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How vaccines could be about to revolutionise acne treatments
Acne could be caused by our immune systems overreacting to proteins released by skin bacteria. Columnist Michael Le Page looks into the experimental treatments aiming to block this process and prevent or reduce acne
from Health – latest in science and technology | New Scientist https://www.newscientist.com/article/2595926-how-vaccines-could-be-about-to-revolutionise-acne-treatments/?utm_campaign=RSS|NSNS&utm_content=health&utm_medium=RSS&utm_source=NSNS
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Personalised cancer vaccine expected to be approved next year
A scanning electron micrograph of a melanoma cell
Science Photo Library/Alamy
A personalised mRNA vaccine for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, is expected to be approved for use in the US, Europe and the UK next year. The vaccine is designed to stimulate immune responses against genetic mutations that are unique to an individual’s cancer. When used alongside standard treatment in a late-stage trial, it substantially cut the risk of cancer recurrence or death within the next two years.
“I think approval could be quick, and next year sounds reasonable,” says Alan Melcher at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, who wasn’t involved in the trial.
“It is a huge deal,” says Rebecca Lee at the University of Manchester, who also wasn’t involved. Thousands of people in the UK alone could benefit from this, based on the trial’s patient population, she says. “It’s highly likely the US and Europe [including the UK] will approve it next year”. However, producing the vaccine is very expensive, and it may not be deemed cost-effective for use on the UK’s National Health Services (NHS), she says.
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In August, drugmaker Modern announced that the vaccine had positive results in a late-stage trial. More specific findings have now been released.
The trial recruited more than 1100 adults who had surgery to remove high-risk melanomas that were likely to recur or spread to distant sites. In the UK, 19,400 melanoma cases are diagnosed annually, of which about 25 per cent are deemed high risk.
Two-thirds of the participants were randomly assigned to receive a bespoke vaccine on top of standard immunotherapy, called pembrolizumab, which helps the immune system find and destroy cancer. Both were delivered every 3 weeks for up to a year. The remaining participants received placebo injections plus pembrolizumab.
The vaccine is made by genetically sequencing a small sample of a person’s cancer and comparing that sequence with the DNA in the individual’s healthy blood cells. This enables researchers to pinpoint mutations specific to the cancer.
Based on the same technology used in covid-19 vaccines, the cancer vaccine contains mRNA molecules that encode for proteins with up to 34 of those mutations. “The jab contains a fingerprint of proteins specifically associated with the cancer,” says Lee. “This helps [immune] T cells recognise the cancer better, and then pembrolizumab prevents those T cells from becoming exhausted once they’ve started attacking the cancer cells.”
About two years after the start of treatment, 82 per cent of the participants who received the vaccine plus pembrolizumab were alive without their cancer recurring, on average, compared with 70 per cent among those on pembrolizumab alone. “It’s a really exciting result,” says Lee. Side effects were similar between the two groups.
The results combine cancer recurrence and death rates into one figure, but since a treated cancer has to recur for it to cause death, this combined measure should be interpreted mostly as a sign of the vaccine reducing recurrence, says Melcher. The participants haven’t been tracked for long enough to robustly determine whether the vaccine improves survival rates. These results should be available within a few years, says Lee.
But because the vaccine has to be tailored to and manufactured for each individual, it is expected to be very costly, which could affect NHS access. “If it was a cheap drug, I’d definitely say it will get approved [for NHS use], but it’s going to be expensive,” says Lee. In January, a report by Reuters suggested it would cost around $200,000 per treatment. Merck and Moderna did not respond to a request about its cost.
Further research is needed to better understand who is mostly likely to benefit from the vaccine, says Melcher. Some people may have mutations included in their vaccine that fail to stimulate anti-cancer immunity as predicted, or pembrolizumab could work so well that the vaccine can’t lead to further improvement. “If we can find immune markers in the blood or tumour that predict patient responses, we could use those to determine who to give the jab to,” says Melcher.
James Larkin, also at the Institute of Cancer Research, says personalised vaccines could also work for other types of cancer, such as those affecting the lungs, bladder and kidneys, which are also routinely treated with immunotherapy. Further research is needed to verify this and explore whether the vaccines could work as standalone treatments.
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Body temperature may drive the higher risk of autoimmune conditions in women
Autoimmune conditions are much more common in women than men, which could partly be due to the fluctuating body temperatures that occur during the menstrual cycle and menopause
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Cholesterol may disrupt the brain’s cleaning system in Alzheimer’s disease
The glymphatic system flushes toxins out of the brain, but this seems to be disrupted in Alzheimer’s disease, and cholesterol may be involved
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1 in 4 cases of depression may be caused by off-kilter body clocks
Disturbed sleep is a common depression symptom
chaiyan Anuwatmongkonchai / Alamy
A quarter of depression cases are caused by people’s body clocks being out of whack, a large study suggests. This newly identified “circadian depression” responds poorly to standard antidepressants, but might be eased by taking melatonin or adopting behavioural strategies, like going outside in the early morning sun.
