Brian Huntly and I are looking to recruit a postdoc to investigate a promising novel therapeutic target in B-ALL @scicambridge.bsky.social. This new CRUK-funded project will involve collaboration with Prof Sir Steve Jackson's group @cruk-ci.bsky.social and the CRUK Functional Genomics centre.

The murder rate in London is now the lowest in decades, perhaps centuries. (The Times)

“Critically assessing the literature, we found it beset by conceptual & methodological flaws & limitations, undermining claims that the gut microbiome is causally involved in etiology/pathophysiology of autism” Crucial PSA from @wiringthebrain.bsky.social @statsepi.bsky.social @deevybee.bsky.social🧪

#WIMMReads: New @nature.com study, led by the Simmons & Antanaviciute Groups, used advanced single-cell and spatial analysis techniques to map the cells that drive #Crohn's fistulas - paving the way for targeted treatments 🧪 Learn more 👇 @rdm.ox.ac.uk @medsci.ox.ac.uk @ox.ac.uk

This is a very interesting study that implicates CMV seropositivity with enhanced spike-specific T cell immunity post covid vaccination. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

#WIMMReads: Oxford scientists, led by James Davies at the MRC WIMM, have captured the genome’s structure in unprecedented detail. 🧪 Read the full story below 👇 @ox.ac.uk @davieslab.bsky.social @jojdavies.bsky.social @medsci.ox.ac.uk

Great to see our review of the immunomodulatory role of cytomegalovirus and the relationship with cancer and immune checkpoint blockade treatment published as an open access article in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

CMV co-evolved with human. It is a master regulator of immunity and knows about our biology more than we do.

Super paper from some super talented colleagues… CMV positivity related to better outcomes and lower toxicity with PD1 blockade, and potential protection from MM development. Lots of interesting avenues to follow and very relevant to treatment stratification 👏

Related to lively discussion @brownmedicine.bsky.social this morning about the interplay of environment, genetics and immunotherapy - here CMV seropositivity associated with much lower G3 toxicity of colon, lung, muscle, higher in skin. Very intriguing irAE data from @bpfairfax.bsky.social 🤓

#WIMMReads Fairfax Group ( @bpfairfax.bsky.social ) map how genetic variation shapes monocyte gene expression and splicing across immune contexts 🧪 Read more 👇 doi.org/10.1038/s414... #Genomics #Immunology #Transcriptomics

Why are more younger adults having strokes? Come along to our next free public talk on Tues 4 Nov 6pm to hear researcher Linxin Li discuss what is driving the recent increase and how we tackle it oxfordbrc.nihr.ac.uk/brc-event/fr... @ouhospitals.bsky.social @medsci.ox.ac.uk @ndcnoxford.bsky.social

New CRUK Post-doc position in our group. #mutationalorder #multiomics #cancer. my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

Interesting paper from Becki Lee and colleagues: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New findings in @natcomms.nature.com demonstrate the impact of allelic variation on monocyte context-specific splicing. @bpfairfax.bsky.social & colleagues show that many risk polymorphisms lead to differential gene splicing. ➡️Reveals putative mechanisms of diverse disease risk alleles inc. cancer

PIWI clade Argonautes are essential for transposon silencing. Without them, animals are sterile due to massive transposon activity. But how does piRNA-guided target interaction translate into silencing? PhD student Júlia Portell Montserrat has an intriguing answer www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

📣First paper from the lab is out in @science.org‬! 📣https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu3461 It’s well known that HLA shapes the TCR repertoire — but how does this change under immune checkpoint blockade (ICB)?

Our paper describing the Range Extender element which is required and sufficient for long-range enhancer activation at the Shh locus is now available at @nature.com. Congrats to @gracebower.bsky.social who led the study. Below is a brief summary of the main findings www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/

It's hard to avoid recalling this passage from the English historian Tony Judt:

"The diminution and marginalization of science are thus central parts of the erosion of democracy itself." www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

amazing q&a with paul krugman

No evidence for neutralizing IL1RN autoantibodies in our cohorts of MIS-C, SARS-CoV2 pneumonia or vaccine-induced myocarditis. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Great work by Anish Behere in Nils Landegren lab, Uppsala university

Black people who are diagnosed with melanoma are about five times as likely as White people to die within five years. Find out how and where to look for the disease.

