Biotech, in brief

Fiji has declared HIV a national emergency. About one adult in 60 now has the virus, against one in 167 five years ago. [1][2]

The country recorded 2,016 new diagnoses in 2025, sixteen times the number recorded in 2019. [1][3]

Of the 9,100 Fijians living with HIV last year, only 39% knew they had it and 22% were getting the drugs that hold the virus down. [2][3]

Across the world, 78% of people with HIV are on that treatment. [2]

Fifty-nine babies were born with HIV in Fiji last year and 18 died before their first birthday. [3]

Health Minister Antonio Lalabalavu said an outbreak-level response is no longer sufficient. [2]

Fiji's government will set up a needle-and-syringe programme, which the country has never had, and change the law in parliament so it can run. [2][3]

Among cases where the route is known, more than half were passed on through sex and over 42% through injecting drugs. [3]

Health workers describe bluetoothing, where people inject the blood of someone already high, so several share one hit and one syringe. [2]

Jason Mitchell, who leads Fiji's HIV taskforce, expects it to take more than five years to get on top of the epidemic. [2]

Fiji is a hub for business, tourism and transport in the South Pacific, and UNAIDS warns the rise could reach its neighbours. [1]

Why it matters. Watch whether Fiji's parliament passes the law that lets clean needles be handed out, and whether the share of infected Fijians who know they have the virus rises above 39%.

Bundibugyo belongs to the same virus family as Ebola and causes the same severe bleeding illness. [4] Before this year it had appeared in only two recognised outbreaks, in Uganda in 2007 and Congo in 2012. [4] By 11 June the current outbreak in Congo and Uganda had 695 confirmed cases and 138 confirmed deaths, the World Health Organization said. [4] A review published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, by Nancy Sullivan of Boston University, says outbreak preparation must reach past the few diseases that get most attention. [4]

Why it matters. Early symptoms look like malaria or typhoid, so confirming a case needs a laboratory, and laboratory access is thin across much of eastern Congo. [4] This outbreak was formally recognised only after a nurse died. [4]

The New World screwworm is a fly whose larvae feed on the living flesh of animals and, rarely, of people. [5] A campaign in the 1950s and 1960s wiped it out of the United States and pushed its range south to Panama. [5] Before that it cost southwestern livestock producers an estimated 50 to 100 million dollars a year, and it has now reached Texas and New Mexico. [5] Researchers at the University of California San Diego and the county health department have built a dashboard estimating the risk for every US county. [5]

Why it matters. Laboratory confirmation can take days or weeks, so the team fed news coverage into the dashboard to see the fly arrive before the official reporting system does. [5] Only public health officials can use it for now. [5]

A Reuters/Ipsos poll of Americans completed on Monday found 76% believe the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine is safe for children, down from 84% in a May 2020 poll by the same pair. [10] The fall was sharpest among Republicans. [10] The United States has recorded more than 3,000 confirmed measles infections this year, its worst count in 35 years, with outbreaks in Pennsylvania, Utah and South Carolina. [10] Vaccination coverage among children starting school fell last year to 92.5%. [10]

Why it matters. Experts put the level needed to protect children who cannot be vaccinated at 95%, so coverage is now below it. [10] Just 19% of Americans told the pollsters they approve of President Trump's handling of the outbreak. [10]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the United States health secretary, told a convention of Children's Health Defense on Thursday that they have a strong and steadfast friend in President Trump's White House. [11] He founded the group, which campaigns against vaccines, and led it for years before taking the job. [11] He said he would die with his boots on pursuing answers about vaccine risks. [11] The speaker before him called the polio vaccine's success a fraud, and the speaker after him was Andrew Wakefield, whose retracted paper linked the measles vaccine to autism. [11]

Why it matters. The speech came a day after Nicole Saphier, President Trump's nominee for surgeon general, defended the safety of vaccines at her Senate confirmation hearing. [11] Two parts of the same administration are saying opposite things about the same shots. [11]

Gareth Balmer of the charity With You told the BBC that the drugs now sold on Scottish streets are more dangerous than they have ever been, and that a grain of some of them is enough to kill. [7] Police Scotland seized about 80 million pounds of street drugs in 2025 and has already seized 78 million pounds this year. [7] A laboratory at Dundee University, run by Professor Niamh Nic Daeid, has been expanded into a national drug testing centre. [7]

Why it matters. Naloxone reverses an opioid overdose, and Balmer says getting hold of it matters more than ever. [7] But nobody can give the right advice about a substance they have not yet identified, which is what the new centre is there to fix. [7]