“The coordination of [your body clocks] underpins your mood, your metabolism, your concentration, your sleep-wake cycle and many other key factors,” says Ian Hickie at the University of Sydney. “When it’s well, you feel really well, you get up in the morning full of energy. When it’s off, you feel jet-lagged all the time, you feel tired, you feel exhausted, you gain weight, you can’t concentrate, you sleep poorly and your behaviour changes.”
Hickie and his colleagues asked more than 10,000 people in Australia with severe, recurrent depression to fill out surveys about their sleep patterns and other characteristics, such as whether their symptoms change seasonally. The participants also provided saliva samples for DNA analysis.
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Of these participants, 23 per cent were identified as having circadian depression. This meant they exhibited at least three of six signs of body clock dysregulation: being an “evening type”, going to sleep later than most people, feeling very tired when getting up regardless of sleep duration, sleeping more during bouts of depression, sleeping in late on non-work days, and experiencing strong seasonal changes in mood, energy, sleep and appetite. “It’s not only about the quantity or the amount of sleep, it’s really about the rhythm and the regularity of sleep,” says team member Emiliana Tonini, also at the University of Sydney.
Those with circadian depression tended to have more severe symptoms than those with non-circadian depression, including more suicidal thoughts. They also developed symptoms at an earlier age – the average age of onset was 18 in the circadian-depression group and 23 in the non-circadian group.
Body clock dysregulation and the resulting mood disturbances may be caused by genetic factors, the study found. The participants with circadian depression were more likely to have genetic variants linked to sleep problems, higher body weight, inflammatory markers and ADHD. “There is an underlying biology that is quite distinct from other forms of depression,” says Tonini.
Another contributing factor may be our modern lifestyles, says Hickie. Our body clocks need to be reset each morning by light exposure to maintain steady, 24-hour rhythms and can be destabilised by artificial light exposure at times when we would have historically been in the dark, he says. “We live in the 21st century, which says, you know, ‘Stay inside, be on a computer all day, avoid the light and then stay up at night and expose yourself to light’”. This is “a complete reverse of what we’re built for”.
The participants identified as having circadian depression reported less efficacy and more side effects when they took common antidepressants like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. This may be because these SSRIs target a form of depression related to the neurotransmitter serotonin.
The researchers are about to launch a clinical trial to investigate whether taking a synthetic form of the hormone melatonin, which regulates sleep-wake cycles, might be more effective for treating circadian depression. They previously found that an antidepressant called agomelatine, which mimics melatonin’s effects in the brain, improved sleep and reduced general depression.
The trial will also explore whether behavioural strategies for body clock regulation reduce depression. These include waking up at the same time every morning around sunrise and going outside, spending time outside again in the middle of the day when the sun is brightest, and having regular mealtimes and exercise times during daylight hours.
Once it gets dark, Hickie recommends not eating large meals, exercising or being exposed to bright lights. “They are all the wrong signals,” he says.
Aside from helping with depression, rejigging body clocks may also reduce inflammation and promote healthy weight, says Hickie. He hopes that, in the future, early identification of circadian depression will allow people to be treated more effectively and spare them from taking medications that are inappropriate for them. “If you get on the right track first off, you’re more likely to get out of the hole you’re in and more likely to have better longer-term mental health, but also physical health,” he says.
The findings are “really useful because they advance the field in terms of understanding the whole circadian rhythm aspect of depression and how it might be related to biological measures like genetics and inflammatory markers”, says Colleen Loo at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
However, more research is needed before circadian depression can be formally recognised as a new subtype of depression, says Loo. “As a clinical psychiatrist, I don’t think it’s time for us to say, ‘Right, based on this, we’re going to say that, if you have these symptoms, we should treat you with this medication rather than that medication,’” she says.
Nevertheless, people with depression could consider trying melatonin and behavioural strategies in addition to their current treatments if they believe their body clocks aren’t functioning optimally, says Loo. Melatonin is available only on prescription in the UK and Australia, but not in the US. “Melatonin is a safe medication and things like low lighting before bed is sensible anyway,” says Loo. “All clinicians should be talking to patients about these things if they have sleep disturbances.”
Journal Reference:
British Journal of Psychiatry
DOI: 10.1192/bjp.2026.10798
Need a listening ear? UK Samaritans: 116123; US 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: 988; hotlines in other countries.
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Parasite-infected mosquitoes released in Europe for first time
Male mosquitoes infected with a parasite have been released in Barcelona to reduce the number of mosquitoes that can transmit infections such as dengue
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Noise-cancelling headphones prevent vomiting after surgery
Headphones could be a simple way to ease vomiting after surgery
Anchiy/Getty Images
Nausea and vomiting are common after surgery, but wearing noise-cancelling headphones during the procedure helps prevent these unpleasant side effects. This simple intervention also supports the idea that our brain processes sounds even when we’re not consciously aware of our surroundings.
“That data is really encouraging and is actually in line with decades of research showing that anaesthesia is not simply an off switch,” says Vigi Katlowitz at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Nausea and vomiting are common side effects of anaesthetics. Patients are routinely given drugs to prevent them, but Huayue Liu at the First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University in Suzhou, China, and his colleagues wanted to investigate a non-pharmacological approach and presented their results at the Anesthesiology conference in San Diego.
