Johan Duchêne

On the balance of knowledge - Nature Reviews Immunology Ruslan Medzhitov shares his thoughts on the balance between generating data and developing theories in immunology, with a focus on exploring the rules that govern complex systems.

I'd like to see this problem analysed at the single cell multi-omics level
'Advances in research technolo- gies are crucial for the scientific enterprise but have an unintended consequence: when pow- erful techniques become widely available, they tend to be applied without a good question in mind.'

AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It One of the promises of AI is that it can reduce workloads so employees can focus more on higher-value and more engaging tasks. But according to new research, AI tools don’t reduce work, they consisten...

Engineers increasingly found themselves coaching colleagues who were “vibe-coding” and finishing partially complete pull requests. This oversight often surfaced informally—in Slack threads or quick desk-side consultations—adding to engineers’ workloads.'
hbr.org/2026/02/ai-d...

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Do we study the right biology after myocardial infarction (MI)?
• Surgery in standard mouse model disrupts bone marrow & masks MI-specific immune responses
• Minimally invasive model better reflects patient immune responses & reveals immature neutrophils worsen heart function
tinyurl.com/MImodels

Scientific paper mill: the model flagged 10% of the research papers in cancer research as problematic 😱

www.bmj.com/content/392/...

A study shows the consequences of poor Antibody Validation

- Out of 614 antibodies tested, 97 failed
- These 97 non-specific antibodies (43 proteins) were used in 640 publications
- 9443 mice and 5015 human samples wasted

Waste of animals, human samples, time, and trust

tinyurl.com/OGA-Ab

The antibodies don’t work! The race to rid labs of molecules that ruin experiments Poorly performing antibodies have plagued biomedical sciences for decades. Several fresh initiatives hope to change this.

unfortunately, several scientists experienced the same situation. Worth to read this article www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The statement is maybe strong, but how often Ab specificity is tested?
My experience: A study claimed new biology using non-validated Abs. After we showed the Abs were unsuitable, the supplier discontinued them. Meanwhile, study has been cited 150+ times. This is how artefacts can become “facts".

For instance ab263899 that recognises human NLRP3 specifically was cited 737 times, according to CiteAb (see image)

CiteAb - Reagent Search & Life Science Data CiteAb - Reagent Search & Life Science Data

Good question.
I would suggest to use CiteAb website. They catalogue all commercial antibodies and report how many times each antibody has been cited. In addition, they provide information on antibody validation.
www.citeab.com

Highly recommend using CiteAb and check for genetic (KO/KD) validation too.

In all seriousness,use CiteAb and Antibodypedia, look for KO/KD validated antibodies, best - recombinant, second best - monoclonal, and if possible do your own KO/KD controls, or induction by ligand/small molecule,if not - compare hyperexpressing with low expressing cells (from depmap/protein atlas)

VA-LI-DA-TE your abs! My experience (and some spooky examples in the thread): bsky.app/profile/gree...

That would be an interesting study to compare both models.

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A minimally invasive thrombotic model to study stroke in awake mice - Nature Communications Rodent stroke models are crucial but often invasive and limited in translational relevance. Here, the authors show that magnetic particle delivery creates a reproducible, minimally invasive thrombotic...

A new magnetic particle mouse model of stroke

Importantly, no craniotomy is required, avoiding a major confounder that causes massive surgery-induced inflammation.

Read the article "A minimally invasive thrombotic model to study stroke in awake mice"
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Nature Medicine to investigate study that found cancer treatment is better in morning Nature Medicine starts an investigation into inconsistencies in a study that found it was better to have immunotherapy in the morning.

www.statnews.com/2026/02/20/c...
i hope they can get the data from the authors. I was told by the editor that data weren’t available because of patient confidentiality- so many authors use that excuse , it makes data sharing policies worthless

This is weird. On @pubpeer.com, a reader noticed some seemingly irrelevant references in a Scientific Reports paper pubpeer.com/publications... The paper has now been modified, with many references removed (from 45 down to 25!) but it contains no acknowledgment of the change. It does have EoC.

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Murine bone marrow macrophages and human monocytes do not express atypical chemokine receptor 1 The atypical chemokine receptor 1 (ACKR1) was discovered on erythrocytes as the Duffy blood group antigen (Cutbush et al., 1950), also called Duffy-antigen/receptor for chemokines, or DARC (Novitzky-B...

Based on our publication on antibody validation, R&D Biotechne confirmed that MAB4139 and AF6695 exhibit nonspecific binding and have been discontinued. Thanks for that 👍.
For assessing ACKR1 expression, the specific clones 2C3 and 6B7 should be used.
#Metaresearch

www.cell.com/cell-stem-ce...

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Cre toxicity in mouse models of cardiovascular physiology and disease - Nature Cardiovascular Research In this Review, the authors provide an overview of the critical studies reporting Cre and CreER toxicity in the cardiovascular system, discuss the mechanisms proposed to underlie Cre toxicity and high...

The Cre–LoxP system is widely used to study gene function in mice.

However, Cre itself can be toxic to cells.

Proper controls should always be included to distinguish gene effects from Cre toxicity.

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Modeling HFpEF in animals - Nature Cardiovascular Research There is great interest in modeling human HFpEF in animals to identify underlying mechanisms and ultimately improve sorely needed therapies. Our current models are a step forward but still fall short ...

With hundreds of HFpEF animal studies, it’s time to ask: how good are the models?

Read the comment from David A. Kass
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Conclusion: current HFpEF models are suboptimal & we must refine them to better capture disease essentials and drive truly translational therapies

From doing science to saving science Science and scientists are under assault. From denial of vaccines to climate change, political leaders are increasingly sacrificing democracy as well as science on the altar of populism and authoritar...

Scientists must learn to join larger pro-democracy and people's movements, coalitions. Our science training may not have prepared us for such work, but we can no longer sit in the safety of our labs and expect the world to get better

My book review @thelancet.com

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

Fully agree with you.

Resources such as Human Protein Atlas rely on antibodies to map protein expression or intracellular localisation, but bad or unvalidated antibodies can misinform and derail research projects by giving false or unreproducible results.
How can we make antibodies better and more reliable? 👇

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5th International Antibody Validation Meeting - YouTube Listen to talks from the speakers at the 5th AbVal meeting, held in Bath on the 9-11th September 2025.

Bad antibodies are a major roadblock in biomedical research, harming reproducibility and wasting resources.

The International Antibody Validation Meeting was created to fix it.

Watch the talks from the 5th Antibody Validation Meeting (2025)
tinyurl.com/AntibodyVali...
#Integrity #reproducibility

🗨️ Just published in Nature Biotechnology: Our CellWhisperer AI enables chat-based analysis of single-cell sequencing data. You can talk to your cells & figure out the biology without writing any computer code. Paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... Annotated walkthrough in a thread below (1/11)

Indeed. And I think it is also important to acknowledge when tools are great.