Jessica Stark

🚨 Attention undergraduate scientists and engineers! 🚨 Want to spend a summer doing research at MIT? Join us for the 2026 MIT Summer Research Program!
Learn more and apply: oge.mit.edu/msrp/
@mitdeptofbe.bsky.social @mitcheme.bsky.social @mitkochinstitute.bsky.social

It's a great year to join the Leading Edge community 🕊️🤍

Congratulations, Abbey and team! Such a cool story.

Great to see this story in print! Congrats @megtriesscience.bsky.social @douglaspdyer.bsky.social and team! Looking forward to sharing Megan's first contributions as a postdoc in our lab at @mitdeptofbe.bsky.social @mitcheme.bsky.social @mitkochinstitute.bsky.social soon... 👀

Why fundamental research is fundamental to progress, seeding major breakthroughs
Editorial @nature.com this week
And 7 basic science discoveries that changed the world
nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com/articles/d41...

We are recruiting new faculty in IMES at MIT!

IMES (Institute for Medical Engineering and Science) is the MIT home of the famous HST program. As faculty are also appointed in a department at MIT, we have diverse research programs, all focused on human health.

faculty-searches.mit.edu/imes-search/

Trump Is Shutting Down the War On Cancer America’s cancer research system, which has helped save millions of lives, is under threat in one of its most productive moments.

“It will take decades to recover from this, if we ever do.” America’s cancer research system, which has helped save millions of lives and is in one of its most productive moments, is under threat by the Trump administration.

The global return-on-investment of COVID-19 vaccines in the first year of the vaccination programme COVID-19 vaccines played a critical role in reducing global health burden during the COVID-19 pandemic, but their rapid development required extraordinary effort. This study aims to evaluate their glo...

Wow!

Covid vaccine development and delivery cost $79.4 billion, but the health and economic benefits of vaccination were valued between $4.83 trillion–$37.8 trillion.

A return on investment of $59.8–$475 per dollar invested!!

This is why vaccine equity matters!

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

World Health: The Magazine of the World Health Organization. May 1980. smallpox is dead!

#ThrowbackThursday: In 1980 the 🌍🌎🌏 was declared #smallpox free, thanks to mass vaccination efforts.

Smallpox was an acute contagious disease caused by the variola virus. It was one of the most devastating diseases known to humanity. #VaccinesWork

Opinion | America First? Not When It Comes to Your Health.

"The ideas and technologies that are being destroyed today, ... some of them irreversibly, those are the cures that would have been present 20 years from now."
"It’s people who will get cancer in 10, 20, or 30 years who will really pay the price for these cuts."

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/24/o...

Congrats @kamphorstlab.bsky.social !! 🍾

Spending a few days with intramural researcher at NIH has me thinking about the old Bell Labs, the storied research institute where major breakthroughs in physics, chemistry and mat sci (and associated @nobelprize.bsky.social awards) were made in the 70s-80s 1/n

Fantastic news - congrats, Judith! 🍾

SCIMaP - Impacts of Federal Cuts to Science and Medical Research Developed by an interdisciplinary research team, this website shows how funding cuts reduce economic activity and employment nationwide

Federal science cuts aren’t just halting medical research or disrupting clinical trials. They are already costing us $8.1 billion and 35,000 jobs. The projected loss is $16 billion and 68,000 jobs every year. This reaches every corner of America.
scienceimpacts.org

Fantastic news - congrats! 🍾

"The United States will no longer have the same window into the technologies of the future ... " - H. Holden Thorpe, Editor-in-chief, Science journals

“As the Trump administration continues to drastically defund and dismantle basic science in America, the United States is presenting other countries with opportunities to take the lead …” writes H. Holden Thorp in a new #ScienceEditorial. scim.ag/43R82B5

ADD YOUR NAME: Sign the Open Letter in Support of NIH Staff Join the courageous and committed National Institutes of Health (NIH) public servants by adding your name now.

Sign on in support of the #BethesdaDeclaration

actionnetwork.org/forms/add-na...

2/2

The gutting of US biomedical research with loss of ~2,500 grants affecting research for cancer, Alzheimer’s, infectious disease, global health and much more
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Where was this important 1st randomized trial performed?
China
Where are 8 of the 10 most productive research institutions in the world as of March 2025?
China
nature.com/nature-index...
What country is radically defunding research and will lose its competitiveness?
USA

MIT ACCESS is an opportunity for undergraduates to explore cutting-edge research and graduate education in science and engineering. See for yourself what grad life is like at MIT!

Applications open June 1: access.mit.edu
@mitdeptofbe.bsky.social @mitcheme.bsky.social @mitchemistry.bsky.social

On a day when all research grants at Harvard were terminated, and in a context where Congress seems to broadly accept the notion that destroying science and health research in the US is fine, it’s worth noting that this is not what the public wants.

