The financial structure of the initiative is deliberately simple. The total support of €5,000 is divided into two Research Seed Grants of €2,000 each and one Iprona Innovation Award of €1,000. Beyond the monetary component, selected projects will also receive standardized Iprona research extracts, a detail that carries more scientific weight than it might first appear. In polyphenol research, the reproducibility of findings has long been complicated by the enormous variability of plant-derived materials: differences in cultivar, harvest conditions, extraction methods and storage can all alter the chemical profile of an extract and therefore the biological effects observed in an experiment. By supplying researchers with standardized preparations, the initiative aims to ensure that results from different laboratories can be compared, replicated and built upon with greater confidence.

The call focuses on two specific research materials: ElderCraft®, a standardized black elderberry extract, and CherryCraft®, a standardized tart cherry extract. Both belong to Iprona’s Craft line of berry-derived extracts, which the company describes as intended for scientific and health-related applications. Black elderberry and tart cherry have attracted considerable attention in recent years for their dense content of anthocyanins and other polyphenolic compounds, and both have featured in studies exploring effects on immune function, exercise recovery and metabolic health. By anchoring the funding call to these two well-characterized extracts, the organizers are effectively steering applicants toward experiments in which the composition of the test material is known and documented, a prerequisite for mechanistic work that can be meaningfully interpreted.

The eligible scientific areas span a remarkably broad swath of contemporary biomedical research. Proposals may address microbiome research, healthy ageing, immunity, inflammation, recovery, metabolism, mitochondrial function, bioavailability and other emerging applications of polyphenols. The organizers explicitly welcome in vitro studies conducted in cell culture, ex vivo experiments on isolated tissues, in vivo work in living organisms, mechanistic investigations of how polyphenols act at the molecular level, metabolomics approaches that map the chemical fingerprints of polyphenol metabolism, and translational studies that attempt to bridge laboratory findings and human health outcomes. This methodological breadth reflects the reality that polyphenol science operates at many scales simultaneously, from the chemistry of a single molecule binding to a protein to the population-level epidemiology of fruit and vegetable consumption.

The call is open worldwide to researchers working in universities, hospitals, research institutes and recognized scientific organizations. The organizers have singled out postdoctoral researchers, young investigators and early-career scientists as groups they particularly hope to encourage, positioning the grants as pilot funding for those at the start of their independent research trajectories. This targeting speaks to a well-recognized bottleneck in the scientific enterprise: the difficulty of securing support for untested ideas. Major funding agencies typically demand preliminary data as evidence that a hypothesis is viable, yet generating that very data requires money that early-career researchers often do not have. Seed grants of a few thousand euros occupy a niche that formal funding structures frequently leave empty, offering just enough resources to run a small experiment, hire a student for a summer or pay for a round of analytical chemistry.

The Polyphenols Applications Scientific Board made this rationale explicit in a statement accompanying the announcement. Small research grants, the board noted, can be decisive at the earliest stage of a project, because they allow a researcher to test an original hypothesis, generate the first data and determine whether a new scientific direction deserves larger investigation. The formulation captures a philosophy of scientific risk-taking that many in the research community argue is undervalued in an era of competitive, milestone-driven grant making. A €2,000 award will not fund a clinical trial, but it can fund the pilot experiment whose outcome determines whether a clinical trial is worth designing at all.

The initiative is being launched within the international Polyphenols Applications scientific community, whose flagship event, the 19th World Congress on Polyphenols Applications, will take place in Málaga, Spain, on 8 and 9 October 2026. The congress is expected to draw more than 200 participants and will cover a scientific scope that includes polyphenols in nutrition and health, microbiota, brain and metabolic health, inflammation, precision nutrition and sustainable innovation. Launching the funding call within this community serves a dual purpose: it connects the new grants to an established network of researchers who meet annually to exchange results, and it signals to congress attendees that the community is prepared to invest directly in the next generation of polyphenol studies rather than merely convening to discuss those already completed.

Iprona’s role in the initiative extends beyond the Innovation Award itself. The company, which develops standardized functional polyphenol and anthocyanin extracts including ElderCraft® and CherryCraft®, is serving as the research funding and standardized-material partner for the program. The partnership model is an increasingly common one in nutrition science, where academic laboratories often lack access to the well-characterized, batch-consistent extracts that industrial producers can supply. For the company, supporting independent research with standardized materials helps build a body of published science around its products; for researchers, it removes one of the most persistent sources of experimental noise. The organizers state that the research funding and standardized research materials described in the call are provided by Iprona, with the initiative organized in collaboration with Polyphenols Applications.

Researchers worldwide have been invited to submit their proposals by 30 November 2026, with the winners expected to be announced in January 2027. Applications and scientific inquiries are to be directed to the organizers at innovation@polyphenols-site.com, while media inquiries are handled by the Polyphenols Applications secretariat at polyphenols@polyphenols-site.com. The timeline gives applicants roughly two and a half months from the announcement to prepare their submissions, a window the organizers presumably consider sufficient for the concise pilot proposals such seed calls typically require.

For the broader field, the launch of this call arrives at a moment when polyphenol research is both flourishing and under pressure to raise its methodological standards. The compounds, found abundantly in berries, cherries, grapes, tea, cocoa and countless other plant foods, have been implicated in studies ranging from antioxidant activity and gut microbiome modulation to mitochondrial function and cognitive health. Yet the field’s credibility depends on experiments built on chemically defined materials and transparent methods, which is precisely what standardized extracts and small, focused pilot studies are designed to deliver. Whether the two €2,000 seed grants and the €1,000 Innovation Award ultimately catalyze significant discoveries remains to be seen, but the initiative’s central premise, that relatively modest funding can enable a researcher to test a hypothesis, obtain preliminary data and establish the basis for a larger project, is one that generations of scientists whose careers began with a small grant will recognize immediately.

Subject of Research: International seed grant funding for early-stage polyphenol research using standardized elderberry and tart cherry extracts

Article Title: Global €5,000 call backs new polyphenol research

Article References: Global €5,000 call backs new polyphenol research. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: polyphenols, research funding, seed grants, Iprona, elderberry extract, tart cherry extract, anthocyanins, microbiome, healthy ageing, mitochondrial function, early-career researchers, Polyphenols Applications 2026

The study was led by Dr Helda Tutunchi of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences in Iran, together with colleagues, and takes the form of a systematic review and meta-analysis, the highest tier of evidence synthesis in medical research. Rather than relying on any single trial, the team systematically combined and re-analysed the results of all available randomised controlled trials testing wholegrain intake against cardiovascular risk factors. The trials included in the analysis were conducted across Asia, Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and Brazil, giving the findings a broad geographic and dietary-cultural span that strengthens their generalisability.

The motivation for the work, Dr Tutunchi explained, stems from a long-standing tension in the nutrition literature. Population studies, known as observational research, have consistently linked higher wholegrain intake with better heart health, but individual clinical trials have produced mixed findings, leaving clinicians and guideline writers without a clear target. “Although higher wholegrain intake has long been linked to better heart health in population studies, clinical trials have produced mixed findings,” she said. “This left an important practical question unanswered: how much whole grain should people eat to meaningfully improve cardiovascular health?” By pooling every eligible randomised trial, the researchers aimed to resolve that uncertainty with numbers rather than impressions.

