New study by University of Sussex and Zhejiang Chinese Medical University shows blocking protein LMTK3 can prevent breast cancer tumours turning immune cells into 'friends’ First-generation LMTK3 drug (C28) restores the body’s natural immune response Discovery paves way for tailored treatments and a quick test to identify suitable patients, and could be used to fight other cancers – ultimately prolonging lives A new study published today (Friday 23 May 2025) by the University of Sussex and Zhejiang Chinese Medical University reveals that blocking a protein known as LMTK3 can prevent breast cancer tumours from turning immune cells into 'friends’. In cancer, immune cells can be either 'friends’ or ‘foes’, depending on the specific cell type and the tumour microenvironment (TME). Now, scientists have discovered that high levels of LMTK3 in breast cancer cells can trick the body’s defences – and that switching it off with drugs could turbo-charge immunotherapy by fighting tumour cells, thereby delaying or preventing spread and ultimately prolonging lives. LMTK3 is also present in other parts of the body – including the lungs, thyroid, stomach, colon, ovaries and skin – meaning the findings could have positive implications on a range of cancers. Lead researcher Professor Georgios Giamas from Sussex’s School of Life Sciences said: “This research is another step towards unravelling the contribution of LMTK3 in cancer progression and the first one to link LMTK3 with an immunosuppressive tumour microenvironment. “Our findings suggest that by targeting LMTK3, we can control tumour growth both directly by attacking the cancer cells and indirectly by modulating the signals that promote immune cell infiltration and their anti-cancer function.” The study, conducted by the Giamas Lab at the University of Sussex and the Zhejiang Chinese Medical University, and published in Molecular Cancer, has revealed thatLMTK3 acts like a ‘control knob’ that changes the size and content of microscopic ‘parcels’ that cancer cells release to communicate with their surroundings. These parcels – known as extracellular vesicles (EVs) – normally carry signals such as proteins, DNA and lipids, but when LMTK3 is highly active, they contain specific instructions that persuade incoming immune cells to stop fighting and start helping the tumour grow. Researchers performed extensive studies in breast-cancer cells, including treatment with a molecule named C28, the first drug designed to block LMTK3. Once the LMTK3 protein was shut down, the modified parcels lost their power to promote tumour growth, while immune cells, called monocytes, were able to enter the tumour and remained in attack mode rather than switching sides. High levels of LMTK3 in patient tumours have long been linked to poorer survival. Scientists now believe the protein could serve two roles at once – both as a drug target and as a biomarker to help doctors identifywhich patients are most likely to benefit. The group is now working with pharmaceutical partners to turn C28 into a medicine suitable for human trials and to create even stronger, more specific follow-up compounds. At the same time, pre-clinical studies are testing whether LMTK3 drugs can be safely paired with widely used ‘checkpoint’ antibodies that release other immune brakes. The Giamas Lab, along with hospital teams, is also aiming to begin measuring LMTK3 levels in routine biopsy samples, hoping to match future drugs to patients’ individual needs. Co-author Dr Mark Samuels said: “This exciting study highlights how one protein, like LMTK3, can be so multifunctional. It was fascinating to see how it disrupts immune cell function by modifying extracellular vesicle biogenesis. “This adds an important layer to our understanding of how tumours manipulate their surroundings to avoid immune destruction.” Back to all news

Dr Katie Piatt pictured at the Playful Learning Conference 2024 The University of Sussex is joining universities across the UK to launch a research project which could lead to changes in how higher education is taught – with a move away from traditional lectures in favour of a more interactive and playful approach to learning. Dr Katie Piatt, Head of Educational Enhancement in the Student Experience Division at Sussex, is part of the research group, which aims to evidence the value of different approaches to learning. Led by Professor Nic Whitton of Northumbria University, the £1 million RE:PLAY project (Researching the Effectiveness of Playful Learning in Higher Education) has been granted almost £800,000 of funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), with the remainder funded by the collaborating institutions. The research will be carried out as a three-year study by a collaboration of academics at Northumbria University, Durham University, Anglia Ruskin University, University of Sussex, Coventry University, and University of the Arts London. Employers are increasingly looking for more than just academic knowledge from university graduates, with problem-solving abilities, resilience, creativity, and teamwork skills all now highly valued. The research project will examine how universities can improve the way experiential and interactive skills are taught – enhancing student learning and providing graduates with the skills needed to tackle the complex challenges faced by future societies. The project is the first large-scale, systematic study into the effectiveness of the playful learning approach – which encourages students to play an active role in their learning, through processes such as role play, interactive simulations, games, digital toys, quests and challenges. It will develop a deep understanding of the types of playful learning that are effective in different contexts, and why. The project aims to change attitudes towards play in universities by encouraging leaders to be more confident in endorsing play, developing academics’ skills and confidence to use playful learning approaches, and supporting students to learn from play. Dr Piatt is co-Chair of the Playful Learning Association, which recently won a Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence award (led by the University of Sussex and Northumbria University). Sussex is hosting the Playful Learning conference from 2-4 July 2025 for the second year - find out more on the Playful Learning Association website. Back to all news

