The conclusion(?) to the bird flu mystery and a Syrian doctor on coming to the U.S.

Happy birthday to Taylor Swift! She’s now old enough to run for president of the United States (not saying she SHOULD, just that she COULD…)

And happy birthday to my feature from one year ago about a little girl named Shelby, whose one-time gene therapy miracle cure took place over a grueling year. (Don’t miss the Taylor Swift name drop in the piece itself!)

Bird flu mystery resolution: Not bird flu, but also not flu. Maybe.

If you’ve been following the saga of the child in California who was thought to have contracted bird flu after drinking raw milk, we have a rather unsatisfying conclusion for you. Though one test on a sample from the child tested positive for influenza A, confirmatory tests from the CDC were negative for all influenza viruses and unable to identify the illness.

That outcome does not definitively rule out the possibility that the child had an H5N1 infection, so the child will be counted as a suspected case, according to Lisa Santora, public health officer for Marin County. She also said she wasn’t surprised by the outcome, because the amount of virus in the original test sample was low and the samples degrade over time.

The child has now recovered, so the illness will remain a mystery. Read more from STAT’s Helen Branswell on lessons learned, further details of the case, and the likely future of human H5N1 cases.

When awards beget awards

The prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a major funder of scientific research, will be changing criteria for its 2027 round of funding in an effort to diversify its recipients and the institutions they come from. Right now, just 10 institutions (led by Stanford) employ more than half of the HHMI’s principal investigators. For 2027, institutions that already have two or more HHMI investigators will not be considered eligible.

But does this move spread the wealth or unfairly penalize elite institutions where talent is concentrated?

“Folks might say, ‘This is not a meritorious way of distributing funding.’ What I would say to that is that the system that we currently have now is not meritorious in the way that we distribute funding in the first place,” said Christine Yifeng Chen, a geochemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who has studied racial bias in NSF funding.

Read more from STAT’s Anil Oza on the consequences of the “Matthew effect” and HHMI’s intriguing method of attempting to democratize funded research.

A new antiviral class…and half a bridge to nowhere

To stop viruses, antivirals like the Covid-19 drug Paxlovid target a class of enzyme in a virus’s machinery called a protease. But in a Nature paper published earlier this week, researchers at Rockefeller University proved that targeting a different part of the virus machinery — a methyltransferase enzyme — is another promising strategy for new antivirals.

Human methyltransferases and virus methyltransferases look significantly different — meaning that the antiviral candidate can target that virus efficiently and doesn’t cause many side effects. Researchers noted that this method could be effective on other RNA viruses like Ebola and dengue, as well as Pox viruses.

This research was funded in part by the Biden administration’s Antiviral Program for Pandemics, which was intended as a bold defense against both Covid and future pandemics. However, as STAT’s Jason Mast told us earlier this year, the program’s funding was cannibalized by Omicron response and other efforts. What was supposed to be a five-year, $1 billion push will run out of funding next spring, leaving the country with a $577 million “half a bridge to nowhere.”

The Syrian-American dream

When M. Ihsan Kaadan came to the U.S. after finishing his medical degree in Syria, he recalls, “I quickly realized that the American dream is real.” He got a master’s degree in international health policy and management and did his residency and fellowship at highly respected hospitals in Boston. While at Massachusetts General Hospital, his research group included an Israeli and an Iranian in addition to himself — three people who would never work together elsewhere. The U.S. accepted him regardless of his background or religion.

He’s not sure all that could happen today.

In a STAT First Opinion, Kaadan lays out the problems the “Muslim ban” of the first Trump administration caused for international doctors helping to fill gaps in the U.S. physician workforce. He’s excited to use his American medical training to help rebuild the Syrian health care system, but fears for immigrant doctors like him if there’s a new travel ban in the new administration. Read more, including the statistics on international doctors in the U.S. workforce, here.

‘Another can to kick’ for leukemia

Eventually, no matter what therapy patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia get, the expectation is that they will relapse if they live long enough. STAT’s Angus Chen reports that there’s a new hope — including compete remission — for patients whose cancer is resistant to other therapies.

In a small phase 1/2 trial, 61% of 23 patients responded to AbbVie’s drug Epkinly that’s already approved for some lymphomas, and 39% had a complete response. This is a very significant achievement, said Alexey Danilov, a hematologist-oncologist and cancer researcher at City of Hope, because this is a very difficult population of patients to treat.

“I’d be lying to say I don’t always hope that this will be the last therapy, no more swings at the bat,” said Brian Koffman, a patient who has relapsed multiple times. “The reality is you kick the can down the road. But you hope, by the end, there’s another can to kick.” He’s now in remission due to the new therapy.

Read more here.

Correction: In yesterday’s edition, the name of public health officer for Marin County Lisa Santora was misspelled.

What we’re reading

• Patients couldn’t pay their utility bills. One hospital turned to solar power for help, WBUR/KFF Health News
• Inside Isomorphic Labs: Demis Hassabis’ lab-free vision for biotech’s AI future, Endpoints
• A ‘second tree of life’ could wreak havoc, scientists warn, New York Times
• I have a rare form of ALS. My insurance company’s approach to covering my medication is cruel, STAT
• With no approved treatments and little support, people with Long COVID turn to online drug markets, The Sick Times
• Centene warns Republicans against cutting Medicaid or letting ACA subsidies expire, STAT