The results were striking in their breadth. Eating more wholegrain food reduced participants’ body weight and waist circumference, lowered both systolic and diastolic blood pressure, and improved blood lipid profiles, including reductions in total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, often called LDL or “bad” cholesterol, and triglycerides. The analysis also documented reductions in fasting glucose and in interleukin-6, an inflammatory signalling molecule that is increasingly recognised as a contributor to atherosclerosis, the process underlying heart attacks and strokes. Importantly, the researchers graded the quality of the underlying evidence and found high-certainty support for improvements in body weight, waist circumference, total cholesterol and interleukin-6, with moderate-certainty evidence for benefits to LDL cholesterol, triglycerides, systolic blood pressure, fasting plasma glucose and insulin resistance as measured by the HOMA-IR index.

Perhaps the most actionable finding concerns dose. Benefits began to appear at intakes of around 30 to 40 grams of wholegrain per day, measured as dry weight, but the greatest improvements were seen at 60 to 100 grams per day, which corresponds to roughly four to six daily servings. The researchers illustrate what that looks like in practice: a bowl of oatmeal at breakfast, a sandwich made with wholegrain bread at lunch, and a serving of brown rice at dinner would together place a person squarely within the optimal range. This dose-response analysis is what distinguishes the new work from previous reviews, which typically asked whether wholegrains help without quantifying how much is needed.

Dr Tutunchi described the analysis as the largest and most comprehensive of its kind, but she was careful to spell out its limitations. Most of the included trials were relatively short, averaging about eight weeks in duration, which means the researchers cannot determine whether the observed benefits are maintained over years rather than weeks. In addition, relatively few studies evaluated very high intakes above 140 grams per day, leaving the effects at those levels uncertain. Crucially, none of the included trials assessed cardiovascular events such as heart attacks or strokes directly; they measured risk factors instead. Longer-term studies tracking actual disease outcomes will be needed to confirm that the improvements in risk markers translate into fewer cardiovascular events.

Despite those caveats, the researchers argue that the findings carry a clear practical message. “Increasing wholegrain intake is a relatively simple, accessible and affordable dietary strategy that can complement other lifestyle and medical interventions,” Dr Tutunchi said. She noted that the optimal intake of 60 to 100 grams per day sits toward the upper end of current dietary recommendations, so the results do not necessarily call for major changes to existing guidelines. Instead, they support public health strategies that help people move toward the higher end of current targets, encouraging swaps from refined grains to minimally processed wholegrain staples rather than dramatic dietary overhauls.

One of the study’s most conceptually important insights is that wholegrains appear to benefit cardiovascular health through several modest improvements acting together, rather than through one large effect on a single risk factor. The researchers observed parallel improvements across multiple physiological pathways, including blood lipids, blood pressure, glucose regulation, body fat and inflammatory markers. Although the change in any individual risk factor was generally modest, improving several risk factors simultaneously could compound into a substantially greater reduction in long-term cardiovascular risk. This multi-pathway model helps explain why single-marker trials may have appeared inconsistent: each trial may have captured only a fragment of the overall effect.

An accompanying editorial by Dr Cecilie Kyrø of the Danish Cancer Institute in Copenhagen and colleagues places the findings in a broader historical and scientific context. More than half a century ago, the surgeon Sir Denis Burkitt and colleagues proposed that the refining of staple carbohydrates, which strips out cereal fibre as whole grains are converted to refined grains, underpinned a broad spectrum of so-called Western diseases through effects on stool bulk, intestinal transit time and the colonic environment. Whole grains, by definition, retain all three main parts of the cereal kernel, the bran, germ and endosperm, in the same proportions as in the intact grain, whether consumed as whole kernels, flakes, or milled into flour for bread and other foods. The editorial authors highlight that the dose-response analyses provide quantitative evidence to inform food-based dietary guidelines, and note that evidence from research into other disease endpoints suggests the benefits of wholegrain foods extend substantially beyond cardiometabolic disease.

The editorial also frames the findings as a challenge for clinicians and policymakers alike. For clinicians, the message is described as reassuringly simple: encouraging patients to replace refined grain foods with minimally processed whole grains is likely to yield modest but meaningful improvements in body weight, waist circumference and blood lipids, perhaps particularly in individuals with type 2 diabetes. At the population level, even small shifts in these markers can translate into substantial reductions in cardiometabolic events. The current United States dietary guidelines recommend two to four servings of whole grains per day, and the trial evidence indicates that higher intakes than presently recommended in some guidelines may be optimal for cardiometabolic health. From a policy perspective, the editorial authors argue, the real challenge is to make minimally processed wholegrain staples accessible, affordable and culturally acceptable, while avoiding a drift toward ultra-processed products that merely add whole grains to otherwise highly processed formulations. In other words, the source of the grain matters as much as the quantity, and the public health opportunity lies in returning whole grains to the centre of the plate in their least processed form.

Subject of Research: The effect of wholegrain consumption on cardiovascular disease risk factors

Article Title: Four to six servings of wholegrain per day lowers risk factors for heart disease

Article References: Four to six servings of wholegrain per day lowers risk factors for heart disease. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: wholegrain, cardiovascular disease, meta-analysis, diet, cholesterol, blood pressure, European Heart Journal, nutrition, randomised controlled trials, inflammation, dietary guidelines, LDL cholesterol

The research, conducted by a team from the University of Michigan Medical School and VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System, draws on twenty years of surveys of hospital infection prevention staff, carried out every four years since 2005. This unusually long observational window allows the researchers to chart not just the current state of practice but the trajectory of improvement over two decades, a period during which CAUTI prevention became a national priority, a subject of federal financial penalties, and a fixture of hospital quality improvement programs.

The findings are a study in partial success. The percentage of non-VA hospitals using at least one of the three most strongly evidence-supported practices rose from roughly 23 percent fifteen to twenty years ago to nearly 70 percent today. That represents a genuine transformation in how hospitals think about urinary catheters, which were once treated as routine, low-consequence equipment. But the data also show that this progress has plateaued, or even slipped slightly, in recent years, suggesting that the remaining hospitals are the hardest to reach and that momentum has stalled without sustained external pressure.

The three practices with the strongest evidence behind them are strikingly simple. The first is a system that reminds physicians that their patient has a catheter in place, or requires them to proactively renew the catheter order after a set period, forcing a fresh decision about whether the device is still needed. The second is an automatic stop order that ends the catheter order unless a clinician actively renews it. The third is nurse-initiated removal, which empowers nurses to take out a catheter without a physician’s order when they judge that a patient can attempt to urinate independently. Yet according to the study, only 49 percent of general hospitals and just 32 percent of VA hospitals have a reminder or renewal system in place. Nurse-initiated removal fares somewhat better, available in 58 percent of general hospitals and 38 percent of VA facilities.

Jennifer Meddings, Professor of Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at the U-M Medical School and a Research Investigator at VA Ann Arbor, expressed surprise at the stagnation. Reminders prompting clinicians to reassess whether a catheter is still necessary are low-cost, demonstrably effective, and straightforward to embed in electronic medical record workflows that many health systems already operate. In her view, hospitals can go further by using their electronic ordering systems to restrict catheter placement to a list of clinically appropriate indications, and by prompting clinicians at the moment of ordering with alternatives such as external catheter devices. Such just-in-time prompts serve as continuous education, which is particularly valuable because trainee physicians place the majority of catheter orders in many hospitals.

Sanjay Saint, Professor Emeritus of Internal Medicine at U-M, now at Northwell Health and the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, framed the two-decade arc with measured optimism. He noted that hospitals have come a long way in recognizing that urinary catheters are not benign devices and in building systems to use them more thoughtfully. At the same time, he cautioned that progress is not self-sustaining: the most effective strategies, including prompting clinicians to reassess catheter necessity and empowering nurses to remove devices when appropriate, must be woven into the fabric of everyday care rather than treated as one-time campaigns.

