Halting mRNA vaccine development in the US has broader implications beyond infectious diseases, impeding innovative cancer and rare disease treatments. Science is interconnected; each step forward contributes to collective knowledge and new breakthroughs. www.sciencenews.org/article/mrna...

One sane article in a sea of endless misinformation: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/o...

RFK Jr. should resign. Any healthy Democratic Party would demand it right now. Any public health apparatus of value would demand it right now. We are leaderless in government and academia. America is a fucking death cult

Pseudobabble. There is deliberate confusion here. 1) The first claim is made concerning infections. Fact: No vaccine is or can be effective in stopping infections. Why? Because antibodies are our only pathogen-specific protection against infection ,and they wane. 1/4

At his confirmation hearing, RFK Jr claimed he wouldn’t take away vaccines. So far he has: Removed COVID vaccine recommendations Fired the CDC’s vaccine committee Replaced scientists with antivaxxers Cancelled vaccine hesitancy research Pulled $500m in mRNA vaccine research

mRNA vaccines are so close to magic as to be basically indistinguishable, and the administration is stopping them because they worship death.

Hey congrats to everyone who took the soft anti-vaccine stance of “mRNA vaccines aren’t 100% effective and aren’t useful against future variants so the mRNA vaccines aren’t good, we need to mask forever”, your stance has been noted by RFK Jr. to kill mRNA technology in America.

Every reputable expert I know considers mRNA vaccine technology to be one of the most revolutionary advances in medicine in our lifetimes. Its inventors won the Nobel Prize in 2023. Shutting it down now is pointless self-harm to humanity.

Check out the latest study from our lab, led by Coffee Xiang (@coffeebond007.bsky.social) www.nature.com/articles/s41... (1/2)

🧬 A new AI tool from @utaustin.bsky.social & Sanofi could speed the development of mRNA-based therapies for viruses, cancers and genetic disorders. RiboNN predicts which mRNA sequences will be most efficiently translated into proteins. cns.utexas.edu/news/researc... @taccutexas.bsky.social

Predicting the translation efficiency of messenger RNA in mammalian cells go.nature.com/4mgXR0C

Translation efficiency covariation identifies conserved coordination patterns across cell types go.nature.com/3TXvmZy

Very excited that our most significant work, a collaboration w/ Dr. Can Cenik at UT Austin on translational gene regulation, was finally published in Nature Biotechnology in a dual set of studies: Paper 1 -- an AI model trained to predict translation rates from mRNA sequences: rdcu.be/exN1l

RFK Jr.’s war on vaccines is hurting America's kids.

Vaccine refusal, encouraged by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has now led to the worst U.S. measles outbreak since the disease was classified as eliminated in 2000. This was preventable. Vaccines save lives and prevent hospitalizations that are physically, mentally, and financially draining.

1/ DNA sequence models like Borzoi predict gene expression and variant effects across tissues — but how can someone adapt the model to a custom experiment? @drkbio.bsky.social, Johannes Linder and I propose a solution via parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I've seen folks talk about how "in four years" they'll be able to get back to their planned projects and I really don't think that's going to work out. People & projects losing funding now will not be able to hit pause and come back once funding is restored. Hard-won progress & capacity will be lost

Some exciting news! 🥳👍 finally dropped our open-source AI model to predict translation rates from mRNA sequences online for free academic use! Hope it's widely used among RNA scientists! Code: github.com/Sanofi-Publi...; Model: zenodo.org/records/1537...; Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Deaths from heart disease down 75%, that’s NIH. Deaths from stroke down 75%, that’s NIH. HIV/AIDS no longer a death sentence, that’s NIH. 99% of FDA approved drugs in the last decade, that’s NIH. Please show this video to anyone who doesn’t understand why the NIH is so important.

At what point in history did science become partisan? Didn't we all agree that innovations help all of us? If our brother/mother/father or YOU are stricken with cancer, do you really think you have "owned the libs" by destroying NIH/NSF funding? The amount of self-inflicted destruction is dizzying 😢

I talked to Nature about the latest development at NSF, which is a five-alarm fire for American science. The scale of immediate impact is massive. We narrowly escaped this affecting @viralemergence.org for now, but will have to shut down in a few months if this stays. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Dr. Anthony Fauci urges Americans not to accept "Normalization of Untruths".

Well, fuck! Just got a message from my university that we can no longer spend money on our NSF-funded grants. This is as good as having the grants taken away from us.