Australia and Brunei Darussalam are sharing innovative coral reef monitoring technology to help protect reefs in the face of increasing climate change and local ocean pressures. Speaking at the conclusion of the final workshop of the Australian Government’s Marine Resources Initiative (MRI) at Bandar Seri Begawan, High Commissioner his Excellency Mr Michael Hoy said he was proud to bring together scientists from AIMS and the Brunei Darussalam Department of Fisheries to step up its coral reef monitoring capabilities. The launch of the Brunei National Coral Reef Monitoring and Management Plan at the Department of Fisheries. “Protecting coral reefs is a globally shared challenge, vital in locations where people rely on healthy reefs for their livelihoods and where reefs hold significant cultural and spiritual significance,” he said. AIMS Principal Research Scientist Dr Manuel Gonzalez Rivero said the AIMS-developed technology, ReefCloud, was a digital platform that used artificial intelligence to analyse underwater images of a coral reef to extract data about its condition and provide comprehensive, standardised, and easily understandable reports. “ReefCloud enables users to rapidly and cost-effectively provide real-time information on coral reef condition which is essential to inform good reef management decisions,” he said. “AIMS scientists have worked with the Brunei Darussalam Department of Fisheries to train local reef monitoring professionals to use the technology, transfer knowledge, and adopt and adapt it to meet local needs.   “The project successfully collected about 340,000 data records to describe the status of coral reefs across 13 sites along the coast of Brunei Darussalam.   “Researchers, managers and monitoring providers from across the country have been trained in novel monitoring technologies, advanced data analyses and standard methodologies for documenting changes in coral reefs.”   In the final Brunei workshop (L to R) Manuel Gonzalez Rivero (AIMS), Britta Schaffelke (AIMS), Desimawati Binti Haji Metali Hajah (Dept of Fisheries), David Van Der Zwaag (Australian Deputy High Commissioner), Muhammad Azizi Bin Mahali (Dept of Fisheries). Image: Brunei Department of Fisheries. AIMS International Partnerships Manager Dr Britta Schaffelke said the Brunei Darussalam Department of Fisheries would have access to ReefCloud improvements, and new information and training products from AIMS.  “An important objective of the MRI is to establish long lasting relationships between coral reef researchers and professionals across Southeast Asia and Australia,” she said.   “Brunei Darussalam’s fringing reefs and submerged coral reef patches host highly biodiverse coral communities with species richness comparable to the neighbouring ‘Coral Triangle’ zone. “AIMS is also committed to support ongoing regional cooperation through our leadership of the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN) and engagement with the GCRMN’s East Asian Regional node.” ReefCheck Brunei and AIMS representatives in the final workshop (L to R): Fathana Dzarfan, Leonora Yeo, Britta Schaffelke, Manuel Gonzalez Rivero, Emily Maher and Frederick Chong.

LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE Play Pause Skip backwardsGo ten seconds backward Skip forwardsGo ten seconds forward Progress 1.0x Mute Unmute Volume is at 50% 00:00 5:31 1.0x Audio is AI-generated. Report an issue | Give feedback Hummingbird feeders are a beloved pastime for millions of backyard birders and a convenient dining spot for the birds. But for the Anna’s hummingbird, a common species in the western United States, feeders have become a major evolutionary force. According to research published this week in Global Change Biology, artificial feeders have allowed the birds to expand their range out of Southern California up to the state’s northern end. They have also driven a transformation of the birds themselves. Over just a few generations, their beaks have dramatically changed in size and shape. “They seem to be moving where we go and changing quite rapidly to succeed in their new environments,” says co–lead author Nicolas Alexandre, who conducted the work when he was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley and is now a geneticist at Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnology company based in Dallas. “We can think of Anna’s hummingbird as a commensal species, similar to pigeons.” Carleton University animal behaviorist Roslyn Dakin, who wasn’t involved with the study, adds that the new paper beautifully shows “evolution in action.” SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up It’s unclear when the earliest hummingbird feeders appeared. A 1928 National Geographic article provided instructions for DIY feeders to observe hummingbirds, but the technology likely existed earlier. What is clear, though, is that hummingbird feeders took off after World War II. When Alexandre and his colleagues mined the text of newspaper archives dating back to 1880, they found that ads for feeders proliferated after the first patented one appeared in 1947. To test how Anna’s hummingbirds responded to the uptick in feeders, the researchers turned to the Audubon Christmas Bird Count, an annual birding survey. Data from the survey showed which of California’s 58 counties the bird inhabited from 1938 to 2019. U.S. Census records indicated human population density in these same areas, while newspaper ads for feeders served as a proxy for feeder density. In addition, the team analyzed hummingbird museum specimens in 2D and 3D to quantify changes to their beaks over time. Finally, they built a model for predicting hummingbird range expansion that incorporated not just artificial feeders, but also other factors, including the locations of introduced eucalyptus trees, which can provide nectar throughout the year. The researchers’ findings suggest eucalyptus trees—which were planted en masse in California in the late 1800s—might have served as the first steppingstone for some populations of Anna’s hummingbirds to expand their ranges. But hummingbird feeders played the biggest role in driving the hummingbird’s northward population growth. “The feeders are what really make the difference here,” says senior author Alejandro Rico-Guevara, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington. Advertisement The northward expansion of Anna’s hummingbird was already known, says Catherine Graham, an ecologist