The study also documents growth in hospitals’ capacity to monitor which patients have catheters and how many days those devices have been in place, a foundational data infrastructure for any prevention effort. Here the VA hospitals lagged behind non-VA facilities, but the researchers point to the VA-wide electronic health record modernization now rolling out as a mechanism that could close the gap. Another widely adopted technology is portable bladder ultrasound, in which a bedside scanner estimates urine volume and guides decisions about whether catheterization is truly necessary; more than 70 percent of both VA and non-VA hospitals now use these scanners, making it one of the most universal practices in the CAUTI prevention toolkit.

The financial stakes are considerable. Medicare penalizes non-VA hospitals when patients covered by traditional Medicare experience high rates of catheter-associated urinary tract infections under the Hospital-Acquired Condition Reduction Program, and the program does not reimburse hospitals for the cost of treating these infections when they occur. Hospital CAUTI rates are publicly reported, allowing patients to compare facilities on Medicare’s Care Compare website. This combination of payment consequences and public transparency has been a powerful driver of the improvements seen over the past two decades, and the plateau in adoption suggests that hospitals without these practices may now face mounting pressure to catch up.

To accelerate that catch-up, the Michigan and VA team has consolidated decades of research and quality improvement work into a free public resource. The website bladdersafe.org offers evidence-based tools for hospitals seeking to prevent CAUTIs in medical and surgical patients, including a mobile app called BladderSafe that helps clinicians decide when to use or avoid common devices for managing adult patients’ urinary needs. The site also features a cost calculator that lets hospitals estimate how the expense of implementing prevention programs is offset by reductions in catheter-associated bacteriuria, symptomatic urinary tract infection, and bloodstream infection, turning the business case for prevention into concrete numbers administrators can act on.

The team’s credentials in this field run deep. Epidemiologist M. Todd Greene of the U-M Division of Hospital Medicine and VA Ann Arbor noted that through numerous local, regional, and national implementation projects, the group has demonstrated how collaborative efforts improve both process measures and outcome measures such as infection rates, including work that drove down CAUTI rates in hospitals and nursing homes across Michigan and nationwide. Looking ahead, Greene argued that tracking systems should expand beyond infections to monitor and prevent non-infectious device-related complications, capturing the full spectrum of catheter harms. The researchers also highlight a human vulnerability in the system: infection prevention staff face high job stress and turnover, and better support for them could preserve continuity in data collection and prevention efforts. The study’s authors, members of the U-M/VA Patient Safety Enhancement Program, the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation, and the VA Center for Clinical Management Research, include Sarah Krein, Kristin Chrouser, Karen Fowler, and David Ratz, alongside Saint, Meddings, and Greene. Saint’s contributions were recently recognized with the John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Award for Individual Achievement from the Joint Commission and the National Quality Forum. The survey project was funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs, with additional support from the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan through the Collaborative Quality Initiatives based at the University of Michigan. The message for hospitals that have not yet acted is unambiguous: the tools exist, they are free, and the evidence says they work.

Subject of Research: Prevention of catheter-associated urinary tract infections in US hospitals

Article Title: Many hospitals still don’t do enough to prevent UTIs from catheters

Article References: Many hospitals still don’t do enough to prevent UTIs from catheters. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: catheter-associated urinary tract infection, CAUTI, hospital infection prevention, urinary catheters, patient safety, JAMA Network Open, University of Michigan, VA Ann Arbor, electronic health records, bladder ultrasound, Medicare penalties, quality improvement

The scale of the shortage the program addresses is substantial. According to the editorial, attrition during the COVID-19 pandemic worsened an existing deficit in the public health workforce, which now needs an estimated 80,000 full-time workers to provide basic community services. Agencies at every level of government are understaffed, and the authors attribute this largely to a lack of qualified applicants rather than a lack of available positions. The paradox at the heart of the problem is that the pipeline of public health students has never been larger. Undergraduate public health degrees awarded in the United States grew from just 1,480 in 2001 to 18,289 in 2020, and in the spring of 2020 the number of bachelor’s degrees conferred surpassed the number of public health master’s degrees for the first time. Yet only about one in ten graduates holding an undergraduate public health degree reports employment with a government agency, meaning that the vast majority of this expanding talent pool never enters the governmental public health sector where the need is most acute.

The Lewis Scholars Program was designed to close that gap by intervening early in students’ academic trajectories. Over eight to eleven weeks, scholars participate in classroom learning and hands-on internships, supported throughout by intensive mentoring, professional development, and networking opportunities. A series of articles in the same special issue of the journal details how the programs function at each site and what they have accomplished over more than a decade of operation. The demand for these opportunities is striking: in total, the programs have accepted roughly 2,000 students from a pool of more than 40,000 applicants, an acceptance rate that underscores both the competitiveness of the program and the appetite among undergraduates for meaningful public health training.

The outcomes for program alumni suggest that the model is working. More than half of former scholars have gone on to enroll in advanced degree programs, including Master of Public Health, PhD, and MD programs. Forty-five percent of alumni work or have worked in public health or biomedical science roles, and another 20 percent have pursued careers in other areas of health care. Alumni now serve in health departments, advocacy organizations, community-based nonprofits, tribal health programs, and academic research centers, forming a distributed network of trained professionals across the breadth of the public health enterprise. For a field struggling to recruit qualified candidates into government positions, these figures represent a measurable return on a relatively modest educational investment.

Michael A. Joseph, PhD, MPH, Vice Dean for Education at Columbia Mailman and a co-author of the editorial, frames the program as more than a recruitment tool. The Lewis Scholars Program, he says, is a powerful model for how cultivating the talents of young public health students can open new pathways to fill the need for public health careers, particularly in government and in service of local communities. Recruitment is deliberate and targeted. The program intentionally seeks out first-generation college students and individuals who are members of groups that have historically been underrepresented in public health and biomedical science careers. The goal, Joseph explains, is to build a public health workforce that reflects the diversity of communities across the country, composed of professionals who are deeply connected to the communities and populations most in need.

A companion article in the special issue, authored by Troy Hoffman, MPA, director of SPHSP and Educational Initiatives at Columbia Mailman, examines the mentoring approach that underpins the program’s results. The programs offer scholars what the authors describe as a web of support designed to cultivate both academic and professional development. Each scholar is paired with one or more internship mentors who engage trainees in real-world public health challenges across a variety of domains, including governmental agencies, academic institutions, and community-based organizations. The scale of this mentoring effort is considerable: in 2025, across all seven sites, the programs recruited and trained 190 professionals to serve as mentors. Beyond internship mentors, scholars are also supported by advisors, preceptors, coaches, and near-peer mentors, creating multiple layers of guidance throughout the program and beyond.

Hoffman emphasizes that the support structure is holistic and responsive to individual circumstances. The program makes sure scholars get support where they are and when they need it, he says. Crucially, mentorship does not end when scholars complete the summer program. Instead, the programs create career-long connections with program staff, researchers, faculty, and community-facing public health professionals, all of whom continue to shape alumni trajectories in public health long after the formal training period concludes. This sustained engagement distinguishes the Lewis Scholars model from shorter-term internship programs and may help explain the strong rates of advanced degree enrollment and public health employment among its graduates.

The pathway from scholar to public health professional is illustrated by the experience of Kennedy Wade, MPH ’26, who applied to SPHSP in 2023 as a rising senior at Xavier University of Louisiana, a historically Black university. A public health major, Wade was drawn to the opportunity to do hands-on work in the field. After her acceptance, she expressed an interest in environmental health and housing, and the program placed her in an internship with a researcher studying smoke-free policies in public housing in New York City. Wade describes the placement as her first experience doing community-based public health work, an experience that deepened her interest in environmental health and helped her grow substantially as an aspiring public health professional.