Short of literally launching a war, it’s hard to imagine how a foreign adversary could do more lasting damage to the US than the Trump administration is doing.

Time to catch up on the past week’s news about science and medicine in the US. Whew. 1/10

BREAKING: NSF has frozen all grant funding, as of yesterday. It's unclear when they will resume funding awards, or why the pause has been put in place. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The possibility that RFK Jr. is going to undermine herd immunity in the United States grows increasingly likely. This would mean that US will be responsible for starting numerous pandemics and potentially destroying the effectiveness of the entire globe’s vaccine arsenal. This is bioterrorism.

In what proportions is our new NIH Director a flaming ignoramus vs. a brazen liar?

One of the toughest parts of the field of massively parallel reporter assays to measure >~thousands of elements is that there are hundreds of pubs using them, but no central repo to easily locate the results....until now! Great collab w/ Jingjing Zhao, Ilias G-S, and @nadavahituv.bsky.social!!

Glad I'm not the only one observing the irony of tech billionaires handing out science prizes while backing an admin that has dismantled American science. New level of #respect for Seth Rogan

Pretty cool study... But to me it also highlights simply how releasing more historical medical records could lead to powerful scientific findings that would impact public health policy. Not fully sure the reasons the medical community isn't doing that despite being able to anonymize them...

It’s stunning to me that the New York Times did not put the story on the bloodbath at the NIH, CDC, and FDA on its front page this morning.

Dear America: if your daughter or son or mother or father or YOU have cancer, and there is or could be an mRNA vaccine that would treat it, are you prepared to destroy the research/tech that would save their lives? Because doing so would take your self-sabotage to unprecedented levels of stupidity..

Most bizarre article I've read in quite some time...of course, Florida is no stranger to bizarre

I know that the mRNA is larger than the protein it codes for but I don't believe it

Published in today's issue! OPEN ACCESS article, FREE massive dataset, FREE code, FREE pre-trained AI/ML model. #OpenScience was a mountain of work to make this happen: check it out if you haven't already 😉

Interesting! @nytimes.com still hasn’t covered any of the Stand Up for Science protests today, but they made sure to put this important news front and center online. Powerful reporting…

Life achievement unlocked: our first cover art accepted alongside our new review on computational techniques to model lipid nanocarriers for drug delivery!

Waiting for someone to download the 80M papers on sci-hub and train an agentic AI reasoning system to query it...would be illegal but simultaneously synthesize all of scientific knowledge as we know it into one oracle of knowledge...😈

Heartbreaking chats this week with students thinking of giving up on their dreams of getting a PhD. They worry about getting in PhD programs and careers post PhD. My suggestions: don’t be hasty, think broadly incl EU & Canada, & careers beyond traditional academia. What’re you telling your students?

#Vibes I'm feeling these days in USA...Incubus was way ahead of their time 🫣

Shot: first measles death in the US in a decade Chaser: March FDA meeting on flu vaccine design cancelled www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

The City of Boston is leading 40+ mayors, cities, and counties in an amicus brief against the Trump Administration's drastic and illegal cuts to federal research funding—cuts that will lead to immediate job losses nationwide.

Very interesting work, congrats @anshulkundaje.bsky.social and team!!!

The DOGE firings have nothing to do with “efficiency” or “cutting waste.” They’re a direct push to weaken federal agencies perceived as liberal. This was evident from the start, and now the data confirms it: targeted agencies overwhelmingly those seen as more left-leaning. 🧵⬇️

Scientists are now organizing events, called Stand Up for Science, on 7 March in Washington, D.C., and state capitals. So far, they have attracted more than 100 volunteers from some 30 states who are hoping to rally support for research as a public good. scim.ag/4328LAD

Although I find the NIH cuts very troubling and strongly opposed to them, I think it's a legitimate question to ask why Harvard's indirect costs are 69% and to call for transparency about how they're spent.

It’s been a tough few weeks. My 10yo daughter was diagnosed with a very rare, aggressive cancer called interdigitating dendritic cell sarcoma (IDCS). I’m reaching out to identify clinicians/patients who have encountered pediatric IDCS or other (non-LCH) dendritic or histiocytic sarcomas cases.

Fruitful collaboration between our team & Sven Jager/Ziv Bar Joseph's team @Sanofi published today @narjournal.bsky.social: a language model that learns the grammar of all regions of an mRNA from head to tail!! Can be fine-tuned on all of your favorite mRNA-related tasks -- a successor of CodonBERT.

Amazing & creative work, congrats!!