innovation in vaccine development, where federal funding and university-industry partnerships were game changers for translating promising discoveries from academic labs for the good of all,” said Ishwar K. Puri, senior vice president of research and innovation at USC. “We are both pleased and proud of the critical support the USC Stevens Center provided to enable the development of ExBaq’s experimental vaccine that protects vulnerable populations from serious infections.”
Every year, healthcare acquired infections kill more than 90,000 people in the United States and rack up healthcare costs between $28 billion and $45 billion. On any given day, about 1 in 31 hospital patients has at least one such infection, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A pilot program that successfully reduced burnout among female medical residents has shown even greater results on a national level, according to researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
The study was published today in the journal JAMA Network Open.
“We did a pilot program in 2021to see if it would work and it did,” said study co-author Tyra Fainstad, MD, associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “Then we expanded it to 26 graduate medical institutions in 19 states. There were 1,017 participants. We saw significant improvement in every wellbeing outcome we assessed including all three subscales involved in burnout.”
Burnout within the health care community is a national epidemic disproportionally affecting women. Last year, the U.S. Surgeon General declared it a `crisis’ deserving ‘bold, fundamental change’ though little was known about scalable, effective solutions to the problem.
Women are hit harder by burnout for reasons that include bias and sexism at work, pay disparities as well as a disproportionate burden of home management and child/elder care, the researchers said.
Fainstad and co-author Adrienne Mann, MD, both faculty in the CU Department of Medicine, created the web-based Better Together Physician Coaching Program at CU Anschutz with the goal of reducing that burnout. Then they replicated it to a national level and published their findings.
While the pilot program saw improvements in `imposter syndrome’ (feeling as if you don’t really belong in the job’) and self-compassion, the expanded national study also showed significant improvements in outcomes across the board including moral injury and flourishing, offering actual evidence that the program works.

In a study on the prevalence of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and its association with crash risk among older adult drivers, researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health found that older adult drivers with ADHD are at a significantly elevated crash risk compared with their counterparts without ADHD. Outcomes included hard- braking events, and self-reported traffic ticket events, and vehicular crashes. Until now research on ADHD and driving safety was largely limited to children and young adults, and few studies assessed the association of ADHD with crash risk among older adults. The results are published online in JAMA Network Open.
Older adult drivers were more than twice as likely as their counterparts without ADHD to report being involved in traffic ticket events (22 versus 10 per million miles driven), and vehicular crashes (27 versus 13.5 per million miles driven).
“Our findings suggest that effective interventions to improve the diagnosis and clinical management of ADHD among older adults are warranted to promote safe mobility and healthy aging,” observed Yuxin Liu, MPH, Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, and first author.
ADHD is a chronic neurodevelopmental condition with symptoms such as inattentiveness, impulsivity, and hyperactivity. Although ADHD is commonly considered a childhood disorder, it can persist into adulthood and affect daily life performances of older adults. In the U.S., the reported prevalence of ADHD is 9% to 13% in children younger than 17 years and 8% in adults 18 to 44 years of age. The reported prevalence of ADHD in adults has increased in recent years due to improved diagnosis. In general, the prevalence of ADHD decreases with advancing age.
Study participants were active drivers aged 65 to 79 years of age enrolled during 2015 and 2017 in the Longitudinal Research on Aging Drivers (LongROAD) project who were followed for up to 44 months through in-vehicle data recording devices and annual assessments. The data analysis was performed between July 2022 and August 2023.
Of the 2832 drivers studied, 75 (2.6 %) had ADHD. The prevalence of ADHD was 7.2% among older adults with anxiety or depression. With adjustment for demographic characteristics and comorbidities, ADHD was associated with a 7% increased risk of hard-braking events, a 102% increased risk of self-reported traffic ticket events, and a 74% increased risk of self-reported vehicular crashes.
The researchers collected data from primary care clinics and residential communities in five U.S. sites in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Baltimore, Maryland; Cooperstown, New York; Denver, Colorado; and San Diego, California between July 2015 and March 2019. Participants were active drivers aged 65 to 79 years enrolled in the LongROAD project who were followed through in-vehicle data recording devices and annual assessments.
“Our study makes two notable contributions to research on healthy and safe aging, “said Guohua Li, M.D., DrPH, professor of epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, and senior author. “The research fills a gap in epidemiologic data on ADHD among older adults and provides compelling evidence that older adult drivers with ADHD have a much higher crash risk than their counterparts without ADHD.”
Dr. Li and colleagues launched the LongROAD Project in 2014 to understand and meet the safe mobility needs of older adult drivers.A 2016 study by Li and colleagues in theJournal of the American Geriatrics Societyshowed that health worsens when older adults stop driving. Early this year, the research team reported in a study published in Artificial Intelligence in Medicine that driving data captured by in-vehicle recording devices are valid and reliable digital markers for predicting mild cognitive impairment and dementia.
“There are 48 million older adult drivers in the United States. As population aging continues, this number is expected to reach 63 million in 2030. Data from the landmark LongROAD project will enable us to examine the role of medical, behavioral, environmental, and technological factors in driving safety during the process of aging.” said Li, who is also professor of anesthesiology at Columbia Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, and founding director of the Columbia Center for Injury Science and Prevention.

Glioblastoma is an aggressive and difficult-to-treat brain tumor in adults. On average, patients survive for only 1.5 years. The standard of care treatment for this disease, which includes surgery followed by radiation and chemotherapy, has not changed in 18 years. That’s partly because the cancer is highly variable with many differences across the patient population. Secondly, these cancer cells also deceive the body in insidious ways: they even recruit immune cells called macrophages to help them. And thirdly, they are out of reach for most anti-cancer drugs, which have only a limited capacity to penetrate brain tissues. Besides the standard of care treatment, oncologists try out drugs on glioblastoma patients without any guarantee they’ll work, often involving adverse side effects.
“These patients really are in need of new therapies,” says Professor Holger Gerhardt, the senior author of the study and vice-Scientific Director of the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin. “It is very important to identify the patients who do respond to a specific treatment, and the ones who do not.”
Lise Finotto, the lead author and a cancer researcher at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Cancer Biology in Belgium and formerly at the Max Delbrück Center, and her senior collaborators Gerhardt and Professor Frederik De Smet at KU Leuven, have created a screening platform that could be refined to find novel targets for drugs against glioblastoma. It could also be used to check if a particular patient will respond to a therapy. The study was published in “EMBO Molecular Medicine.”
To understand how macrophages can interact with glioblastoma cells of different patients, the researchers created zebrafish “avatars.” Gerhardt’s lab works extensively with zebrafish. These three-centimeter-long fish are considered good model organisms as their embryos are translucent, making it possible to monitor what’s happening inside.
An unexpected survival
Finotto investigated glioblastoma stem cells from seven patients collected by scientists at the De Smet lab, which is establishing a living tissue bank of glioblastoma samples. She injected them into zebrafish embryos, creating xenograft models — an avatar for each specific patient. When she live-imaged the embryos, it appeared that the glioblastoma cells had adapted well to their new environment. She saw the zebrafish’s immune system sending macrophages as part of an immune response to control the tumor. But as is typical in glioblastoma, the macrophages were suppressed. The tumors have several mechanisms to reprogram the macrophages so they help them grow.
“We wanted to learn how to revert the macrophages to a tumor-attacking state,” Finotto says. And a clue surfaced when they noticed that the tumor of one patient did not suppress the normal macrophage response.