Sanjat Kanjilal

Pre- and postantibiotic epoch: The historical spread of antimicrobial resistance Plasmids are now the primary vectors of antimicrobial resistance, but our understanding of how human industrialisation of antibiotics influenced their evolution is limited by a paucity of data predati...

Imagine we could travel back in time ⏪⌛️to explore the world of bacterial pathogens before humans discovered and industrialised antibiotics

We just did that to study the history of #AMR spread @science.org
doi.org/10.1126/scie...

If you like time travel & biology, this 🧵is for you👇

Multi-armed bandit - Wikipedia

Science is fun, but the history of science is even...funner!

-Originally considered by Allied scientists in World War II, it proved so intractable that...the problem was proposed to be dropped over Germany so that German scientists could also waste their time on it

en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...

Sporenburg

Panamakade

Borneo Isle

Entrepothaven

A stroll around the new hood

Giant DNA viruses encode a hallmark translation initiation complex of eukaryotic life In contrast to living organisms, viruses were long thought to lack protein synthesis machinery and instead depend on host factors to translate viral transcripts. Here, we discover that giant DNA virus...

Historically, viruses were thought to primarily use host cell's translational machinery. New work from @harvardcellbio.bsky.social faculty Amy Lee reveals that a giant DNA virus encodes its own IF4F initiation complex, suggesting an unexpected evolutionary innovation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How We Built the First AI-Generated Genomes | Arc Institute Going from designing individual genes to complete genomes is an incredibly challenging problem. We have previously shown that the genomic foundation models like the Evo series can generate single prot...

arcinstitute.org/news/hie-kin...

Besides the really cool biology, it's also a very nice lay summary of their bioRxiv preprint...good precedent for the rest of us

bmjopen.bmj.com/content/13/9...

Great to see the field maturing!

That's a stage being setup...inside @amsterdamumc.bsky.social...where the hospital's band (yup), play a concert once or twice a year. How about that!

As national medical, scientific, public health and patient organizations, we call for the resignation of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to ensure the health of the American people.

Our statement: https://bit.ly/45LeJHi

Beautifully written and thoughtful letter. Thank you for your years of service.

Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can generate and revise text with human-level performance. These models come with clear limitations, can produce inaccurate information, and reinforce existing biases.

The appearance of large language models caused a drastic shift in the vocabulary of academic writing, according to an analysis in #ScienceAdvances of more than 15 million biomedical abstracts published from 2010 to 2024.

Learn more:

Honest question Emily: if funding were restored in 3.5 years (huge if), how long do you think it would take for institutions like IPAM to recover their pipeline of talent and work.

I’m thinking about the converse: how are other nations going to fill this void?

Thank you! Can’t wait to arrive

Rates of infection with other pathogens after a positive COVID-19 test versus a negative test in US veterans (November, 2021, to December, 2023): a retrospective cohort study Our results suggest that a positive test for COVID-19 (vs a negative test) was associated with increased rates of diagnosis of various infections in the 12 months following an acute SARS-CoV-2 infecti...

Rates of infection with other pathogens after a positive COVID-19 test versus a negative test in US veterans (Lancet ID)

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

Such a cool article; cross-species / -kingdom interactions provide a deeper understanding of the true implications of infection

🚨 IDSA has released the first guidelines for the management and treatment of complicated urinary tract infections (cUTIs)!

The new guidelines simplify the prior definitions of uncomplicated UTIs and cUTIs, & address treatment for cUTIs.

View guidelines: bit.ly/4lUjN1a

Non-antibiotics disrupt colonization resistance against enteropathogens - Nature Non-antibiotic drugs from a wide range of therapeutic classes can alter the ability of gut commensals to resist invasion by enteropathogens, a previously underappreciated side effect of such drugs.

Seeing this published is even better than eating sweets! I am so happy and proud of whole @lisamaierlab.bsky.social, especially Lisa and @jdlcz.bsky.social who walked the funny/exciting/rocky road with me until the very end. Check it out!
#science #microbiome #health

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

three men are sitting around a table with one wearing a shirt that says duke on it ALT: three men are sitting around a table with one wearing a shirt that says duke on it

A 20 year journey finishes today: I paid off my med student loans!

Thank you www.lrp.nih.gov, without you I never could have dug out of my >quarter million $ hole and stay a physician scientist

I gave my final didactic talk to the @mgb-id-fellows.bsky.social fellows yesterday on treatment of MDR GNRs. Really active area of research!

Have a look! I welcome corrections.

drive.google.com/file/d/170xP...

Human gut bacteria bioaccumulate PFAS

Excited to share some key details on our latest research in @natmicrobiol.nature.com reporting intra-cellular accumulation of #PFAS (aka forever chemicals) by certain human gut bacteria. #microsky #mevosky #microbiomesky
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Yesterday was my last day attending at my hospital.

My tenure began and ended as all things begin and end: with Staph

I feel you dude

Reason #4523 for why we are excited to move to the Netherlands

Opinion | The Supreme Court Is Watching Out for the Courts, Not for Trump

Ever review a nice manuscript from a distinguished author that in the discussion section, completely fails to put the paper into context?

This SCOTUS decision makes sense only when you have an executive branch that cares about the people of the US.

Obviously?

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/o...

Super interesting field of work…though the converse question of how antibiotic-mediated perturbations of the microbiome influence cancer risk, is just as, if not more, important from a risk standpoint. Easier to modify antibiotic exposures.

Page 1 of the editorial "Moving Past 'Business as Usual' for Medical Education"

The 𝘑𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭 announces a series focused on preparation of future physicians for clinical practice in light of ongoing disruptions affecting clinical care. The series aims to stimulate new ways of thinking and provide guidance to frontline clinician–educators. Learn more: nej.md/4lgVFGl

RFK Jr. says US won’t donate to global vaccine effort Kennedy ripped into Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, in a video address at its pledging summit.

This is a travesty & a nightmare. The US was a founder of @gavi.org. It lowers global vaccine costs, has vaccinated 1B children, & averted 19M deaths. This pull out will cost 100s of thousands of children's lives a year - and RFK Jr will be personally responsible.
www.politico.com/news/2025/06...

*Shameless call for alpha-testing our AI tutor for microbiology / ID*

Hey all, I'm looking for folks would have interest in providing end user feedback on our AI tutor targeting 2nd year preclinical med students. Clinical knowledge helpful but not required.

If so, DM me for the deets!

Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at a Crossroads In this Viewpoint, former members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) caution that the sudden change in the ACIP may reverse the achievements of US immunization policy, includin...

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

tl;dr

"routine vaccination of approximately 117M children from 1994-2023 likely prevented around 508 million lifetime cases of illness, 32M hospitalizations, and 1 129 000 deaths, at a net savings of $540 billion in direct costs and $2.7 trillion in societal costs"

Waterbury VT shows up!

Venn diagram with one circle representing ordinal endpoints (eg WHO clinical progression score for COVID, modified Rankin scale, Glasgow outcome score, etc), another representing composite endpoints (eg time to death, treatment failure, or disease recurrence), and area of overlap (hierarchical composite endpoints, eg DOOR and extensions as seen in REMAP-CAP).

Making sense of hierarchical composite endpoints in randomized clinical trials – a primer for infectious disease clinicians and researchers

@seanong.bsky.social @gurujosh.bsky.social @steventong.bsky.social and colleagues

Open Access #IDSky #MedSky

academic.oup.com/cid/advance-...

hms.harvard.edu/news/inside-...

This class was my pièce de résistance for @harvardmed.bsky.social and the Health Sciences & Technology program.

So long and thanks for all the fish!