Dante Paul Lacourte was 16 when he died in his bedroom in San Francisco on 7 April. [6] His mother, Christina Lacourte, forced the door open, found him and used the two doses of Narcan, the overdose antidote, that she kept in a kitchen drawer for exactly that moment. [6] They did not revive him. [6] She assumed fentanyl had killed him, but the autopsy named a drug she had never heard of, cychlorphine, and it is still the only time that word has appeared on a San Francisco coroner's report. [6]

Why it matters. An antidote only works on the drug it was built for. [6] A family that had stocked Narcan for a fentanyl overdose had nothing at all for what actually arrived. [6]

Goa Therapeutics came out of stealth this week with GOA26, an engineered protein meant to clear alcohol out of the blood far faster than the body manages alone. [13] Surgeons often cannot safely operate on badly injured patients who arrive drunk, and the company says up to half of severe trauma patients are intoxicated. [13] In anaesthetised pigs given the equivalent of a heavy binge, blood alcohol fell by an average of 61.3% within twenty minutes, against untreated animals. [13] Goa plans to apply to start human testing by the end of the year. [13]

Why it matters. Everything so far is in rats and pigs, and most things that work in animals never work in people. [13] Chief executive Andrew Altschuler's stated goal of a product sold in every bar sits several trials beyond a phase 1 study that has not started. [13]

Eli Lilly presented phase 1 results at the Psych Congress meeting in New Orleans for brenipatide, a drug of the same family as its weight-loss injections Mounjaro and Zepbound. [12] More than 200 healthy, overweight and obese volunteers were randomly given the drug or a dummy injection, at doses up to 4.5mg. [12] It stayed in the body far longer than those products, with a half-life of 9 to 12.5 days. [12] Lilly is already running late-stage trials of it in alcohol use disorder and in recurrent major depression. [12]

Why it matters. A phase 1 trial only checks safety and how the body handles a drug. [12] It cannot say whether brenipatide helps anyone drink less or feel less depressed, and the trials that could are still running. [12]

Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden studied 7,308 people who had both Alzheimer's disease and atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat that raises the risk of stroke. [14] They compared three matched groups: people on newer blood thinners called NOACs, people on the older drug warfarin, and people on no blood thinner at all. [14] Scores on a standard memory and thinking test fell more slowly in the NOAC group, by a little over 0.2 points a year. [14] The work is published in the European Heart Journal. [14]

Why it matters. A fifth of a test point a year is small for any one patient, and the team say it could add up over many years. [14] The study compared existing records rather than assigning treatment, so it can show the pattern but cannot prove the drug caused it. [14]

Streptococcus pneumoniae is a bacterium carried harmlessly in the nose and throat of about one adult in five worldwide, but it sometimes invades and causes meningitis, pneumonia or blood poisoning. [8] Researchers examined roughly 59,000 invasive cases collected over 19 years by South Africa's national surveillance programme. [8] Three subtypes, numbered 14, 19A and 8, carried the highest risk after exposure to air pollution. [8] Risk generally peaked about two weeks after exposure, but where subtypes 4, 8, 23F and 19F were common it rose in the same week. [8]

Why it matters. Sophie Belman, now at Yale School of Public Health, says the risk is not the same for every person or in every place, because the strain someone happens to be carrying changes the odds and the timing. [8] Older adults and young children were most vulnerable when pollution was high. [8]

Apoptosis is the body's controlled way of killing off cells that are old, damaged or no longer wanted, and it is carried out by enzymes called caspases. [15] A team led by Tslil Braun in Eli Arama's laboratory at the Weizmann Institute of Science found cells that begin that process and then survive it. [15] Their descendants were far more resistant to later damage and helped rebuild tissue quickly. [15] The work, published in Nature Communications, repeats a 1970s experiment in which heavily irradiated fly larvae still grew fully working wings. [15]

Why it matters. The same trick may be what lets some tumours come back after treatment in a more aggressive form. [15] A mechanism that helps healthy tissue heal could be helping cancer cells survive the drugs meant to kill them. [15]

Malaria parasites cannot make vitamin B5 and have to take it from whatever they are living in; inside a mosquito, that is the mosquito. [16] Researchers tested two new compounds, PZ-3022 and PZ-3883, that cut how much of the vitamin is available in Anopheles stephensi, a mosquito that carries malaria in Asia and has recently spread in Africa. [16] Mosquitoes fed the compounds carried far fewer parasites in the gut and in the salivary glands, for two Plasmodium species. [16] Neither compound slowed the parasite growing in a dish. [16]

