Félix Balazard

Unitaid, CHAI, and Wits RHI enter into a landmark agreement with Dr. Reddy’s to make HIV prevention tool lenacapavir affordable in LMICs - Unitaid

We all need some good news

👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

“The revolutionary HIV prevention tool, injectable lenacapavir, will be available at a cost of US$40 a year in 120 low- and middle-income countries starting in 2027”

@unitaid.bsky.social CHAI Wits RHI

unitaid.org/news-blog/le...

100 years of insulin in 15 minutes

In the 1970s, it took 8,000 pounds of pancreas glands from 23,500 animals just to make a single pound of insulin.

Roche SBX very high throughout NGS instrument is about to disrupt the short reads sequencing space. But is the data quality good enough? Read all about it at albertvilella.substack.com

This makes me wonder about the premiums we pay on other Sigma products.

Take advantage of the web-only promotion !

OUR BLESSED mixed models vs THEIR BARABAROUS fixed effects OUR GLORIOUS Mundlak device vs THEIR WICKED demeaning OUR GREAT variance components vs THEIR PRIMITIVE dummy variables OUR NOBLE partial pooling vs THEIR BACKWARD unbiased estimates OUR HEROIC maximum likelihoos vs THEIR BRUTISH least squares

I could have sworn I created this before on our Previous Parish, but couldn't find it so made it fresh.

I present:
OUR BLESSED mixed models // THEIR BARBAROUS fixed effects

A reminder that the mRNA vaccine technology saved millions of lives during the Covid pandemic and received the 2023 Nobel Prize for Medicine

Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology Investigating reproducibility in preclinical cancer research.

Here's our attempt, which was (at minimum) much more transparent than the earlier Bayer and Amgen reports: elifesciences.org/collections/...

Pasteurisation: Pasteur's greatest contribution to health December, 2022, marks the 200th year of Louis Pasteur's birth in Dole, France. Among Pasteur's major contributions and their benefit to society, the most important is the heat treatment of foods and b...

Pasteurisation: Pasteur's greatest contribution to health

"the heat treatment of liquid food products (e.g. milk), including eggs, remains Pasteur's most significant legacy as a service to the world"

www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Terence Tao (@teorth.bsky.social) has written a thread on Mastodon about the impact of the federal grant freeze to UCLA, particularly to his own field of Mathematics. UCLA's IPAM (Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics) could shut down entirely

mathstodon.xyz/@tao/1149568...

Sanofi to acquire Vicebio for $1.15 billion upfront to expand #respiratory vaccines pipeline

Vicebio is a London-based #biotech with an early clinical-stage non-mRNA combination #vaccine candidate for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and human metapneumovirus (hMPV)

www.sanofi.com/en/media-roo...

The US is committing scientific suicide @kennethrmiller

A truly bizarre bit of news from an interview with Richard Saynor of Sandoz:

A New Route to Asthma Treatment - Through the Liver, of All Places

Animal models suggest that asthma might be treatable by delivering antigens directly to the liver (!)

The war on science in the US is already having an effect on private sector research like AlphaFold. Bears repeating but the private sector builds on top of things created by academic research for the public good. This hurts everyone.

Of note: this isn't describing theoretical imagined future state but the present, in an increasing number of care settings... ; FWIW most physicians I know who are using this seem to really appreciate it as Peter says. But will long-term effect be > time for doc/pt vs > push to see pts even faster?

We just released unmute.sh 🔇🔊
It is a text LLM wrapper, based on in-house streaming ASR, TTS, semantic VAD to reduce latency. ⏱️
Unlike Moshi 🟢, Unmute 🔊 is turn base, but allows customization in two clicks🖱️: voice and prompt!
Paper and open source coming soon.

Have you asked chatgpt ?

Mr. Secretary, Reclassify the Statin One regulatory stroke could save more American lives than a decade of health campaigns. You have the pen.

Should low-dose statins be available OTC in the US? (UK did this in early 2000s!)