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The team recruited 192 patients who had keyhole gynaecological surgery under general anaesthesic. Half were randomly assigned noise-blocking ear defenders, which they wore from the start of anaesthesia until the end of surgery. All the patients received standard anaesthesia and anti-nausea medication.
Within 48 hours of the surgery, 35 per cent of those wearing ear defenders experienced nausea or vomiting, compared with 52 per cent of those without them. The researchers also found that symptoms were less severe among those whose hearing had been protected, defined as the patients vomiting less and it having less of an impact on their daily life.
Operating theatres aren’t generally quiet places, with Liu recording average noise levels of 66 decibels – around the level of a normal conversation – during the study.
The relationship between sound, nausea and vomiting, and anaesthesia is unclear. However, the latter affects the nervous system, and noise is thought to trigger a stress response that activates the autonomic nervous system. This helps regulate involuntary bodily functions, such as heart rate, and interacts with the brainstem pathways involved in nausea and vomiting.
However, Liu stresses that the researchers didn’t look into the mechanism behind how ear defenders prevent nausea and vomiting, so the idea of them dampening this response “remains a hypothesis”.
Nevertheless, the results tell us more about brain activity under anaesthesia. “The biological plausibility is that general anaesthesia produces unconsciousness without necessarily eliminating all neural processing of sound,” says Liu.
Liu hopes to one day conduct a larger trial at multiple locations that measures noise exposure relative to nervous system activity among patients under general anaesthetic.
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Probiotic cuts risk of respiratory infections in formula-fed babies
Babies who are formula fed are more prone to infections, but the addition of a probiotic supplement containing sugars from breast milk slashed the risk of such infants catching respiratory viruses
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A quarter of male soldiers in the US could have low testosterone
US service members are required to undergo testosterone screening
U.S. Army, Spc. Annie Riley
A quarter of active-duty male soldiers in the US Army have low testosterone, according to a study of nearly 500 personnel. This has implications for the recent ruling that all US service members aged 30 and older must undergo annual testosterone screening and be offered voluntary replacement therapy if they have low levels.
“For soldiers with genuine, symptomatic testosterone deficiency, appropriate treatment can improve symptoms and important aspects of physical health, including sexual function, body composition, muscle mass and bone health,” says Darren Katz at the University of Melbourne, who wasn’t involved in the research. “However, there is currently insufficient evidence that [it] will improve military readiness, operational performance or fighting capacity.”
Stephen Hennigar at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana and his colleagues analysed data from the Military Health and Nutrition Examination Study, which measured testosterone levels and other health markers in active-duty personnel at five military centres across the US between 2024 and 2026.
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Among the 479 male personnel tested, 26 per cent had testosterone levels below 300 nanograms per decilitre, classified as low by the American Urological Association. Based on this, the researchers estimate that 100,691 male soldiers in the US Army could have low testosterone readings.
Older male personnel were more likely to have low testosterone, with 33 per cent of those aged 30 and older being classified in this group. Female personnel weren’t included in the analysis because their testosterone levels were often below the limits of detection.
When announcing the testosterone-boosting initiative in July, Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, noted that testosterone levels naturally decline with age and said the decision to offer replacement therapy to soldiers with low levels was “about restoring and optimising your natural capabilities, protecting your longevity, ensuring you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight”. There are no ramifications for choosing not to have the therapy, he said, adding that personnel under the age of 30 will also be able to opt for testosterone screening.
But a single testosterone test isn’t a reliable measure of deficiency, says Katz. “Testosterone levels can fluctuate considerably, even within the same individual, and may be influenced by numerous factors, including the time of day blood is collected, recent food intake, inadequate sleep, obesity, acute illness and excessive physical or psychological stress,” he says.
Even if testosterone levels are consistently low in blood tests, that doesn’t necessarily mean someone has a deficiency, says Katz. The American Urological Association recommends that a clinical diagnosis be made only if an individual also has related symptoms, such as reduced energy, motivation, libido and erectile function.
“Testosterone should be prescribed to treat a medical condition, not simply to achieve a higher number on a blood test or as a general strategy to enhance the performance of otherwise healthy soldiers,” says Katz. “I would favour a more targeted approach [to diagnosing and treating testosterone deficiency] based on symptoms, clinical findings and relevant risk factors rather than automatically screening every man over the age of 30.”
Some of the side effects of testosterone replacement therapy include acne, testicle shrinkage and reduced sperm production and fertility. It also increases the risk of bone fractures and pulmonary embolism (blood clots in the lungs) in older men.
Timothy Piatkowski at the University of Queensland in Australia says there is a risk that high testosterone levels will be conflated with being a good soldier. “Testosterone is already increasingly being used as an oversimplified proxy for masculinity and virility,” he says.
Journal Reference:
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4 of the most memorable biotech moments in modern scientific history
On the eve of New Scientist’s 70th anniversary, newsroom legend Andy Coghlan reveals four of the most dramatic and surprising moments from his storied career
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