at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, but the exact mechanisms driving it weren’t. She says the new paper stands out as “impressive” because of the detailed explanation it offers. The researchers also found that as feeders proliferated, Anna’s hummingbird beaks got longer and larger, which may reflect an adaptation to slurp up far more nectar than flowers can naturally provide. Developing a bigger beak to access feeders “is like having a large spoon to eat with,” Rico-Guevara says. This change was more pronounced in areas where feeders were dense. But in birds that lived in colder regions north of the species’ historical range, the researchers spotted the opposite trend: Their beaks became shorter and smaller. This finding also makes sense: The researchers used an infrared camera to show for the first time that hummingbirds use their beaks to thermoregulate, by dissipating heat while they are perched. A smaller beak has less surface area—and would therefore help conserve heat. It wasn’t just the size and shape of beaks that changed. In areas where feeders are dense, male hummingbirds have also developed beaks that are pointier and sharper than usual. Pointy beaks in hummingbird species often indicate aggressiveness, and the researchers think male skirmishes over feeder control may have made these birds feistier. “Anyone who has a feeder knows that hummingbirds fight like crazy,” Rico-Guevara says. The most surprising finding, though, was how quickly these changes took place. By the 1950s, hummingbirds were noticeably different from those of the 1930s: a time span of only about 10 generations of birds, Alexandre says. Dakin says the study adds nuance to our conception of humans as an evolutionary force. Often, researchers think of humans as exerting selective pressures through environmental damage or deliberate domestication. But as with Anna’s hummingbird, “I think we’re going to find more and more examples of contemporary and subtle changes,” she says, “that we’re shaping, indirectly, in many more species.”

LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE Play Pause Skip backwardsGo ten seconds backward Skip forwardsGo ten seconds forward Progress 1.0x Mute Unmute Volume is at 50% 00:00 07:16 1.0x Audio is AI-generated. Report an issue | Give feedback An emerging sonar technology that scans the sea floor at centimeter-scale resolution is dazzling researchers with its potential. Commercial synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) devices, originally developed by the military to identify explosive mines, are now being deployed by scientists such as Yizhaq Makovsky, a marine geoscientist at the University of Haifa. When he first saw how SAS instruments could pick out the bumps of tiny seafloor burrows, he says, “We realized this was a game changer.” Only a Rhode Island–size patch of the world’s deep-sea floors has been observed up close, according to a study published on 7 May in Science Advances. That imaged area is likely to grow with the adoption of SAS, which can efficiently reveal fine details in wide swaths of the sea floor, unmasking its biology and geology. It could also be crucial in upcoming fights between deep-sea miners and the environmentalists who seek to limit seafloor exploitation. “How do you decide what to preserve?” Makovsky asks. “How do you monitor it?” Larry Mayer, an oceanographer at the University of New Hampshire (UNH), is excited by the technology’s seemingly “magical” abilities, but cautions that its advantages are not always worth the complexity and price tag, which can run upwards of several million dollars for the device and an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) or ship-towed platform to carry it. SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up SAS is analogous to the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems on satellites that are increasingly being used to map Earth’s surface. In SAR, a moving beam source focuses multiple “pings” on a single point on Earth’s surface. The radar reflections are stitched together to create a picture equivalent to one taken by a much larger aperture antenna. SAS does the same thing with sound instead of radio waves. Making the image requires knowing “exactly where the antenna is, and estimating its motion,” explains sonar scientist Shannon Steele at Kraken Robotics, one of a handful of companies that sells SAS devices. The antenna must travel in a perfectly straight line, says Anthony Lyons, an underwater acoustics researcher at UNH. “Your navigation has to be phenomenally good.” SAR satellites can calculate position and trajectory using the GPS system and the radar pulses themselves. But GPS doesn’t work underwater, and sound travels slower than radio waves, making it a poor navigation tool. Only in the past decade have companies been able to surmount these thorny difficulties in commercial SAS systems. “The magic trick is using the acoustic data itself to correct navigation,” using algorithms that exploit time delays between adjacent pings to estimate motion, says Roy Hansen, an acoustic imaging researcher at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment who in 2006 deployed one of the first consistently successful SAS systems. Advertisement Science is now benefiting. For John Jamieson, a geologist at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, SAS is the “holy grail” for understanding seafloor processes. In 2023, he and Ph.D. student Caroline Gini led a mission to the Galápagos Islands to see what an SAS instrument could show about hydrothermal systems—hot springs percolating up through the sea floor with nutrients that support marine life. The images revealed unknown vents and even some of the seafloor animals that lived near them. “You forget that it’s not a photo, but an image re-created from sound,” Gini says. Such detail about the vents could help refine models of how fluids flow through the sea floor. Makovsky sees potential for marine ecology. In March, he and his colleagues reported the results of an SAS survey of the Bustan HaGalil ridge, a 150-meter-deep reef off Israel’s west coast. A survey covering 5 square kilometers took just 6 hours, producing images showing distinct sandy, rocky, and silty seafloor textures that allowed the researchers to classify the reef’s different habitats. “You can even see algae growth on rocks,” Makovsky says. Human divers guided by the images