Wade’s trajectory continued at Columbia Mailman itself. She is one of 25 SPHSP graduates who have gone on to study for a master’s degree at the school since 2023, when Columbia Mailman took over leadership of the program from Columbia’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. After graduating with a Columbia Mailman MPH in Epidemiology earlier this year, Wade became a CDC/CSTE Injury Epidemiology Fellow at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, where she works in the Bureau of Environmental Surveillance and Policy. Since starting the position over the summer, she has explored a different side of environmental health, with work ranging from traffic-related injuries to falls among older adults. In November, she is scheduled to present her research on the impact of greened vacant lots on adolescent victimization and perpetration at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting.

Three years after her own summer in the program, Wade says its influence remains strong. She credits the program with providing learning, hands-on experience, and a feeling of community, and notes that she is still close with everyone in her cohort, with program leaders remaining in her corner from the beginning. Her account, like the editorial’s broader analysis, points to the central argument of the special issue: that investing early in a diverse, well-mentored cohort of undergraduates can transform individual lives while simultaneously addressing a national staffing shortfall. As public health agencies continue to grapple with an estimated 80,000-worker gap, the Lewis Scholars Program offers a documented, replicable template for converting the growing population of public health graduates into the government workforce that communities depend on.

Subject of Research: The CDC John R. Lewis Undergraduate Public Health Scholars Program as a workforce development model for public health

Article Title: CDC undergraduate pathway program offers a model of success at Columbia Mailman and beyond

Article References: CDC undergraduate pathway program offers a model of success at Columbia Mailman and beyond. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: public health workforce, CDC, John R. Lewis Scholars Program, Columbia Mailman, undergraduate training, mentorship, health equity, epidemiology, government employment, workforce shortage, SPHSP, public health education

Antibodies are among the most widely used tools in modern biology. These Y-shaped proteins, exploited for their remarkable ability to recognize specific molecular shapes, allow researchers to detect, quantify, and isolate particular proteins within complex biological samples. Techniques ranging from Western blotting and immunohistochemistry to flow cytometry and diagnostic assays all depend on antibodies binding precisely to their intended targets. Yet the reagents sold for these purposes do not always behave as their suppliers claim. Research antibodies can fail to bind their intended targets, or they can bind additional, unintended targets, producing signals that look convincing but reflect nothing more than molecular coincidence. Studies have suggested that many commercial antibodies simply do not bind as advertised, and this lack of specificity can quietly misdirect biomedical research across virtually every field that touches proteins.

The first of the two studies, led by Virk with first author Michael Biddle, set out to measure the consequences of that failure rather than merely describe it. The team combined three strands of evidence: focus groups involving 12 researchers, a survey of 107 researchers, and an analysis of 785 publications linked to antibodies that had failed rigorous, knockout-controlled testing. Knockout validation, in which the target protein is genetically removed to confirm that the antibody’s signal disappears along with it, is considered one of the most stringent checks available, so antibodies failing such tests provide a well-grounded proxy for reagents that cannot be trusted.

The results of that analysis were sobering. Among 760 publications in which the validation status of the antibodies could be determined, only 120, or 15.8 percent, presented any validation evidence at all. This shortfall was not explained by researchers being unaware of good practice. In the survey, 72.0 percent of respondents reported having used at least one recommended validation method, a striking disconnect between what scientists say they do and what the published record shows. The papers lacking antibody validation had used a minimum of 8,064 animal samples and 4,424 human tissue samples, and when the team extrapolated from these figures, they estimated that millions of animal and human tissue samples have been consumed globally in experiments resting on inadequately validated antibodies.

“This study provides, to our knowledge, the first systematic quantification of biological sample waste attributable to the use of poorly performing antibodies without context-specific validation,” the researchers say. Biddle emphasized the scale of the problem in the starkest terms. Researchers told the team they validate their antibodies, he noted, with 72 percent reporting use of at least one recommended method, yet only 120 of the 760 papers the team could assess showed any validation evidence. The remaining 640 studies reported at least 8,064 animal and 4,424 human tissue samples used with antibodies that had failed independent testing, samples the authors describe as being at risk of waste. In the clearest cases, where the antibody has since been withdrawn from sale so that the work cannot be reproduced at all, scaling to the commercial antibody market yields a lower-bound global estimate of 4 to 7 million animal samples and 6 to 11 million human tissue samples.

Behind the numbers lies a human and ethical dimension that Virk knows personally. “Around ten years ago I discovered that data I had submitted in a grant application relied on an antibody that did not detect its intended target,” he says. “The data included staining of bronchial biopsies from patients who had given informed consent. They would not have expected their donation to be wasted. That has driven this work ever since.” That experience, a trusted reagent failing silently and rendering a patient’s contribution scientifically useless, crystallized the problem the two studies now document at scale: every unvalidated antibody is not merely a technical risk but a potential squandering of animals sacrificed, patients’ tissues donated, and public research funding spent.

Quantifying the damage was only half of the project. In the second study, Virk and first author Katherine Blades convened 32 international experts, including researchers, publishers, funders, antibody manufacturers, and institutional leaders, for a two-round Delphi consensus exercise. The Delphi method, a structured process in which participants anonymously rate and re-rate proposals across successive rounds, is designed to surface genuine agreement while filtering out the noise of group dynamics. The panel was asked to judge proposed reforms for antibody validation on two axes: whether each action would be effective, and whether it would be feasible to implement.

The consensus that emerged was remarkably concrete. The panel agreed that 15 actions, including institutional training programs, dedicated validation budgets written into grant applications, and publisher reporting requirements, were both effective and feasible for implementation by 2030. A further 15 actions were judged effective but of uncertain feasibility, marking out a second tier of reforms that could follow once the groundwork is laid. Participants identified two key barriers standing in the way: the diffuse ownership of the problem, with no single stakeholder clearly responsible for fixing it, and market incentives that fail to reward antibody quality, allowing poorly performing products to compete on price rather than performance.

“What struck us was the level of agreement once researchers, funders, publishers, institutions and manufacturers were brought into the same process,” Blades says. “The panel reached consensus on 15 actions that are both effective and achievable by 2030. Progress is held back not by disagreement about what to do, but because no single group owns the problem — so everyone waits for someone else to move first.” To translate that consensus into practice, the team has prepared separate documents for each stakeholder group, presenting the agreed recommendations alongside implementation options drawn from the panel’s qualitative feedback. These documents deliberately present options rather than prescriptions, recognizing that the optimal approach will vary across organizations, countries, and contexts.

The work is already moving from analysis to action. Since completing the studies, the team has embedded champions for better antibody practice in 14 UK research institutions, and the University of Leicester has made antibody validation training mandatory for its bioscience postgraduate researchers. The researchers are working with two national funders, the NC3Rs and Cancer Research UK, on implementation solutions, and they have built free tools that publishers can use to protect the integrity of what they publish. “Together these papers show the problem has significant impact with ethical dimensions, and is solvable,” Virk says. The message to the research community is unusually hopeful for a field accustomed to reproducibility crises: the waste is enormous, the causes are identifiable, and, for the first time, a broad coalition of stakeholders has agreed on a concrete, dated path to fixing it.

