On March 1, 2025, former NIH director Francis Collins’ announced that he had fully resigned from the NIH, where he continued to lead a laboratory after his resignation as director. Collins gave no reason for his resignation, but it comes just before this week’s confirmation hearings for Jay Bhattacharya, who is U.S. President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH and who Collins called a “fringe epidemiologist” during the COVID pandemic. It is a bitter irony that when Collins resigned as NIH director in 2021, then-President Joe Biden said that “countless researchers will aspire to follow in his footsteps.”
On March 1, 2025, former NIH director Francis Collins’ announced that he had fully resigned from the NIH, where he continued to lead a laboratory after his resignation as director. Collins gave no reason for his resignation, but it comes just before this week’s confirmation hearings for Jay Bhattacharya, who is U.S. President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH and who Collins called a “fringe epidemiologist” during the COVID pandemic. It is a bitter irony that when Collins resigned as NIH director in 2021, then-President Joe Biden said that “countless researchers will aspire to follow in his footsteps.”
Too much of a good thing, it turns out, is a concept that applies to oxygen. And researchers at the University of California at San Francisco are working on a small molecule, Hypoxystat, that can lower tissue oxygen levels and prevent damage when oxygen levels are too high. When administered to mice with the rare mitochondrial disorder Leigh syndrome, the molecule more than tripled their average lifespan.
In general, tumor cells embody the idea of “the survival of the fittest” gone out of control. Tumor cells outcompete their normal brethren with their uncontrolled growth; and the inside of a tumor is a fiercely competitive environment where over time, the most aggressive clones take over. But research published online in Nature on Feb. 19, 2025, has discovered that cancer cells cooperate as well as compete.
Researchers have altered the genetic code in a strain of Escherichia coli, reducing the number of stop codons from three to one and assigning the freed-up stop codons to nonstandard amino acids. They reported on the recoded bacterium, which they named OCHRE, in Nature on Feb. 5, 2025.
A 15% cap on indirect cost reimbursement that was announced by the U.S. NIH has been stalled by a court order for the time being. But researchers remain deeply concerned about the attempt, and about the new administration’s adversarial approach to research and universities.
In the early days of the second Trump administration, what will happen to various government science agencies is not yet clear. Given the communications blackout imposed on agencies including the NIH and the CDC, most of what is known comes from anonymous sources and secondhand reports. Executive orders affecting the agencies are also still in the process of being interpreted, as well as subject to multiple legal challenges.
Researchers at the University of California at San Francisco have identified an RNA-binding protein that increased the translation of Myc mRNA. The authors wrote that their work, which was published online in Nature Cell Biology on Feb. 4, 2025, “transforms the understanding of the translational code in cancer and illuminates therapeutic openings to target the expression of oncogenes.”
Researchers at the University of California at San Francisco have identified an RNA-binding protein that increased the translation of Myc mRNA. The authors wrote that their work, which was published online in Nature Cell Biology on Feb. 4, 2025, “transforms the understanding of the translational code in cancer and illuminates therapeutic openings to target the expression of oncogenes.” Myc is a transcription factor that regulates multiple cellular growth factors. Its overexpression is a driver event in many solid tumors, including pancreatic cancer. Drugging Myc, though, has so far proved challenging.
Implanted patches of iPS cell-derived heart muscle integrated with heart tissue in a primate model of heart failure, and in patients being treated in a clinical trial, marks progress toward a potential option for patients with advanced heart failure.
