Aaron Schwartz

…ALS patients with the mutation show 6x the T-cell reactivity. The abstract of that paper ends “These findings highlight the potential of therapeutic strategies [for ALS] aimed at enhancing
regulatory T cells” www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Yentli inherited the c9orf72 mutation that causes ALS from her dad, Frank. Frank, a beloved public school educator, who died last year at 66.

14 years after c9orf72 was discovered as a cause ALS, last week, researchers discovered that T-cells are highly reactive to c9orf72 in ALS patients….

Here is Yentli, one of our MD-PhD students at Penn, speaking powerfully about the stakes here.

Regulatory T-cells could be a key to defeating the genetic mutation that killed her dad with ALS and threatens her life.

From a speech at her high school this week: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Autoimmune response to C9orf72 protein in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - Nature An analysis of T cell responses in people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis shows that the C9orf72 antigen is a key target of autoimmune responses in the disease, and identifies C9orf72 epitopes that are recognized.

It is possible that enhancing the activity of regulatory T-cells, could help treat these diseases or prevent the diseases from progressing.

See, for example, the new study on ALS, highlighting the possible role for treatments aimed at regulatory T cells www.nature.com/articles/s41...
(3/3)

The past few years have seen several compelling studies linking neurological diseases to infection and our immune responses. For example:

Dementia: Eyting et al, Nature 2025
Multiple sclerosis: Bjornevik et al, Science 2022
ALS: Michaelis et al, Nature (just this week!)
(2/3)

Today's Nobel Prize in Medicine went to the discoverers of regulatory T-cells. How could this discovery about our immune systems change the world?

Here is one possible way: leading to treatments for terrible neurological diseases. (1/3)

Ok you were right

Believe in the old man!

"Full-day kindergarten expansions were responsible for as much as 24 percent of the growth in employment of mothers with kindergartenaged children in this time frame."

Not enough discourse on the Chalamet discount rate

It was very kind of him to open his home to a random college student.

One day, we were talking about his brother, Howard, who won a Nobel for discovering reverse transcriptase. “A lesson: Don’t compare yourself to your brother,” he said. Good advice.

I missed this sad news last month. I first saw Peter Temin’s name when I was a college freshman. It was on a list of people willing to house Swarthmore students over the summer. I lived in his spare bedroom in Cambridge during the summer of 2006, while I was working at a microbio lab…

I'm as enthusiastic as anyone else is about effective treatments for Huntington's disease but, for anyone who's curious about the methodology –

A Closer Look at a Widely Despised Health Insurance Policy Every year, millions of people’s medical care runs into the roadblock known as prior authorization, which requires a patient’s health insurer to sign off before chemotherapy, surgery or countless othe...

Few topics in health care policy can incite passions like insurer prior authorization. What do researchers know about this practice? I spoke with @dgorenstein.bsky.social and @lesliemwalker.bsky.social for the latest @tradeoffs.org podcast.

tradeoffs.org/2025/09/25/a...

The paper that clarified this issue for me is Gelman and Imbens. But i’m not sure that’s what you are looking for. www.nber.org/system/files...

Winner of mRNA Nobel Prize says ACIP member’s claim that Covid vaccines persist is “absolutely impossible” In a Q&A with STAT, Nobel winner Drew Weissman addressed concerns raised about Covid shots at a recent meeting of federal vaccine advisers.

Winner of mRNA Nobel Prize says ACIP member’s claim that Covid vaccines persist is “absolutely impossible”

In Q&A, Drew Weissman says vast literature shows Covid shots are safe, refutes claims from Retsef Levi
www.statnews.com/2025/09/20/d...

Harvard Medical School to cut research by 20%. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Open mic picked up someone saying “You’re an idiot!” as ACIP member Retsef Levi was speaking. So things are going great in vaccine policy.

A last-minute surprise vote by ACIP to table indefinitely their vote on removing the HepB birth dose rec. A pleasant surprise (for the time being, at least…)

Yes. If you get vaccinated you are less likely to get hep b and have a test result that confuses you and your doctor.

You are doing the heavy lifting for the surname. I wish your field were more boring these days.

Totally. If I wanted test result interpretation to be so challenging, I would have become a rheumatologist.

With Hepatitis B vaccination under threat, here is one frustrating fact about testing for Hep B. It’s super complicated, based on multiple tests. I’ve often consulted this chart to interpret tests, and occasionally ended up in the dreaded “four interpretations possible” section.

""But so long as the President identifies a cause, the determination of “some cause relating to the conduct, ability, fitness, or competence of the officer” is within the President’s unreviewable discretion.""

If the Supreme Court agrees, the Fed is at-will and under control of the President.

It was covered for patients with diabetes, to test how well their disease was controlled. Not covered for screening people who might have diabetes.

And the coverage change announcement: www.cms.gov/files/docume...

The Start of Something Good: The Discovery of HbA1c and the American Diabetes Association Samuel Rahbar Outstanding Discovery Award

Fascinating history of the discovery: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

In 1968, an Iranian scientist discovered there were high levels of sugar-coated blood proteins in diabetic patients.

In 2024, Medicare finally granted coverage for hemoglobin A1c (glycated hemoglobin) as a screening test for diabetes.

3:164 • Make five years of payments — $200 million annually - and set up a $172 million fund for people with claims of civil rights violations. • Ensure foreign students who are "anti-Western" will not be admitted. • Pay for all costs of the settlement, including the fee for an outside monitor. • Annually release demographic data for hires as well as students who have applied or have been admitted, broken down by "race, color, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests." • Make a public statement declaring that transgender people's identities are no longer recognized. • End gender-affirming care for minors at medical facilities. • Give the government access to "all UCLA staff, employees, facilities, documents, and data related to the agreement" not protected by attorney-client privilege.

These are the Trump Administration’s demands on UCLA, in addition to a 1.2 billion dollar fine, as reported by the LA Times today. I must note again that the Trump Administration’s attempt to use title vi to enforce conservative agenda items is flagrantly illegal.

It is with great sadness that I learned today of the passing of my friend, mentor, and co-author Dr. Allen Goodman. Allen was an exceptional mentor and was kind, thoughtful, and supportive. I am passing his legacy on, teach the next generation of health economists.