later performed a census of organisms in the different habitats—ultimately creating a machine learning tool that could be used to estimate ecological diversity from SAS data at other sites. Meanwhile, Hansen and colleagues have put SAS to work in deepwater archaeology, hunting Allied cargo ships filled with bombs and mustard gas that were scuppered in the North Sea just after World War II. Using an SAS system onboard an AUV to map an area four times the size of Paris, Hansen’s team found 54 wrecks, some of them unknown, and pinpointed individual bombs and barrels scattered around the wrecks that would have been too small for other sonar systems to see. The mapping could help guide future cleanup efforts. “These environmental problems are, for me, the best application,” Hansen says. Another kind of environmental monitoring could come as miners begin to target the sea floor. For example, SAS could help miners identify smokestacks of extinct hydrothermal vents, which hold rich metal deposits. And it could enable watchdogs to gauge the impacts of resource extraction. When Israel opened the Palmahim Disturbance, a deep-sea landslide off the coast of Tel Aviv, for oil industry bids in 2021, the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel approached Makovsky with concerns. He led an ensuing SAS campaign that, on the largely barren sea floor, revealed fluid seeps surrounded by animal burrows, brine pools, and even a deep-sea shark nursery. Makovsky calls it “a lavish oasis in the middle of the desert.” The findings helped clinch the region’s status as a new marine protected area in 2022. Lyons points out that projects like these often benefit from access to military-purchased AUVs and SAS systems. “They’re phenomenally expensive,” he says. It’s not just the equipment, he adds: You need crew to deploy them, and analysts who understand the data processing. But companies are beginning to offer commercial SAS services, hiring out both crew and SAS system to perform surveys. Progress and demand will drive price down, Hansen believes. He sees “an evolution not a revolution” in access and technology. For now, Mayer believes, well-financed shipwreck hunters and companies prospecting for seafloor minerals will continue to be early adopters, along with scientists lucky enough to have major government support for ecology and biology. “I see it as a niche thing, for people who 
can afford it,” Lyons says. “I wish I had one to 
play with.”

LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE Play Pause Skip backwardsGo ten seconds backward Skip forwardsGo ten seconds forward Progress 1.0x Mute Unmute Volume is at 50% 00:00 4:10 1.0x Audio is AI-generated. Report an issue | Give feedback Perfumes and lotions do more than soften our skin and give us signature aromas. They can chemically alter the air we breathe, weakening a phenomenon called the human oxidation field, researchers report today in Science Advances. The new results lend further credence to the idea that the human body can meaningfully alter the chemistry of indoor air, says Nicola Carslaw, an indoor air chemist at the University of York who wasn’t involved with the research. “What’s fascinating about this paper is that it shows what simple bodies in a space can do.” Whether these chemical reactions help—or harm—us, however, remains unclear. Scientists coined the term “human oxidation field” in 2022. A study published in Science found that when oils in our skin are exposed to ozone—an oxidant that can creep in from the outdoors or from some air purifiers—they can spawn highly reactive molecules called hydroxyl radicals. These in turn can break down other gases in the air around us, creating a haze of radicals—the human oxidation field. SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up The discovery raised only more questions, however: namely, whether the products we apply to our skin also change the air around us, says Manabu Shiraiwa, a chemist at the University of California, Irvine and author on the 2022 study. To find out, Shiraiwa and his colleagues ran two experiments: one in which four volunteers spritzed a popular commercial perfume on the backs of their hands, and another wherein four daubed unscented body lotion onto any exposed skin. After applying either product, each group of volunteers sat in a chamber where they were exposed to up to 40 parts per billion of ozone for 2 to 4 hours, at levels lower than U.S. air pollution standards. Next, the researchers identified the molecules in the chamber’s air and then worked out the radical reactions that must have taken place to result in the observed mélange. They found that when volunteers had on either lotion or perfume, their bodies created fewer hydroxyl radicals, with the perfume specifically lowering their concentrations around the body by 86%. Advertisement “We expected that the personal care products would weaken the human oxidation field,” Shiraiwa says. “But the extent of the impact was surprisingly huge.” The researchers are still figuring out exactly what fewer hydroxyl radicals mean for everyday life. If the radicals react with other molecules to form toxic substances, wearing personal care products could be a safeguard; if they are breaking down dangerous gases, then the same products could leave someone more vulnerable. But there’s such a wide variety of compounds in indoor air—created by everything from cooking to cleaning—that researchers don’t have any easy answers. “We can’t give any public advice on whether this means you should wear a lot of lotion,” Shiraiwa says, adding that he hopes future research can zero in on health impacts. Jonathan Abbatt, a chemist at the University of Toronto who wasn’t involved in the study, is interested in how future studies could build on these findings. Research could incorporate more types of bathroom products, for example, perhaps including soaps or shampoos. He also wants to know how long these products can alter the human oxidation field. “These are some state-of-the-art techniques being used,” he says. “But I wonder how the air would change … 10 hours later.” With future work, Shiraiwa hopes scientists can gain an even better understanding of the spaces where we spend so much of our lives. “If you think about how long you’re indoors versus outdoors, you actually spend most of your time indoors, right?” he says. “What’s going on in indoor air needs a lot more attention.”