Why it matters. Almost every malaria medicine treats the patient; a compound that works on the mosquito would stop the parasite being passed on instead. [16] This is laboratory work in insects, and no person has taken either compound. [16]

Body mass index cannot tell fat stored under the skin from fat packed around the organs. [9] Researchers ran automatic analysis over abdominal CT scans from 1,107 adults treated for sepsis, the body's overwhelming reaction to an infection, at a single hospital. [9] Of those patients, 300 died within 28 days. [9] More fat under the skin went with a lower risk of dying, and a higher ratio of organ fat to skin fat went with a higher risk, after adjusting for other factors. [9]

Why it matters. The two kinds of fat point in opposite directions, and a single BMI number averages them together. [9] The authors say the finding needs checking at other hospitals before anyone relies on it. [9]

Harold P. Freeman, a cancer surgeon who arrived at Harlem Hospital Center in New York in 1967, died on 11 August in Atlanta at 93. [17] He found that his poor, often uninsured patients turned up only once their cancers were advanced, and built a programme that assigned someone to walk each patient through the hospital system. [17] That idea, called patient navigation, spread to hospitals around the world. [17] Since 2024 Medicare has paid for some navigation for cancer, heart failure and HIV. [17]

Why it matters. Freeman wrote that he had imagined he could cut cancer out of Harlem, and learned the disease would not yield to a surgeon's knife. [17] His patients were arriving late, not getting worse operations. [17]

A survey of 1,102 men in the United States, run by Morning Consult for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, found that 20% knew of research linking milk and other dairy products to a higher risk of prostate cancer. [18] The same share said a health professional had ever discussed nutrition and prostate cancer risk with them. [18] After being told about the link, 66% said they would be likely to avoid dairy. [18] Three in four supported warning labels on dairy products. [18]

Why it matters. The group that paid for the survey campaigns for plant-based diets, so it was asking about a link it already argues for. [18] The studies behind that link record what men ate and what later happened, which cannot separate dairy from everything else in a diet. [18]

Researchers matched hospital records in New York State from 2005 to 2021 against floods and power cuts. [19] Each on its own went with more admissions for heart and blood-vessel illness, and the two together were worse than either alone, with a rate ratio reaching 1.09. [19] The risk rose once a flood lasted more than three days, or once a power cut covered more than 15.3% of an area. [19] Hospital stays were longer as well. [19]

Why it matters. The effect was strongest for high blood pressure, stroke and reduced blood flow to the heart. [19] It fell hardest on people over 65, rural residents, and those on Medicaid or with no insurance. [19]

Interferon is the alarm chemical a cell releases when a virus gets in, telling its neighbours to defend themselves. [20] Researchers fitted three mathematical models to matched readings of virus levels and interferon in human nose and windpipe tissue infected with seasonal flu and with two versions of H5N1 bird flu, from 2005 and 2022. [20] The models disagreed about how interferon actually holds a virus back, and with only ten readings per condition the data could not pick between them. [20] The strains differed mainly in how fast interferon was cleared away. [20]

Why it matters. H5N1 causes severe disease in people and is watched as a pandemic risk, so knowing which part of the body's first response slows it would matter. [20] The authors say the measurements are too sparse to answer that yet. [20]

Two years ago Mohit Gupta, an analyst at the biotech hedge fund Adar1 Capital, walked into the Austin office of his boss Dan Schneeberger. [21] He proposed building a company from scratch to make a longer-lasting antibody treatment for atopic dermatitis, the most common form of eczema. [21] Schneeberger's job is to invest in drug companies that already exist, not to start them. [21] The result, a company called North Immunology, was reported by STAT this week. [21]

Why it matters. A fund that spends its days judging other people's drug programmes decided it could run one better itself. [21] That is a different bet from the ones it usually makes, and it carries the development risk rather than trading around it. [21]

Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust in northern England told its board that deaths after emergency abdominal surgery at Rotherham Hospital were 168% above the national average in 2024/25. [22] A national audit covered 104 of its patients between April 2024 and March 2025, and 14 of them died, about one in seven. [22] An emergency laparotomy means opening the abdomen to deal with something life-threatening, such as internal bleeding or a burst bowel. [22] The trust said it has changed how patients move through the hospital and added staff. [22]

Why it matters. Patients needing this operation are often already very ill and pass through several departments, and the trust said no single cause explained the figure. [22] It said more recent numbers show the performance improving. [22]