Read Alex Kesin’s case in favor: www.alexkesin.com/p/mr-secreta...

Thoughts from @cnewtoncheh.bsky.social, @ethanjweiss.bsky.social?

Interesting thing. She has this quote from Aristotle's politics, where she claims he says that with automation, we wouldn't need craftsmen, but would still need slaves. This is interestingly, so I looked it up. At least in Rackham's translation, Aristotle appears to literally say the opposite:

Nice transparency

A screenshot of the termination notice showing "Outstanding Investigator Grants"

A screenshot of the termination notice with "This award is terminated effective the date of this award, due to unsafe antisemitic actions that suggest the institution lacks concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students." highlighted

Yesterday, the NIH R35 “Outstanding Investigator” grant to fund scientists in my lab studying antibiotic resistance was terminated for reasons not related to the content of the science, or any actions taken by me or members of my lab

Escape From the Lysosome

Two days in a row of antibody-drug conjugates! First, the thrilling lysosomal breakout:

New Cell Therapy For Resistant Hodkins Patients

And then we have this excellent new NK cell trial result for Hodgkin’s patients who are resistant to the existing ADC therapies (and all others). A real advance for people with no options left:

Single-cell proteomics is gaining momentum.

It can analyze the proteomes of ~ 1,000 single cells / day, and we need to ensure high quality cell isolation and sample preparation:
⬛️ These approaches can help:

nature.com/articles/s41...

The sample size calculation was based on the primary outcome assumption in the intervention and control groups, the severity level of ASD symptomatology, measured with the ADOS-CSS. In a previous study, the ADOS-CSS decreased in 62% of preschoolers whereas it was the same or worse in 37% of the children after 6 months of “as usual” treatment (42). Sample size calculations were performed using the nQuery advisor 6.2 software. Assuming a response rate of 62% in the placebo group and 90% in the probiotic group, it was calculated that 38 patients per treatment arm would be sufficient to achieve 90% power in detecting a treatment difference based on 1-tail χ2 test at a significance level of 0.05. The main statistical analysis included all participants who had data for the primary endpoint in the group to which they had originally been randomized. Analyses were performed both on the binary outcome measure assumed for sample size calculation (rates of subjects with a decrease in ADOS-CSS vs rates of subjects whereas it was the same or worse) and on continuous outcome measure (changes in mean ADOS-CSS).

A common story, where investigators needlessly shoot themselves in the foot when planning a trial:

1) They take a continuous outcome measure and dichotomize it to instead study % improved. This immediately tanks power by discarding information (turning a measure of rank and distance into a binary)

Applying the Principal Stratum Strategy in Equivalence Trials: A Case Study The estimand framework, introduced in the ICH E9 (R1) Addendum, provides a structured approach for defining precise research questions in randomised clinical trials. It suggests five strategies for a...

Applying the Principal Stratum Strategy in Equivalence Trials: A Case Study. Jerome Sepin, Thomas P. A. Debray, Wei Wei, Hans C. Ebbers, Cristina Fernandez-Mendivil, Marian Mitroiu. Pharmaceutical Statistics. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Research at risk: Life-saving heart pumps for babies | Cornell Chronicle After receiving a stop-work order from the federal government, the future of a device to help children with heart defects is uncertain.

One of grants frozen at Cornell: $6.7M (4 yrs) to develop heart pumps for babies born w/ heart defects.

It took decades of work to get to point of prepping device for in-human clinical trials. No private company could do this.

The cruelty of the Trump administration is heartbreaking. So to speak.

Check out this great resource of single cell multiome data, cell annotations, regulatory DNA models of cell type resolved chromatin accessibility & comprehensive annotation of motifs & sequence syntax for multiple tissues in early human development 1/

I just got word that this federal transportation grant was terminated today, despite us removing the word "climate" from the title. The moral of the story? Obeying orders doesn't keep you safe with this administration.