Go beyond the ABCs of ADCs! Join us for the 23rd Annual @kochinstitute Symposium on Antibody Drug Conjugates, June 27th! Our keynote speaker is Nobel-prize winner @carolynbertozzi.bskyverified.social of @stanford.edu & an array of industry and academic leaders. Register: mit-ki.org/4lfoxiz

YouTube video by MicrobeTV Beyond the Noise #64: Anti-vaxxers, the dog that caught the car

youtu.be/aXdoExz_cd4?...
The anti-vaccine movement has been so successful that children are now dying from preventable infections.

Yes!! 🍾🥂 Congrats, Bryan!

Episode 71 PEGS Young Scientist Keynote Jessica Stark on the Role of Glycans in Cancer Research April 15, 2025 | In this episode of The Chain, host Brandon DeKosky, associate professor, speaks with MIT colleague Jessica Stark, Underwood-Prescott career development professor, about glycans and wh...

Enjoyed discussing the interface of glycobiology and immunology with @mitcheme.bsky.social colleague Brandon Dekosky on The Chain podcast. Looking forward to sharing our work at #PEGSummit next month!
@mitdeptofbe.bsky.social @mitkochinstitute.bsky.social
www.healthtech.com/the-chain/pe...

Great summary of last month's senate forum on what cuts to NIH funding mean for Americans: fewer treatments and fewer cures for diseases that collectively affect us all. Worth the ~12 min watch!

Yesterday we celebrated @mitdeptofbe.bsky.social PhD student Brian Cho, who received an honorable mention in this year's #NSFGRFP competition. Brian's work promises to shed new light on the adaptive immune response to glycans and glycoproteins. Congratulations! 🍾

Congrats, Nick!! 🍾

HPV Vaccine is Cancer Prevention A couple of years ago I was waiting in a clinic to see my physician for a normal well check. When a nurse I had never met came in to check my vitals, she started with small talk. “How are you doing…

"The vaccine provides close to 100% protection against infections and pre-cancers caused by certain types of HPV. That is remarkable."

Effective cancer prevention. www.voicesforvaccines.org/hpv-vaccine-...

Peter Marks, MD, PhD Director, Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research U.S. Food and Drug Administration 10903 New Hampshire Avenue Silver Spring, MD 20903 March 28, 2025 Sara Brenner, MD, MPH Acting Commissioner of Food and Drugs U.S. Food and Drug Administration 10903 New Hampshire Avenue Silver Spring, MD 20903 Dear Dr. Brenner: It is with a heavy heart that I have decided to resign from FDA and retire from federal service as Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research effective April 5, 2025. I leave behind a staff of professionals who are undoubtedly the most devoted to protecting and promoting the public health of any group of people that I have encountered during my four decades working in the public and private sectors. I have always done my best to advocate for their well-being and I would ask that you do the same during this very difficult time during which their critical importance to the safety and security of our nation may be underappreciated. Over the past years I have been involved in enhancing the safety of our nation's blood supply, in advancing the field of cell and gene therapy, and in responding to public health emergencies. In the last of these, during the COVID-19 pandemic I had the privilege of watching the vision that I conceived for Operation Warp Speed in March 2020 in collaboration with Dr. Robert Kadlec become a reality under the leadership of HHS Secretary Azar and President Trump due to the unwavering commitment of public servants at FDA and elsewhere across the government. At FDA, the tireless efforts of staff across the agency resulted in remarkably expediting the development of vaccines against the virus, meeting the standards for quality, safety, and effectiveness expected by the American public. The vaccines undoubtedly markedly reduced morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 in the United States and elsewhere. Many of these same individuals applied learnings from the pandemic during a flawless response helping…

ongoing multistate measles outbreak that is particularly severe in Texas reminds us of what happens when confidence in well-established science underlying public health and well-being is undermined. Measles, which killed more than 100,000 unvaccinated children last year in Africa and Asia owing to pneumonitis and encephalitis caused by the virus, had been eliminated from our shores. The two-dose measles, mumps, rubella vaccine regimen (MMR) using over the past decades has a remarkably favorable benefit-risk profile. The MMR vaccine is 97% or more effective in preventing measles following the two-dose series, and its safety has been remarkably well studied. Though rarely followed by a single fever-related seizure, or very rarely by allergic reactions or blood clotting disorders, the vaccine very simply does not cause autism, nor is it associated with encephalitis or death. It does, however, protect against a potential devasting consequence of prior measles infection, subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), which is an untreatable, relentlessly progressive neurologic disorder leading to death in about 1 in 10,000 individuals infected with measles. Undermining confidence in well-established vaccines that have met the high standards for quality, safety, and effectiveness that have been in place for decades at FDA is irresponsible, detrimental to public health, and a clear danger to our nation's health, safety. and security. In the years following the pandemic, at the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research we have applied the same unwavering commitment to public health priorities to the development of cell and gene therapies to address both hereditary and acquired rare diseases. During my tenure as Center Director we have approved 22 gene therapies, including the first gene therapy ever to be approved in the United States. However, we know that we must do better to expedite the development of treatments for those individual suffering from any one of the thousan…

Peter Marks’s resignation letter. Everyone should read this.