CicinSainLab

I am at the International #Herpesvirus Workshop (IHW) in Berlin, where the cream of the #herpes science crop gathers this year to share data and ideas (hopefully, not herpes #viruses). I look forward to the talks and may post under #IHW some thoughts on the most interesting talks by my colleagues.🧪

The paper in question features numerous metodological flaws resulting in biases within groups, in a population with high children mortality, which is not the norm anymore and about a vaccine that is not in use anymore. But hey, why would you let facts get in the way of your ideology. Shameful! 2/2

RFK Jr.’s Cruelest Cut of All Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just eliminated U.S. vaccine funding for the world’s children. Why?

Paul Offit has a detailed takedown on the new misguided #vaccine policies of RFK Jr.
pauloffit.substack.com/p/rfk-jrs-cr...
In brief, it is a combination of arrogance with willful ignorance of scientific #evidence. An entire change in policies is justified by a single outlier paper from 1980. 1/2 🧪

Filter the microplastic from your blood through a plastic filter! What could possibly go wrong?

This is important - there is vaccine derived polio in German sewage water. Please share in your networks these information for MDs and parents (only in German, sorry).
bsky.app/profile/rki....

We started the Cres conference with a great talk by Tony Hunter, spanning his work over 5+ decades, from early identification of protein kinases as drivers of cell transformation and cancer to his recent work on PIN1 and cholesterol biosynthesis in bladder cancer pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39808064/

...who put together the conference. Thanks to the University of Rijeka for providing us with the spectacular venue in the Moise Palace in the middle of Cres town. More details can be found here: www.conferences-cresdrugdiscovery.hr

I am attending the Frontiers in Drug Discovery workshop on the beautiful island of Cres, Croatia in the next few days. Even more beautiful is the lineup of speakers, with big names in cell and molecular biology, immunology and biochemistry. Kudos to @idikic.bsky.social, I. Stagljar and T. Lenac 1/2

Large Language models / ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini...

ChatGPT's Impact On Our Brains According to an MIT Study The study, from MIT Lab scholars, measured the brain activity of subjects writing SAT essays with and without ChatGPT.

While LLM are useful and make us much more efficient, thez also make us complacent and kinda lazy. Now there is more evidence on that. time.com/7295195/ai-c...
h/t @mjkellner.bsky.social 🧪

NEW: NSF will be kicked out of their building. Announcement will be made tomorrow by HUD Sec. and Governor of VA. HUD will take over the NSF building over the next two years.

NSF staffer: "There is no planning for NSF, no identified future location, appropriation for a new building or a move."

Robert De Niro in JOKER as a talk show host

"You're laughing? Big Balls lost his government job and you're laughing?"

...it can not only sum the main points in a text file, but generate a podcast-style conversation on its merits.
For this paper pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39514636/, the results are here:
notebooklm.google.com/notebook/b94....
Many thanks to Max @mjkellner.bsky.social, who told us about this cool tool.

Like every other Friday, today my lab has a journal club. We will discuss a new paper by the @virusesimmunity.bsky.social Iwasaki lab on Ig responses to endogenous retroviruses. I write this to highlight an AI tool for rapid analysis of PDF manuscripts notebooklm.google.com. We tried it and... 1/2🧪

This is a very nice report on the local TV network (German only) on our efforts to develop a #biotech platform that allows modular development of #vaccines eliciting non-waning immunity against an array of potential targets. Our first aims is a vaccine against #RSV. Others will follow. Stay tuned.🙂

Memory maintenance depends on two factors - cell survival & cell proliferation. GFI1 promotes both, so it might be a target for improved immunizations. GFI1 promotes T-cell survival in mice by inducing EOMES gene expression, but it is not clear how it helps proliferation. More work for Zeeshan😉. 3/3

Vaccines elicit both humoral and cellular immunity, but antibody titers wane faster than T-cell memory populations. The longevity of memory T cells, however, depends on factors that are not completely defined and understood. This study shows that the GFI1 gene is essential for maintaining them. 2/3

GFI1-driven transcriptional and epigenetic programs maintain CD8+ T cell stemness and persistence - Nature Immunology Belz and colleagues show that GFI1, a transcriptional repressor that recruits histone-modifying enzymes, is necessary for the generation and maintenance of stem cell memory CD8+ T cells.

Very proud of my former student Zeeshan, who has identified a genetic determinant of T-cell memory formation.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
He & the team of G. Belz show that GFI1 is critical for the establishment & maintenance of antigen specific T-cell populations. Why does this matter? 1/3🧪

This thread was probably interesting to the Science community, so I add a few hashtags to find it more easily:
#COVID #vulnerable #infection #epidemiology #GfV 🧪

Addendum - I showed the death toll in Sweden up to October 2020, because the Great Barrington Declaration was published in October 2020. These information should have been available to the authors at the time.

"...with potentially devastating consequences." I'd like to add that these consequences were not just potential. This strategy was pursued in Sweden early on, elevating the death toll way above comparable nations in the region. One of the authors of the GBD was recently elevated to NIH director. 5/5

"Reality has shown otherwise. Despite repeated infections and widespread vaccination, SARS-CoV-2 continues to circulate globally. Had contact reduction measures been lifted early as proposed, this would have resulted in sustained exposure of vulnerable individuals across all age groups..." 4/5

"... the psychological, social, and economic burdens imposed by contact restrictions, the herd immunity proposals were based on a flawed assumption: that a single infection with SARS-CoV-2 would confer long-lasting immunity sufficient to block onward transmission to vulnerable individuals. " 3/5

Here the excerpt regarding the GBD: "In hindsight, public proposals advocating for allowing infections to spread among younger adults and children—as a path to achieving herd immunity—must be regarded as clear misjudgments (Great Barrington Declaration, 2020). While it is valid to acknowledge..."2/5

The @gesvirologie.bsky.social has now published g-f-v.org/en/fuenf-jah... addressing among others the merits of Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for ending COVID-19 lockdowns, focused protection of vulnerable, while allowing low-risk groups to live normally & build natural immunity. 1/5

Think like this: In presence of neutr. Ab, the virus is targeted immediately, and controlled during the very early stages of infection = hardly any symptoms. If Ab titers are low but memory cells present, the virus starts to spread but is contained with a delay = symptomatic, but not severe disease.

Yes, I meant to say within 300 characters that there are many people who have experienced multiple reinfections that resulted in symptomatic disease. I agree that this is in part due to infections with new escape variants, but the other contributor is the ongoing drop in antibody titer.

Agreed - Memory B and T cells do not decline as fast, a likely reason for maintained immunity against severe outcomes & death. Yet, symptomatic reinfections are common, and this matches a drop in neutralizing Ab titers, correlates of protection against symptomatic COVID in many independent studies.

The solution has been to boost people, especially vulnerable elderly groups, at regular intervals to maintain high/protective antibody titers. However, this results in more costs & compliance issues, and feeds vaccine hesitancy. Hence, a vaccine driving persistent immunity remains an unmet need. 2/2

I gave a talk on COVID vaccines yesterday. I combined in my introduction slide two key meta-analyses, with the good and the bad news about COVID vaccines. While mRNA and some protein vaccines outperform infection in terms of antibody responses and protectivity, this does not last that long. 1/2🧪