Subject of Research: Antibody validation failures and biological sample waste in biomedical research

Article Title: Poor antibody validation wastes millions of biological samples, but solutions exist

Article References: Poor antibody validation wastes millions of biological samples, but solutions exist. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: antibody validation, research reproducibility, PLOS Biology, biological sample waste, animal research, Delphi consensus, research integrity, knockout validation, University of Leicester, publishing standards, research funding, biomedical reagents

The central argument of the paper is provocative precisely because it challenges a widespread assumption: that access to air conditioning guarantees protection from dangerous heat. According to the authors, air conditioning only protects people if they can afford to run it, maintain it, and use it safely. Rising utility costs, the expense of repairing or replacing aging cooling systems, mobility limitations that make installing window units difficult, and an aging housing stock that was never designed to withstand prolonged extreme heat all combine to leave many older Americans exposed even when they technically have cooling equipment in their homes. Cognitive decline adds another layer of risk, because some individuals may fail to recognize when indoor temperatures have reached dangerous levels or may be unable to take appropriate action on their own behalf.

The physiological reasons behind this vulnerability are well established. Aging reduces the body’s ability to regulate temperature, making older adults less efficient at dissipating heat through sweating and cardiovascular adjustments. Common chronic conditions, including diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases, further heighten heat-related risks, as do many medications frequently prescribed to older adults, which can interfere with thermoregulation or hydration. The health consequences of extreme heat exposure are not limited to heat stroke. The analysis links exposure to cardiovascular and respiratory problems, sleep disruption, cognitive impairment, reduced attention, and mental health concerns, painting a picture of heat as a systemic threat to the health of aging populations rather than a short-lived inconvenience.

Heat is, as co-author Amir Baniassadi, PhD, Assistant Scientist II at the Marcus Institute, notes, one of the deadliest weather-related hazards in the United States, and older adults are among those at greatest risk. But the analysis emphasizes that the nature of that risk varies dramatically from region to region, which means a one-size-fits-all national policy is unlikely to succeed. In the Desert Southwest, where air conditioning is often essential for survival, questions of affordability and performance standards have become critical public health concerns. Some Arizona cities have responded with rental housing laws that require air-conditioning systems to be operational, repaired promptly, and capable of cooling a residence to as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below outdoor temperatures. These are among the strongest such protections in the country, yet the analysis shows they may still fall short in a rapidly warming climate.

The numbers from Phoenix illustrate the problem starkly. In 2024, the city experienced 70 days on which temperatures reached 110 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. Under the local rules, a legally compliant cooling system could still leave indoor temperatures above 90 degrees Fahrenheit on such days. Lead author Peter Crank, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management at the University of Waterloo, states that indoor temperatures above 90 degrees are not safe for many older adults, and that clear, objective standards for cooling performance are critical to protecting health and ensuring safe living conditions. In other words, even the regulatory gold standard in the hottest part of the country leaves a gap between legal compliance and genuine physiological safety, a gap that widens with every additional extreme heat day.

The analysis also scrutinizes cooling centers, which are frequently promoted by municipalities as a frontline public response to extreme heat. While these facilities can provide meaningful relief, the authors document a series of barriers that limit their usefulness for the very population they are meant to serve. Transportation challenges can make reaching a cooling center difficult or impossible for people with mobility limitations. Limited operating hours, particularly the lack of overnight and weekend availability, mean that the most dangerous hours of a heatwave often occur when centers are closed. Safety concerns and simple lack of awareness of available services further reduce utilization. A resource that exists on paper but cannot be reached, or is closed during the hottest hours, offers little protection to a frail older adult in an overheated apartment.

The challenges look strikingly different in historically colder climates, and the analysis devotes particular attention to the Northeast. In cities such as Boston, many older adults live in older buildings designed to retain heat during harsh winters, a feature that becomes a liability during prolonged hot weather. Much of this housing stock lacks central air conditioning and can trap heat indoors, exposing residents to dangerous temperatures even during periods when outdoor conditions might seem manageable. Yet the regulatory and social safety net in the region has not adapted. Regulations governing indoor cooling, renter protections, and utility assistance have not kept pace with increasingly frequent heatwaves, leaving a mismatch between the climate older Americans actually face and the policies built for the climate of the past.

The financial asymmetry the authors identify is particularly striking. Substantial public resources exist to help households cover heating costs during the winter months, reflecting decades of policy attention to cold-related mortality. Comparable protections for cooling remain limited across much of the Northeast. Maximum indoor temperature standards are largely absent from housing codes, and most energy-assistance programs continue to focus primarily on winter heating needs despite rising summertime heat risks. For an older adult on a fixed income, this means the choice between an unbearable utility bill and an unsafe indoor environment is one that policy has largely left unaddressed, even as summer temperatures in northern cities increasingly rival those of southern ones.

In response, the authors call for policies that recognize regional differences in climate, housing, and infrastructure while directly confronting affordability and accessibility challenges. Their recommended approaches include stronger renter protections, the adoption of indoor temperature standards, expanded utility assistance programs that cover cooling as well as heating, support for the maintenance and replacement of cooling systems, and improvements to the availability and accessibility of cooling centers, including extended hours. As Crank observes, the barriers facing an older adult in Phoenix are not necessarily the same as those facing someone in Boston, and effective heat policy must account for differences in climate, housing, infrastructure, and resources while ensuring that all older adults have access to safe indoor temperatures.

The broader significance of this analysis lies in its reframing of extreme heat as a policy failure rather than merely a meteorological hazard. The tools needed to protect older adults largely already exist: cooling technology, utility assistance frameworks, housing regulation, and public health infrastructure. What is missing, the authors argue, is the political and regulatory adaptation to a climate in which heat has become a chronic, deadly, and regionally diverse threat. As heatwaves intensify in both the Desert Southwest and the historically temperate Northeast, the gap between what buildings, budgets, and laws were designed for and what older Americans now experience will continue to widen. Closing that gap, the analysis suggests, is not simply a matter of installing more air conditioners, but of rethinking how housing, energy, and health policy intersect for a population whose lives increasingly depend on it.

Subject of Research: Health and policy risks of extreme heat exposure among older adults in the United States

Article Title: New analysis underscores the rising threat of extreme heat on older adults

Article References: New analysis underscores the rising threat of extreme heat on older adults. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: extreme heat, older adults, aging, air conditioning, public health, heat policy, cooling centers, housing, utility assistance, Phoenix, Boston, climate change

The headline numbers are striking. Between 1991 and 2024, the overall cancer death rate in the United States fell by 35 percent, an achievement the report attributes to reductions in smoking rates combined with advances in prevention, early detection, and treatment. That decline translates into 4.8 million fewer cancer deaths over the period. Survival gains are increasingly extending even to patients with advanced and metastatic disease: the five-year relative survival rate for distant-stage cancers of all types has more than doubled over the past three decades, rising from 17 percent in the mid-1990s to 36 percent during 2016 to 2022. Those figures, the report argues, are the direct product of sustained federal investment in the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The regulatory pipeline tells a similar story of momentum. From July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2026, the FDA approved 11 new anticancer therapeutics, several of which marked historic firsts. Among them was the first molecularly targeted therapy for a rare, aggressive brain tumor driven by a specific genetic alteration, and the first approval of a proteolysis-targeting chimera, a novel class of drug that hijacks the cell’s own protein degradation machinery to destroy cancer cells, indicated for patients with breast cancer. The agency also greenlit the first immune checkpoint inhibitor for ovarian cancer and the first chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy for patients with marginal zone lymphoma, extending a living-drug approach once confined to a handful of blood cancers.

Beyond new molecules, the FDA expanded the uses of five previously approved anticancer therapeutics and cleared a series of devices and tools that signal where clinical care is heading. These included a wearable, noninvasive device for treating pancreatic cancer, an at-home human papillomavirus self-collection kit designed to widen access to cervical cancer screening, and several artificial intelligence-based tools intended to improve the early detection and diagnosis of cancers. Taken together, the approvals sketch a regulatory environment increasingly receptive to technologies that move diagnosis out of the clinic and into patients’ homes and that embed computational analysis into routine imaging and pathology.