We know that noisy reefs are healthy, but carefully listening to the sounds made by fish, invertebrates and humans underwater can help us understand the details better, such as changing diversity, distribution and abundance of species. There might even be new species to identify in the cacophony. AIMS scientists and collaborators have been refining techniques to help them hear these details more clearly. Sound on! Image: A. Rerekura (hover over video to pause) In a series of papers, AIMS researchers and partners have found that coral reef soundscapes vary significantly across reef habitats and can reflect subtle differences in biological communities. They also tested different analytical tools and methods for recording and analysing underwater sound that will help scientists discriminate between different sounds, and improve the design of monitoring systems. Senior co-author on the papers, AIMS acoustic scientist Dr Miles Parsons, said: “Coral reefs are vital ecosystems supporting livelihoods, biodiversity, industries like tourism and fisheries and providing coastal protection. To assist them under a changing climate, we need to understand them, and monitoring their noises can help. "We know that acoustic monitoring offers complimentary and scalable tools for monitoring reef health. In some cases, it’s the most feasible method of data collection because it’s autonomous and long term. “It also captures information on parts of the underwater community that are otherwise difficult to sample, such as cryptic species that make specific noises, and records behaviours at times and in conditions when it’s difficult to sample, such as deep, dark or dirty water when visual surveys won’t work. Scientists use underwater microphones, or hydrophones, to record reef sounds. Image: J. Hurford. “Our new research explores the spatial scales at which we can tease out this information and what types of habitat might be driving them.” AIMS and Curtin University PhD candidate Juan Carlos Azofeifa Solano, who led two of the papers, said the researchers used data from three sites: Lizard Island in the Great Barrier Reef, Coral Bay at Ningaloo World Heritage Marine Park and Guanacaste Conservation area in Costa Rica. “In our research at Lizard Island, we found we could discriminate between habitats that did and did not include significant proportions of a type of coral called Pocillopora just by listening to the associated soundscape. “The shape and fine branching of Pocillopora provide small refuges to several noisy invertebrates, like snapping shrimp, who are loudest at night.” The scientists used a tool called the Soundscape Code to help them understand the characteristics of the reef soundscape. This helped them to detect different soundscapes within the same coral reef, at monitoring stations just 30 metres apart. “Our results provide evidence that a single reef might require more than one sampling site to obtain a representative characterisation of the soundscapes from different habitats occurring in the same reef,” added Mr Azofeifa Solano. Lizard Island, on the Great Barrier Reef, was a key location for reef sounds recordings. Image: J. Hurford In another paper, led by AIMS@UWA postdoc Dr James Kemp, the team explored the effect of adjusting processing criteria when analysing the sound data and highlighted the need for methodological standardisation and validation to ensure reliable comparisons and effective ecosystem monitoring. The team also found the placement and orientation of hydrophones affect soundscape recordings, which is essential to account for when designing monitoring systems. Dr Kemp said: “This research contributes to the advance of underwater acoustics as a tool for ecological monitoring, ground-testing commonly used and novel methods, integrating them with field-based ecology, and assessing potential sources of bias, which is essential to develop reliable long-term monitoring programs.” Installing a hydrophone next to a small experimental patch reef at Lizard Island. Image: J. Hurford. Co-authors on the papers came from the Curtin University; Doñana Biological Station; the University of Bristol; the University of Exeter, the University of Costa Rica; and The University of Western Australia. The studies were supported by the Australian Coral Reef Resilience Initiative (ACRRI), which is jointly funded by AIMS and BHP. Interested in the details? Kemp et al (2025) Impact of acoustic index parameters on soundscape comparisons Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 16, 872–885. Azofeifa-Solano et al (2025): Soundscape analysis reveals fine ecological differences among coral reef habitats Ecological Indicators, 171, 1113120 Azofeifa-Solano et al (2025) Distance and orientation of hydrophones influence the received soundscape in shallow coral reefs Frontiers in Remote Sensing, 6.

LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE Play Pause Skip backwardsGo ten seconds backward Skip forwardsGo ten seconds forward Progress 1.0x Mute Unmute Volume is at 50% 00:00 06:28 1.0x Audio is AI-generated. Report an issue | Give feedback At his first staff town hall, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya yesterday faced a packed auditorium and fielded challenging questions on topics from transparency about decisions by President Donald Trump’s administration to gender research. He also tried to make the case that he shares his employees’ concerns about crippling layoffs and is working to get NIH operations back on track. “My goal is to make this place better,” said Bhattacharya, who started at the agency on 1 April. The event on NIH’s main campus in Bethesda, Maryland, drew 1200 questions in advance, nearly 500 attendees in person, and many more online. The turnout—and the skeptical reactions some expressed online or privately to Science—reflected the recent upheaval at the agency. Since Trump took office in January, NIH has lost about 2500 of its 20,000-person staff to layoffs and hundreds more to retirement and other departures. SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up Bhattacharya said he didn’t decide who was terminated or offered reassignment. “I actually don’t have any transparency in how those decisions were made, and actually I’m quite upset about that. It would be nice to have had some say,” Bhattacharya said. (Science obtained a recording of the town hall.) A health economist who left Stanford University for the NIH job, Bhattacharya joked that his hair has turned grayer since he became director. He said he is adjusting to working for the federal government and has sometimes mistakenly left his ID in his computer—a common practice among many NIH employees but one that, a few weeks ago, led the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency to threaten the jobs of some agency staffers. Bhattacharya’s staff had canceled a previously scheduled town hall, a move that some speculated reflected concerns that the union representing NIH’s trainees, which includes college graduates through postdocs, planned a walkout. Indeed, a group of several dozen people did walk out a few minutes into Bhattacharya’s remarks, prompting some applause. “It’s nice to have free speech,” he responded. Advertisement Bhattacharya, whose opposition to public health measures such as vaccine mandates and school closures during COVID-19 won him fans among conservatives and others, ticked through a list of his now familiar priorities. They include prioritizing research on chronic disease, supporting reproducibility, backing “edge science,” and encouraging scientific freedom. He wants to stop NIH-funded risky virus research known as gain-of-function (GOF) studies because “it’s possible” that the agency backed studies in Wuhan, China, that caused the COVID-19 pandemic: “I believe it,” he said. But he didn’t expand on ambiguities in a recent White House executive order that appears to restrict GOF research except to say such studies are “a tiny, tiny portion of our portfolio.” The new director discussed a new NIH policy for grantees and in-house scientists that he had signed off on. It aims to reduce the use of lab animals, he says, because “what we want is research that improves the health of people, not just the health of mice.” Many lab researchers worry about the policy’s implications for research. Tackling another controversial policy decision made since he started, Bhattacharya insisted a new NIH requirement that foreign scientists apply directly for agency grants instead of receiving subawards from their U.S. partners won’t stop vital work. “Foreign collaborations will continue,” he said. He answered several questions gleaned from the 1200 submissions and from audience members, including one asking how he squares his opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which he calls “political ideology,” with research on health disparities, some of which he has himself done. Bhattacharya said NIH remains committed to studying the health of women and minority health populations in order “to advance the health and well-being of every single American.” He said researching the health effects of redlining, in which people of certain races or ethnicities are denied services such as mortgages based on where on a map they live, is a “completely legitimate kind of study” that NIH could fund because “you can remove the policy” and study its effects. Yet he said structural racism cannot be studied because it’s “not a scientific hypothesis.” One audience member pointed out that redlining is a form of structural racism. Another asked about how his support for scientific dissent fits with a Trump policy declaring that there are only two biological sexes, male and female, and rejecting the use of gender in research. Bhattacharya took a hard line: “Sex is a very cleanly defined variable. If you’re using gender, you have to have a scientific reason for using gender” and cannot make it “a routine question in order to make an ideological point.” He was asked about concerns that patients might be afraid to come to NIH for experimental treatments because they are not citizens and fear arrest by immigration authorities. The NIH Clinical Center is a “sacred place” obligated to treating patients “regardless of what their status is,” he declared. Bhattacharya also addressed more practical matters, saying teleworking was probably gone forever and promising to help get needed lab supplies. “No gloves?” he said. “We’ll get that fixed” by bringing back fired staff in procurement offices, he vowed. Some watching the town hall gave the new director grudging praise for being willing to go off script. But others were skeptical of his seemingly contradictory views on studies involving DEI. And several in-house NIH scientists told Science they felt he only paid lip service to their concerns. “Denying problems,” said one senior researcher, pointing to ongoing issues such as an exodus of clinical researchers.

LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE Play Pause Skip backwardsGo ten seconds backward Skip forwardsGo ten seconds forward Progress 1.0x Mute Unmute Volume is at 50% 00:00 9:10 1.0x Audio is AI-generated. Report an issue | Give feedback Baba Pascal Camara, 57, has served as a community health worker in the ancient Malian city of Timbuktu for almost 30 years. Once or twice every year, he helped organize a campaign to provide the entire population of the health district Bellafarandi, where he lives, with drugs to treat a slew of so-called neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), debilitating and often disfiguring infections unknown in richer parts of the world. Supported since 2007 by the United States, the work has helped steadily drive down their prevalence. In 2023, Camara and his colleagues celebrated a milestone: The World Health Organization (WHO) announced that Mali had eliminated the bacterial disease trachoma, once a leading cause of blindness, as a public health problem. The country of 25 million is also close to getting rid of lymphatic filariasis (LF), a mosquito-borne worm infection also called elephantiasis because it causes horrifically swollen arms, legs, breasts, and genitals. But that progress is in peril. After President Donald Trump took office in January, the U.S. ended all of its support for the fight against NTDs in more than two dozen countries. Mali has not found alternative funding to help distribute the drugs across its vast territory. “I would ask the American government to reconsider its decision,” Camara told Science in a recent phone interview. “Our community needs those drugs.” SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up The elimination of the 19-year-old NTD program managed by the now-defunct U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has received far less attention than the cuts in programs for the “big three” in global health—HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis. NTDs, which affect 1 billion people worldwide, do not kill in large numbers. But the ill health and stigma they bring can keep people trapped in poverty and shorten their life spans. And the USAID program had an outsize impact, relative to its modest budget of $114 million annually, because drug companies have been willing to donate billions of dollars worth of medicines, as long as USAID and its partners distributed them. “The beauty of it was, for every dollar you spend as a taxpayer, you’re getting $26 in donated drugs,” says Emily Wainwright, who led the USAID program’s strategy until she was fired in January. Fourteen countries have eliminated at least one disease with USAID support; in January, for example, Niger was the first African country to eliminate onchocerciasis, also known as river blindness because the parasitic worms that cause it are spread by black flies breeding in fast-flowing rivers. “After thousands of years, we’re now at a point where we can actually eliminate some of these diseases as a public health problem,” says Angela Weaver, who helped launch USAID’s program and is now head of NTDs at Helen Keller Intl., a U.S. nonprofit that helped run now-canceled USAID-funded projects in Mali and five other West African countries. “All of that is now in jeopardy.” Advertisement The term “neglected tropical diseases” dates back just over 20 years, to when researchers in a range of little-known illnesses started teaming up to integrate control efforts and raise their collective profile. At the time, fighting diseases of the world’s poorest was still a bipartisan cause in the U.S. Congress, and lawmakers from both parties supported the USAID program with an initial $15 million in funding in 2006. In addition to trachoma, LF, and onchocerciasis, the program took on schistosomiasis, which is caused by Schistosoma worms released from freshwater snails and can result in organ damage, infertility, bladder cancer, and death. It also targeted soil-transmitted helminthiasis, an umbrella term for infections with a variety of intestinal worms that can cause malnutrition, reduced growth, and anemia. The antibiotic azithromycin is a cheap weapon against trachoma, an infection that leads to blindness.RTI International Focusing on these five infections made sense because drugs to treat them are cheap, effective, and safe enough that they can be given to entire populations, in so-called mass drug administration (MDA) programs, instead of testing and treating individual patients. Pharmaceutical companies have been happy to provide the drugs for free—in most cases, through WHO—as part of their corporate responsibility programs. Merck, for example, has donated more than 5 billion doses of ivermectin since 1987 to treat onchocerciasis and LF. Pfizer supplies the antibiotic azithromycin against trachoma, and GSK donates albendazole against LF and soil-transmitted helminthiasis. USAID supported nonprofits and governments to map infection rates throughout affected countries, organize drug administration drives, and monitor their impact. It also provided small grants to researchers in developing countries and financed operational research. “They funded a whole ecosystem,” says Patrick Lammie, an NTD expert at the Task Force for Global Health. Now, this ecosystem has collapsed. FHI 360, a nonprofit that administered a USAID-funded NTD program in 11 West African countries, has laid off more than 400 people in the U.S. and 700 elsewhere in the world, says Juliana Soares Linn, the group’s senior director of infectious disease and global health security. (Helen Keller has laid off hundreds of people as well, a spokesperson says.) USAID withdrawal has already delayed 47 drug distribution campaigns, together affecting more than 142 million people, says Albis Gabrielli of WHO’s NTD department. In Mali, one of the biggest worries now is the distribution of the drug praziquantel to fight schistosomiasis, the most lethal of the five diseases, says Modibo Keita, who coordinates Helen Keller’s program in the country. If MDAs stop, infection rates are bound to go up again, he adds: “We risk losing the gains that we’ve made.” WHO is attempting to mitigate the crisis, with the help of an online dashboard that keeps track of where donated drugs are about to expire—some 109 million tablets are at risk the next 9 months—and where MDA rounds are most urgently needed. It’s working with countries to look for opportunities to piggy-back drug distribution on existing public health efforts, such as vaccination campaigns or food distribution. But so far, no alternative funders have stepped forward. WHO itself is downsizing because the U.S., its largest financial contributor, has canceled its membership. And almost all the countries affected by the cuts in NTD programs have also seen their budgets for more deadly diseases such as HIV and malaria slashed—which means NTDs are at risk of sliding back into neglect, Weaver says: “It feels like we’ve gone back to 2006, where we’re not sure if countries will prioritize these diseases.” Companies that donate drugs may also back away. “They don’t want to send a drug out if they know it can’t be distributed,” Weaver says. “That really adds an extra tragic layer to this.” Johannes Waltz, head of the Schistosomiasis Elimination Program at the German pharma company Merck (unaffiliated with its U.S. counterpart) says, “In the worst case, we may be forced to … temporarily scale down” production and donation of praziquantel, currently at 250 million tablets annually. “But make no mistake, Merck’s commitment will continue,” Waltz says. Five other companies did not respond to Science’s requests for comment or declined to answer specific questions. Wainwright says the U.S. departure has harmed the country’s reputation. In developing countries, working with USAID was sometimes seen as “clunky and cumbersome,” she concedes. “You had to follow all of these rules. But at least people knew we were stable. … We’re going to complete the agenda. That reliability is key.” Even before they were burned by Trump, many in the NTD community agreed the distribution of drugs should not be so dependent on a single donor. They favor a model where NTD control becomes part of a country’s regular health system. And many countries “are having a very mature response” to the cuts, says Maria Rebollo Polo, an NTD expert at WHO. “They’re not just sitting and crying, but actually saying, ‘OK, we need to do something, because we care about our people.’”

LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE Play Pause Skip backwardsGo ten seconds backward Skip forwardsGo ten seconds forward Progress 1.0x Mute Unmute Volume is at 50% 00:00 05:48 1.0x Audio is AI-generated. Report an issue | Give feedback Groundbreaking scientific research with lasting impact is on the rise. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which found that the share of papers that are “persistently disruptive”—a new metric the authors developed—rose about fivefold from 2000 to 2019. The results add nuance to the narrative, advanced in several previous studies, that innovativeness has declined across many scientific fields because researchers are increasingly reliant on narrow existing knowledge within their subdisciplines. “It’s a bright spot against the backdrop of lots of evidence suggesting innovation is getting harder,” says Russell Funk, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities who co-authored a landmark 2023 study showing a decrease in papers’ disruptiveness; he was not involved in the new study but wrote an accompanying commentary. Understanding the common features of persistently disruptive research projects and the scientists who conduct them could shed light on “ways to really support scientists and ease some of the barriers to creating the most innovative work,” he adds. The new study builds on a nascent measure of scholarly innovativeness, dubbed “disruption,” that measures by how much a paper departs from a prior body of knowledge. A highly disruptive paper was originally defined as one that subsequent papers cite without also citing any of the works the original paper references—a sign the paper had broken with existing paradigms. SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up But An Zeng, a researcher in systems science at Beijing Normal University, was puzzled to see that papers dubbed disruptive are not consistently highly cited, as one might expect if they contained bold, trailblazing ideas. In the new work, he and his colleagues sought to identify these truly groundbreaking papers using the new measure, persistent disruption. To better distinguish breakthroughs from incremental advances, the approach calculates the amount of disruption a given paper receives from each paper that cites it, then averages these scores. The new method also looks at references to the citing papers to determine whether the paper in question itself has been subsequently disrupted. A paper scored this way is labeled as persistently disruptive if it not only is highly cited without the works it references—similar to the original disruptiveness metric—but if subsequent papers that reference the citing papers also commonly cite the paper in question, too, suggesting it has staying power. After looking at more than 100 million scholarly publications appearing from 1800 through 2019 and tracking citations for up to 10 years after a paper was published, the authors found some 3.6 million papers that scored highly on these twin dimensions—they disrupted their intellectual forebears but were not themselves disrupted by their successors. These papers received a whopping 1637 citations on average, the authors report today in Nature Computational Science. “It’s quite hard to get into this group” of persistent disruptors, Zeng says. Such papers make up an increasing proportion of the literature since 2000, the researchers found. That result does not contradict previous findings that the share of papers that are disruptive has broadly declined, Zeng says. But, “For those papers that do disrupt previous work, they are more likely to be adopted by future work nowadays.” A possible explanation is that the quality of the disruptive work may be improving, he suggests. Advertisement High persistent disruption scores are also correlated with other measures of originality, including recognition by Nobel Prizes, the authors found. For example, the older method of calculating disruptiveness labels the work of Chen-Ning Yang—who shared the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for a discovery that a physical law called the conservation of parity is violated during certain nuclear reactions—as less disruptive than another “typical” scientist who produced about as many papers (whom Zeng’s paper did not name). But the new measure shows more of Yang’s papers were persistently disruptive—less readily “overtaken by later developments” than this other scientist’s works. The new study also found that large teams of scientists disproportionately produce persistently disruptive papers: Teams with 10 members produced them at twice the rate of teams with only three members. The new paper is “a very important, timely contribution,” says network scientist Dashun Wang of Northwestern University. “There are legitimate questions about what’s the right measure” for innovation, he adds. There’s no formula for determining the optimal balance between disruptive research and work that builds incrementally on previous findings, Zeng says. For example, the discovery in 2016 of cosmic gravitational waves by researchers using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory confirmed elements of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity presented a century earlier. It was recognized by a Nobel Prize—and certainly should be counted as a breakthrough, Funk says. But to address challenging problems such as improving sustainability, adapting to climate change, and reducing income inequality, Funk says, “You might want much higher levels of disruption” than exist today.