Nature Biotechnology, Published online: 29 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41587-026-03125-0
A strategy to control translation of mRNA vaccines reveals cell type–specific contributions to immunity that may be harnessed to enhance vaccine efficacy.
mRNA vaccine immunity is enhanced by hepatocyte detargeting and not dependent on dendritic cell expression
Nature Biotechnology, Published online: 29 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41587-026-03099-z
mRNA vaccine efficacy is enhanced by silencing cell-type-specific expression.
Predicting referral need for febrile children in low-resource community settings in South and Southeast Asia
Nature Medicine, Published online: 29 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04338-1
A multicountry cohort study found that prediction models combining clinical parameters with either pulse oximetry or the host biomarker sTREM1 more accurately identified febrile children needing referral than standard WHO criteria.
Low-dose oral nicotinamide mononucleotide for immune thrombocytopenia: a phase 1/2 trial
Nature Medicine, Published online: 29 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04366-x
Preclinical and phase 1/2 trial data show that anti-CD38 monoclonal antibody treatment restores platelet counts in patients with immune thrombocytopenia by increasing nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) levels, and low-dose oral treatment with the NAD+ precursor nicotinamide mononucleotide can similarly increase platelet counts without serious adverse effects.
An agentic framework for autonomous scientific discovery in cancer pathology
Nature Medicine, Published online: 29 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04357-y
Evaluated across 18 multicancer cohorts, the agentic artificial intelligence workflow SPARK uses language as a universal interface to autonomously generate biological ideas.
A septo–entorhinal GABAergic pathway that enables switching between episodic memories
Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 29 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02280-6
How the brain organizes the retrieval of old and new memories remains unknown. Kim et al. identify a septo−entorhinal GABAergic pathway that controls flexible switching between episodic memories during memory retrieval to enable memory updating.
Food safety experts warn of USDA brain drain
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Morning. In the same way that Athena orchestrated the logistics around Telemachus’s journey in the first three books of “The Odyssey,” I hope some gods out there are coordinating a “Survivor” season 50 win for Cirie Fields. She’s earning it, but I wouldn’t mind some divine intervention to make sure.
Opinion: Why alternative medicine can feel so much better than mainstream health care
If all goes well — which is to say if you are generally healthy — you mostly experience the doctor’s office as an inconvenience, going to primary care appointments that are an hour of waiting for 20 minutes of care.
If you’re ill, you fall into a Kafka-esque labyrinth of specialists, waiting rooms, and prior authorizations. You will be held tightly by the medical system, but you are unlikely to feel good.
Opinion: The medical school nutrition blues
One of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s refrains has focused on medical education: Doctors don’t know enough about nutrition and preventive medicine, he likes to say. He has encouraged medical schools to beef up (tallow up?) their education on healthy eating and its connection to chronic disease.
What do medical students think of this?
Opinion: STAT+: Did Kennedy just stack the deck on FDA oversight of peptides?
I’ve been waiting for health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to do something big on oversight of what I call pop peptides, like BPC-157 and GHK-Cu. He had long signaled that he was going to free such peptides from what he saw as a past, misguided FDA that had banned them in 2023.
It’s finally happened — and the way it went down shook me up a bit.
For a few years, a loophole in compounding rules had allowed specialty pharmacies to make and market these peptides. It effectively meant that substances nominated for compounding — even unproven drugs — could be made and marketed by qualified pharmacies while the FDA pondered the nominations. But in 2023, the Food and Drug Administration rightly moved peptides to a no-compounding-allowed status called Category 2 due to concerns about safety and lack of clinical trial data. Now Kennedy is working to undo that with major risks to the public.