Artificial intelligence features prominently in the report’s survey of new frontiers. Researchers have recently combined AI with advanced spatial imaging technologies to generate high-resolution maps of tumors, revealing how cancer and immune cells are organized and interact within the tumor microenvironment, knowledge that could guide the design of more effective immunotherapies. In drug development, one recently described AI model screened approximately 10,000 human proteins against more than 500 million compounds, identifying more than 2 million candidate molecules for further study, a scale of exploration unattainable through conventional laboratory screening alone. The report also notes that AI is improving the interpretation of routine medical images and the analysis of complex digital pathology slides, capabilities reflected in the recent FDA approvals of AI-assisted devices, and that AI-driven tools are helping clinicians predict outcomes, personalize treatment plans, and design better clinical trials, while potentially easing burnout among health care providers.

Cancer vaccines, long a tantalizing but elusive goal, are described as gaining real clinical traction. A small individualized pancreatic cancer vaccine trial has produced durable remissions in patients, including Donna Gustafson, one of several patients whose personal stories are woven through the report. In melanoma, patients with high-risk disease who received an individualized mRNA neoantigen vaccine alongside immunotherapy after surgery experienced sustained improvements in recurrence-free and distant metastasis-free survival compared with immunotherapy alone. For early-stage triple-negative breast cancer, an individualized mRNA vaccine generated durable neoantigen-specific T-cell responses, with most patients remaining relapse-free for up to six years after vaccination. A preventive strategy is also under exploration: an mRNA-based vaccine called Nous-209, designed to provoke immune responses against cells carrying Lynch syndrome-associated mutations, was found in a small trial to be safe, free of serious side effects, and capable of triggering a strong, durable immune response in people with the inherited condition.

The report also examines a question now hovering over primary care: whether the hugely popular GLP-1 weight loss drugs might reduce cancer risk. The evidence is genuinely mixed. One recent study found that semaglutide, sold as Ozempic and Wegovy, was associated with a 12 percent reduction in obesity-related cancer risk. A separate study of individuals with type 2 diabetes found that GLP-1 use was associated with a 40 percent lower risk of esophageal cancer and a 46 percent lower risk of colorectal cancer compared with insulin therapy, and other analyses suggest possible reductions in the risk of skin, breast, prostate, hematologic, and some gynecologic cancers. Yet a large review of 48 clinical trials involving more than 94,000 participants treated with GLP-1s found no significant reduction in the overall risk of obesity-related cancers, and some studies point in the opposite direction: liraglutide use was associated with a 70 percent increased risk of thyroid cancer and a 62 percent increased risk of respiratory cancer. The report’s verdict is cautious: the preventive role of these drugs, while promising, requires further investigation.

Against the progress, the report sets a sobering accounting of the disease’s continuing burden. In 2026, an estimated 2.1 million new cancer cases will be diagnosed in the United States, and more than 626,000 people will die from cancer. By 2050, annual new cases are projected to surpass 2.5 million, a 19 percent increase. Survival remains starkly unequal across tumor types: between 2016 and 2022, five-year relative survival was 13.7 percent for pancreatic cancer and just 6.6 percent for glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, compared with 91.9 percent for female breast cancer and 98.2 percent for prostate cancer. The report also flags the rise of early-onset cancers, diagnosed in people aged 18 to 49, as a pressing public health concern. Globally, cancer incidence among people under 50 increased by nearly 80 percent between 1990 and 2019, with gastrointestinal cancers such as colorectal, stomach, and esophageal cancers contributing disproportionately. Researchers cite overlapping drivers including rising obesity, sedentary lifestyles, greater exposure to environmental pollutants, and shifts in dietary patterns.

The economic stakes are equally large. Direct costs of cancer care in the United States, many borne by patients themselves, were estimated at more than $236 billion in 2020, and one analysis cited in the report projects that cancer will cost the U.S. economy $5.3 trillion over the next three decades once indirect costs and lost productivity are included. It is against that backdrop that the AACR issues its policy demands. Most urgently, the organization calls on Congress to permanently block a proposed Office of Management and Budget rule, Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance, which the report warns would inject political considerations into funding decisions and broaden agencies’ authority to terminate grants for reasons unrelated to scientific merit. Bipartisan action has blocked the rule through December 11, 2026, but the report argues a temporary delay is not a lasting solution.

The Call to Action lays out specific asks: at least $51.303 billion for the NIH and at least $7.999 billion for the NCI in fiscal year 2027; protection of the cancer research workforce; preservation of scientific merit as the sole foundation of federal funding decisions; safeguards for active research awards and clinical trials; protection of researchers’ ability to publish and share findings; and risk-based, proportionate oversight of international collaboration. It further urges strengthening the FDA’s capacity to translate discoveries into patient benefits, sustaining evidence-based public health programs, modernizing interoperable data infrastructure, and removing barriers to prevention, screening, clinical trial participation, and survivorship care. AACR President Keith Flaherty, a physician-scientist who chaired the report’s steering committee, said advances in genomics, immunology, and artificial intelligence have given researchers more insight than ever into the complexities of cancer and are enabling treatments that precisely match each patient’s disease. Chief Executive Officer Margaret Foti added that decades of robust federal investment have transformed patient care and saved millions of lives, and that only by sustaining meritorious research free of political interference will the next generation of lifesaving breakthroughs emerge.

Subject of Research: Annual assessment of cancer research progress, FDA approvals, emerging technologies, and federal funding policy

Article Title: AACR releases annual cancer progress report highlighting promising advances for patients

Article References: AACR releases annual cancer progress report highlighting promising advances for patients. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: AACR, cancer progress report, FDA approvals, cancer mortality, immunotherapy, cancer vaccines, mRNA vaccines, artificial intelligence, GLP-1 receptor agonists, early-onset cancers, NIH funding, cancer screening

Yet a new commentary published in Nature Ecology & Evolution by an international team of researchers argues that this revolution in visibility carries costs that the scientific community has largely failed to confront. Led by Gabriel Hes of the University of Toulouse and corresponding author Patrick Roberts, director of the Department of Coevolution of Land Use and Urbanisation at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, the paper contends that remote sensing research has too often been framed as a purely technical exercise in support of more efficient management and observation. Mapping, the authors insist, is never only a technical practice. Decisions about what is revealed, how it is revealed, and where the scanning takes place are inherently ethical and political, with consequences that can fall hardest on the very communities who live in and depend on the forests being scanned.

The central concern is that high-resolution mapping can strip away what have long functioned as cultural refuges against dominant powers. Dense forest has historically shielded Indigenous peoples and marginalized groups from state surveillance, colonial incursion, and resource extraction. When an external research team produces a centimeter-scale digital model of a forest understory, it does not merely document trees. It can reveal the locations of settlements, gardens, sacred sites, and resources that communities may not have consented to expose, and once that data exists it can circulate in ways the scanned communities cannot control. Governments, corporations, or armed actors may gain access to information that facilitates dispossession, even when the original researchers intended their work to serve conservation or science.

To organize these concerns, the authors group the ethical dimensions of tropical forest remote sensing into three broad areas. The first concerns knowledge, access, and control: who decides when to map, why the mapping occurs, and who controls the resulting data. In much of current practice, those decisions are made by universities, agencies, and funders in wealthy countries, while the people whose territories are scanned may learn of the projects only after the fact, if at all. The second area addresses population rights, exposure, and dispossession, asking how remotely sensed data might be used to expose communities, marginalized groups, or resources targeted for extraction. The third, and perhaps least examined, area concerns the material costs of seeing itself, including the climatic and environmental footprint of the aircraft, drones, sensors, and computing infrastructure that remote sensing depends upon, impacts that can ironically contribute to the very environmental degradation the technology is deployed to prevent.