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 h\t @gmeric.bsky.social

Delighted that our work describing a potential novel treatment approach for B-cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia is published today in @natcomms.nature.com‬. 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Very excited to share our preprint led by M. Levin @skoyama.bsky.social J. Woerner & with S. Damrauer assessing genome-wide pleiotropy of >1,000 clinical traits across ~1.7M individuals with nearly 30K locus-trait associations! www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... @medrxivpreprint.bsky.social

Delighted to have our work on Polygenic Modifiers of #TelomereBiologyDisorders, led by Michael Poeschla, @sashagusevposts.bsky.social, @mitchiela.bsky.social, @sharonsavage.bsky.social, @tummalalab.bsky.social, + co, published in @jclinical-invest.bsky.social today: www.jci.org/articles/vie...

📣📣 Thrilled to see this cool work finally out in the wild! "Genome-wide analyses of variance in blood cell phenotypes provide new insights into complex trait biology & prediction" www.nature.com/articles/s41... Loads of cool findings including MR for alcohol usage -> increased variance in BC traits

The amount of single use plastic passing through my house is insane. It's mostly food. I don't know how we all got used to this, and fighting it alone seems pointless. We fritter the years away, in politics world, on just getting by. I'd love to see big energetic policy moves to fix big things well.

'Of course Britain could restrict international student numbers. We could halve the number, and make ourselves £10bn poorer every year, concentrated in Labour held seats.' timleunig.substack.com/p/internatio...

Remember when you first learned about genetics at school? All those fascinating examples of human traits that are each apparently determined by just a single gene? Time to check in on some of your favourites to see how they’re doing. 🧬🧵🧪 1/n

I could go on with more examples but instead here’s a message to take home. If you’re curious how your genome helps make you unique, don’t expect neat & tidy answers. Indeed, the richness of this tapestry is one of the reasons why human genetics is such a dynamic & exciting field of science. 11/n 🧬🧪

To celebrate our 30th anniversary, Nature Medicine has commissioned 'Turning points' articles, in which researchers discuss the impact of their scientific discovery that was published around 30 yrs ago. Read this one: PD-L1 and the dawn of modern cancer immunotherapy www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Just passing along some friendly advice on how to approach potential changes to the Australian health care system @drruthmitchell.bsky.social

40 Years ago Carl Sagan knew about Climate change and he was so aware of it's impact on Nature more than us we do right now.

I've commented on this before. There's been a lot of interest in the rising incidence of colo-rectal cancer in young adults in many countries. This figure is a plot of incidence and mortality rates in England over time relative to a baseline rate in 1974. I last showed it with data to 2021. 1/n

... cause that became more prevalent and is now waning. Infection seems to be a good candidate for something that changes over time in this way. Colibactin producing E Coli one possibility. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40267983/ 3/3

To restore the gut microbiome after antibiotics, the right diet (rich in carbohydrates, low in fat) was a better approach than fecal microbial transplants (in the experimental model) www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Cool story! Fun fact: The original SARS-CoV-2 strain was uncovered using metagenomics in Jan 2020 (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) which was pivotal for vaccine development efforts. Metagenomics has arguably saved many millions of lives already.

New paper claxon! 📢 In this paper we draw on care ethics to show how moral decision making around healthcare's environmental impact occurs in the context of relationships with others, not simply via top-down principles commonly discussed in the theoretical space. More info/thoughts in thread👇

www.theguardian.com/society/2025... Obligatory daily coffee/alcohol good effects story. Here it's champagne. No possible confounder then. @theguardian.com covering themselves in glory with prominent coverage naturally!

www.nature.com/articles/s41... 'Altogether, our study underscores the crucial role of T-bet+ CD8+ T cells in driving ICI responses and offers strategies to overcome the current therapeutic bottleneck of poor ICI efficacy in MSS gastric cancer'

Review: Epstein–Barr virus pathogenesis and emerging control strategies www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Super to work with Oriol Pich, Elsa Bernard Maria Zagorulya, @PapaemmanuilLab exploring how the age related process CHIP might impact tumour biology; incredible team. Thank you to all our funders, CRUK, Crick, BCRF, Rosetrees Trust, Mark Foundation+ Royal Society www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

Why you should know your viral exposure status (i.e CMV) if you're going to undergo immunotherapy for cancer (but almost no one knows) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New @jama.com Another new report (natural experiment) shows the link of a vaccine vs shingles to less dementia jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... this is the 3rd natural experiment to show the effect

www.nature.com/articles/s41... Proud of my group and collaborators for this work published today in Nature Medicine. We find Cytomegalovirus, which has a profound impact on T cell immunity, is associated with distinct clinical outcomes in patients receiving checkpoint immunotherapy for melanoma.

NEW from the Fairfax Lab (@bpfairfax.bsky.social): 🧪

The cost of Trump’s attack on American science Researchers fear the US is dismantling its post-war model of publicly funding innovation to tackle disease, boost the economy - and track existential threats. Register to read free: www.ft.com/register www.ft.com/content/67fd... @financialtimes.com