As we continue to push through the spring semester, take a break and catch up with some of the latest scientific discoveries, including the transplant of a pig organ into a human and a new tool for pancreatic cancer detection.
"Who are you?" This question, in its many variations, is almost inevitable in school applications, job interviews or introspective moments. We spend years, perhaps our entire lives, unraveling the intricacies of who we are. But there exists another sense of self, of which many are unaware, that stands by 24/7 to protect us. It resides within us, a quiet but essential arbiter of identity: our immune system.
The Los Angeles (LA) wildfires began with with the Palisades fire, which erupted the morning of Jan. 7 in Pacific Palisades as a mere brush fire. Evacuation orders were issued for that fire and by evening, the Eaton fire in Altadena had begun. The Hughes fire was first reported on the morning of Jan. 22. These devastating blazes had engulfed over 47,000 acres of land by the time they were fully or nearly contained.
Following President Trump’s inauguration, the flurry of executive orders and funding freezes introduced uncertainty into the period of political transition. Researchers and health practitioners across the country faced questions about the availability of funding for new graduate students and research fellows, as well as the broader impact on their fields in the coming years.
In the coming weeks, President Donald Trump hopes his cabinet nominations will be swiftly confirmed. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.) — who ran as an independent in the 2024 presidential election before dropping out and supporting President Trump — is eyeing an important position given America’s increasing prevalence of chronic conditions, as Secretary of the Department of Health & Human Services.
The University Writing Program held an event titled Rx: Conversations about Medicine and Writing on Jan. 31. The first speaker was Dr. Lakshmi Krishnan, a historian of medicine, medical humanities scholar and physician currently working at Georgetown University. Krishnan received her M.D. from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and attended the University of Oxford, receiving her D.Phil. in English Literature.
Dr. Won Jin Ho presented a talk as part of the Immunology Neighborhood Seminar on “Overcoming the tumor immune microenvironment — barriers to cancer immunotherapy” on Jan 21. Ho is a physician-scientist at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center and director of the Mass Cytometry Director at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Ho’s expertise centers on pancreatic and liver cancer immunology. He emphasizes that immunotherapy is a mainstay in cancer treatment.
Welcome to this week’s science news in review, where you’ll find newsworthy scientific innovations or events that have been revealed in the first month of 2025. Astronomers and space lovers across the country enjoyed a rare site throughout the month of January. After dark, stargazers could see Venus, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. Venus and Saturn appeared in the southwest, Mars rose in the east and Jupiter was overhead. Uranus and Neptune would also be aligned. This incredible astronomical event will continue throughout February, where seven planets will be “aligned” in this way: Saturn, Mercury, Neptune, Venus, Uranus, Jupiter and Mars.
With the University’s reputation as a rigorous STEM environment, it is no surprise that the campus features students with robust experiences in computer science. One such student is Andreas Jaramillo, a junior majoring in Computer Science (CS). In an interview with The News-Letter, Jaramillo discussed his journey so far and his next steps in the field.
Shawn Burgess, chief of the Office of Scientific Core Facilities in the Developmental Genomics Section of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), gave a talk titled "Darwinian Genomics: Rapid Advances in Genome Assembly Can Make Any Fish a Model Organism" as part of the Biology Department’s seminar series on Thursday, Nov. 14. Burgess is also co-deputy director of the Division of Intramural Research, senior investigator of the Translational and Functional Genomics Branch and head of the Developmental Genomics Section at the NIH.
Innovation in biomedical engineering is accelerating nationally and at Hopkins, a team of ambitious students is similarly pursuing new engineering challenges in the realm of fetal surgery. Led by current Center of Bioengineering Innovation and Design Master’s student Selena Shirkin, the team’s FetalCare Port System aims to address complications in fetal therapy procedures by providing a safer alternative to existing techniques.
For some students, research is merely ticking another box for med school or a resume builder, but not for sophomore Brianna Gauto-Kennedy, a Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChemBE) major, who is currently engaged in research in the Department of Materials Sciences and Engineering . In an interview with The News-Letter, she outlined her journey to her lab and described her current project.
The SERS technique is a valuable tool for the detection of trace amounts of contaminants in food and water or the identification of biological samples. Regarding its most recent clinical applications, SERS has been adapted to diagnose heart attacks in research settings at impressive speeds and accuracy levels.
Andrew H. Song, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School, presented his work on applying deep learning tools to cancer pathology at a talk titled “Taming Large-Scale Pathology Data for Clinical Outcome Prediction” on Nov. 13. In his talk, Song delved into his efforts to leverage AI in improving cancer diagnostics, explaining how machine learning models can fundamentally alter the landscape of clinical outcome prediction.
With Thanksgiving just around the corner, this week’s review highlights scientific breakthroughs we can all be grateful for — advancements that have made a profound impact on human health in the past month. The new at-home test could correctly identify 99% negative and 92% positive COVID-19 samples. For negative Flu A and Flu B samples, 99.9% were identified correctly; for positive Flu A and Flu B samples, the test correctly identified 92.5% and 90.5% of samples, respectively. These quick and affordable tests will be a vital fix for the colder months.
Fei Miao, Pratt & Whitney Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut's School of Computing, delivered a talk titled “Learning and Control for Safety, Efficiency, and Resiliency of Embodied AI” on Nov. 8. Her presentation explored her team’s recent efforts to advance Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) for Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs), which models multiple autonomous vehicles that can send and receive real-time information from nearby vehicles and infrastructure to enhance driving decisions.
On Tuesday, Nov. 5, as part of the Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery Neuroimmunology Seminar Series, Dr. Amber Salter delivered an overview of her ongoing work concerning comorbidities in multiple sclerosis (MS) disease, titled “Examining Associations of Comorbidities in MS Disease-Modifying Therapy Clinical Trial.” Salter is an associate professor of Biostatistics at UT Southwestern Medical Center.
Eledon Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Eledon), is a biotechnology company led by Dr. David-Alexandre C. Gros, its CEO and a 1999 graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Eledon recently announced that two out of the three subjects with Type 1 diabetes treated with Eledon’s drug, tegoprubart, were able to achieve insulin independence after islet cell transplantation between three and six months post-transplant, with the third on the trajectory for insulin independence.
In an interview with The News-Letter, Professor Anna Gilmore discussed her work defining commercial determinants of health (CDOH) — the influence of commercial entities on public health — and further described the topics of her recent talk hosted by the Institute for Global Tobacco Control through the Bloomberg School of Public Health on Nov. 6, 2024.
As the leaves continue to change color, scientific research similarly advances with new progress and innovation. Here are some of the recent studies in the fields of biotechnology, health and chemistry. Researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona recently authored a study published in the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Science, which reports analyses regarding the components and functions of the spliceosome.