Hes frames the problem as a challenge to a slogan that recurs throughout conservation and development discourse. Mapping is frequently promoted as being for the greater good, yet the greater good is rarely defined. Whose greater good, the authors ask, is being served when a forest is scanned, and are forest mapping technologies reinforcing existing imbalances in knowledge production, political power, and environmental impacts? They urge colleagues to reflect on the ethical costs of their methods and to consider the potential intersectional impacts of high-resolution mapping, examining how consequences may differ along lines of race, age, gender, wealth, and class within affected communities. A mapping campaign that benefits an international carbon market, for example, may simultaneously restrict the land-use flexibility of women who gather forest products or of Indigenous groups whose tenure claims are not formally recognized.

The commentary is careful to acknowledge the genuine value of remote sensing rather than dismissing it. Lidar has enabled remarkable scientific advances, from quantifying carbon stocks across millions of hectares to revealing the scale of pre-Columbian urbanism in the Amazon, and it has been used by local communities themselves to safeguard their territories and rights. Community-led mapping projects have leveraged the same technology to document land use, strengthen legal claims, and monitor illegal logging and mining. Roberts emphasizes that the authors are not arguing remote sensing is inherently bad. The point, rather, is that scientists should consider the varied ethical dimensions of their research whether they carry out mapping at local, regional, or global scales, and that these considerations should be integral to research planning rather than an afterthought once data has already been collected.

Part of the problem, the paper suggests, is structural. Ethical discussions about remote sensing have occurred within individual disciplines, but they have tended to focus on technicalities of research practice and data presentation, such as resolution standards, processing pipelines, and visualization choices, rather than on the more fundamental question of whether and under what conditions to map at all. A journal may require that archaeological site locations be blurred in published figures, but that safeguard does little if the raw point clouds, flight plans, and derived products remain accessible to parties whose interests conflict with those of local residents. Data governance, consent, benefit sharing, and the political economy of who commissions and pays for scans are questions that fall between the cracks of disciplinary ethics boards, which are typically designed around human-subjects research rather than landscape-scale observation.

The material footprint of the technology deserves particular attention, the authors argue, because it is so often assumed away. While a single drone flight may seem trivial, large-scale campaigns rely on crewed aircraft burning fuel over remote regions, on repeated monitoring flights that multiply emissions over time, and on energy-intensive data processing and storage in data centers with their own water and carbon costs. When the stated purpose of scanning a forest is to support climate mitigation or biodiversity protection, the authors contend that researchers have a responsibility to account for the climatic and environmental impacts of the act of seeing itself, and to weigh whether those impacts are justified by the benefits the mapping will actually deliver, and to whom.

To move from critique to practice, the paper concludes with a framework intended to help researchers decide when mapping is inappropriate, and to guide the design of projects that proceed. The framework prompts scientists to interrogate the purpose of a proposed scan, the consent and participation of affected communities, the control and accessibility of the resulting data, the distribution of benefits and risks, and the environmental costs of the campaign. By reframing environmental science as an asset for transformative change rather than a neutral generator of data, the authors hope these considerations will ensure that tropical forest mapping best serves the needs of those impacted most by the current global ecological crisis. As Lidar becomes cheaper, more portable, and more ubiquitous, the window for embedding such reflection into standard practice is open now, and the paper makes the case that the scientific community should walk through it before the next flight takes off.

Subject of Research: The ethical and social implications of Lidar remote sensing in tropical forest research

Article Title: The Local Costs of Remote Sensing: Examining the Ethics of Laser Scanning in Tropical Forests

Article References: The Local Costs of Remote Sensing: Examining the Ethics of Laser Scanning in Tropical Forests. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Lidar, remote sensing, tropical forests, research ethics, Indigenous rights, data governance, conservation, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Nature Ecology & Evolution, environmental justice, mapping, dispossession

The timing of the analysis is central to its design. Immigration enforcement activity in Los Angeles County began increasing in early 2025 and then expanded significantly in early June 2025, when high-profile federal operations took place in downtown Los Angeles and other communities. Those operations generated widespread public attention and, according to the researchers, created a natural before-and-after window for studying health care utilization. The team examined patient records at three safety-net hospitals—Los Angeles General Medical Center, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, and Olive View-UCLA Medical Center—during the twelve months before June 2025 and the four months that followed. These hospitals are a key source of care for immigrant communities in the county, which makes them a sensitive barometer for changes in health-seeking behavior among foreign-born residents.

To distinguish foreign-born patients from U.S.-born patients, the researchers relied on a variable that is routinely collected but rarely exploited for research of this kind: patients’ self-reported country of birth, recorded at the point of care. This allowed the team to compare utilization trends across groups defined by place of birth, including patients born in Mexico, patients born in Central or South America, and patients born in Asia, against a U.S.-born comparison group drawn from the same hospitals over the same period. Because all three facilities serve large, diverse patient populations under the same county health system, the design helps control for hospital-level factors that might otherwise confound comparisons, such as changes in staffing, capacity, or billing practices during the study window.

The headline finding concerns the first four weeks after heightened immigration operations began. During that period, emergency department visits by foreign-born patients decreased by more than 20 percent relative to U.S.-born patients. In other words, after adjusting for the comparison group, roughly one in five emergency visits that would have been expected among foreign-born patients did not occur. This kind of relative decline, measured against a concurrent control population, is methodologically meaningful because it accounts for seasonal patterns, general fluctuations in demand, and any county-wide shocks affecting all patients equally. A drop of that magnitude in a matter of weeks suggests a behavioral response to the enforcement environment rather than a gradual shift in underlying health status.

Over time, the disparity partially receded. By October 2025, the gap in emergency department use between foreign-born and U.S.-born patients had narrowed to 10 percent. The researchers interpret this trajectory as consistent with an acute shock to care-seeking behavior that attenuated as the immediate intensity of enforcement operations subsided, though the gap did not disappear entirely. Even at the reduced level, a persistent 10 percent shortfall in visits among foreign-born patients relative to their U.S.-born counterparts represents a substantial volume of foregone care across a hospital system that serves hundreds of thousands of patients annually. The partial rebound also underscores how sensitive utilization data can be to civic conditions, functioning almost as a real-time indicator of community fear.

Perhaps the most clinically consequential finding is what happened among the foreign-born patients who did seek emergency care. Despite making fewer visits overall, they were more likely to be hospitalized once they arrived. Compared with U.S.-born patients, admission rates increased by 4.8 percentage points among Mexican-born patients, by 5.1 percentage points among patients born in Central or South America, and by 2.5 percentage points among those born in Asia. Higher admission rates among a group that is simultaneously visiting the emergency department less often point toward delayed care: conditions that might have been managed with a short emergency visit and outpatient follow-up instead progressed to the point where inpatient admission became necessary.

This combination of fewer visits and higher admission intensity has a well-understood clinical and economic logic. Emergency departments function as a safety valve for conditions ranging from asthma exacerbations to infections and uncontrolled chronic disease. When patients postpone presentation, illnesses that could have been treated early may advance, requiring longer stays, more intensive interventions, and costlier care. The USC team warns that this dynamic could lead to the development of more serious health conditions and higher costs for both patients and the health care system. For safety-net hospitals, which operate under constrained budgets and serve populations with high rates of uninsurance, an influx of more acutely ill patients carries direct financial and operational consequences, from bed capacity to staffing demands.

The study’s implications extend beyond Los Angeles. Public health researchers have long hypothesized that immigration enforcement can produce a chilling effect on health care use, in which fear of encountering authorities at or near medical facilities deters people from seeking care regardless of their own immigration status. The new findings add rigorous, hospital-level evidence to that literature, quantifying both the magnitude and the duration of the effect during a specific enforcement escalation. Because the analysis covers patients born across multiple world regions, it also suggests that the chilling effect was not confined to a single national-origin group, with measurable declines and admission increases spanning Mexican, Central American, South American, and Asian-born patients, though the magnitude of the admission-rate shift varied by group.

Lead author Sarah Axeen, a scholar at the USC Schaeffer Institute for Public Policy & Government Service and an assistant professor at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, summarized the concern in stark terms. Our findings suggest that immigration enforcement may discourage immigrant patients from seeking acute care when they need it, with potentially serious health consequences for patients and economic costs for the health systems that serve them, she said. That framing captures the dual burden the study documents: a public health cost borne by individual patients whose conditions may worsen untreated, and a systemic cost borne by county hospitals that ultimately absorb more complex, more expensive cases when delayed patients finally present.

The research team included, alongside Axeen, Cameron Kaplan, Daniel Cordova, Manuel Pastor, and Todd Schneberk, all of USC; Annie Ro of the University of California, Irvine; and Anna Gorman of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. Data for the work were made available by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award number UL1TR001855, and the authors note that the content is solely their responsibility. Published October 5, 2026, in JAMA Network Open under the title Emergency Department Visits After Heightened Immigration Enforcement in Los Angeles County, the study arrives at a moment when policymakers, hospital administrators, and public health officials are weighing how enforcement strategy intersects with community health. Its central message is difficult to ignore: the effects of immigration enforcement are visible not only in arrest statistics and court dockets, but in the quiet, measurable absence of patients from emergency rooms—and in the greater severity of the illnesses they carry when they return.

Subject of Research: The effect of heightened immigration enforcement on emergency department use and hospitalization rates among foreign-born patients at Los Angeles County safety-net hospitals

Article Title: As immigration enforcement increased in L.A., foreign-born patients made fewer ER visits

Article References: As immigration enforcement increased in L.A., foreign-born patients made fewer ER visits. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: immigration enforcement, emergency department visits, foreign-born patients, Los Angeles County, safety-net hospitals, hospitalization rates, JAMA Network Open, health care utilization, chilling effect, public health, USC Schaeffer Center, delayed care

The study was carried out as part of the PharGTrans project, funded by the Research Council of Finland, and took the form of an interview study rather than a survey or laboratory analysis. Researchers spoke with stakeholders drawn from seven European countries, capturing perspectives from inside pharmaceutical companies, industry associations, non-governmental organisations, public authorities and academia. This breadth matters, because chemicals legislation does not land on all actors equally. A regulator interpreting a directive, an NGO campaigning for stricter limits and a manufacturer re-engineering a production line all experience the same legal text in profoundly different ways, and the study set out to document precisely those divergent experiences.

Among the reforms attracting the most attention was the proposed restriction of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, better known as PFASs, under the REACH Regulation, the EU’s flagship framework for the registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemicals. PFASs are a vast family of synthetic compounds prized for their chemical and thermal stability, which is exactly what makes them so persistent in the environment and so difficult to replace in industrial processes. Many stakeholders interviewed for the study viewed the proposed restriction, alongside the Regulation on Packaging and Packaging Waste, as a genuine push in the right direction for the sector’s green transformation.

According to the researchers, these regulations are encouraging the development of environmentally less harmful compounds that could, in the future, replace substances of concern used in pharmaceutical production processes. They are also expected to increase the use of recycled materials in pharmaceutical packaging, an area where the industry has historically lagged behind consumer sectors. Changes aimed at improving information sharing and transparency, such as the regulation establishing a common data platform on chemicals, were likewise seen as supportive, since better data flows can help companies identify hazardous inputs earlier and plan substitutions more strategically.

Yet the same instruments that inspire hope in some corners of the sector provoke alarm in others. Doctoral Researcher Sanja Riikonen of the University of Eastern Finland, who led the interviews, noted that the PFAS restriction and the recast Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive prompted considerable discussion, particularly among interviewees from pharmaceutical companies and industry associations. The tension is not simply resistance to change; it reflects a technical reality about how deeply certain substances are woven into modern pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Although the proposed PFAS restriction does not apply to active pharmaceutical ingredients, the pharmaceutical industry relies on many PFAS-containing materials in its production processes. These compounds can appear in equipment linings, filters, tubing, gaskets and other critical components where their resistance to aggressive chemicals and high temperatures is difficult to replicate. The interviewees viewed a rapid transition to alternative materials as challenging, and their concern highlights a recurring dilemma in green chemistry policy: banning a problematic substance class is straightforward on paper, but qualifying and validating replacements in a sector governed by strict quality and safety requirements can take years of testing and regulatory approval.

The recast Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive introduces a different kind of pressure through its extended producer responsibility scheme. Under this scheme, the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries are required to cover a large proportion of the costs associated with upgrading wastewater treatment processes in EU Member States. The logic is that manufacturers should bear some responsibility for the residues their products leave in water systems, where trace pharmaceutical compounds can affect aquatic ecosystems. But the interviewees found that requiring industry to bear these costs could divert companies’ resources and attention away from other measures that promote sustainability, effectively pitting one environmental goal against another within the same corporate budgets.

This tension between well-intentioned instruments is one of the study’s most significant findings. A company spending heavily on wastewater treatment levies may have less capacity to invest in greener synthesis routes, safer packaging or substitution programmes. Stakeholders questioned whether some of the legislative changes would genuinely advance the green transformation at all, suggesting that the cumulative burden of overlapping requirements could slow the very transition the legislation is meant to accelerate. The finding underscores a broader lesson in environmental governance: the aggregate effect of individually reasonable policies can be unbalanced if their interactions are not carefully assessed.

In response, the study points toward a clear remedy: closer collaboration between different policy sectors and stakeholder groups throughout the legislative drafting process. Several stakeholders highlighted challenges arising from shortcomings in communication and a limited understanding of the broader picture across sectors. According to the interviewees, more transparent preparatory processes, better information-sharing and more inclusive dialogue could reduce inconsistencies between regulations affecting the chemicals, environmental and pharmaceutical sectors and promote more coherent decision-making. In practice, this would mean regulators consulting more systematically with the industries and communities their rules affect, and vice versa, before texts are finalised rather than after implementation problems emerge.

Riikonen’s concluding message reaches beyond the pharmaceutical sector to anyone shaping environmental regulation. The effects of regulation supporting the green transformation on different stakeholders, she argues, should be taken into account more effectively, because doing so could help avoid unintended consequences that may even slow down the green transformation the rules are intended to advance. As the EU continues to revise its chemicals framework in pursuit of a non-toxic environment, the Finnish study offers a grounded reminder that the path to greener pharmaceuticals runs not through legislation alone, but through legislation designed with a clear-eyed understanding of the laboratories, factories and treatment plants where it will ultimately take effect.

Subject of Research: Stakeholder perceptions of EU chemicals legislation reforms and their effects on green transformation in the pharmaceutical sector

Article Title: Pharmaceutical sector stakeholders see changes to EU chemicals legislation as presenting both opportunities and challenges for the green transformation

Article References: Pharmaceutical sector stakeholders see changes to EU chemicals legislation as presenting both opportunities and challenges for the green transformation. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: EU chemicals legislation, pharmaceutical sector, green transformation, REACH Regulation, PFAS restriction, Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive, extended producer responsibility, sustainable chemistry, pharmaceutical packaging, stakeholder interviews, environmental policy, University of Eastern Finland