HHS head open to gun violence research, flu shot falls short, & new CRISPR tools

Health secretary calls research on violence a priority

HHS Secretary Alex Azar says he's open to running federal health research on gun violence, which has long been limited by a 1996 amendment that prevents the CDC from carrying out research to advocate for gun control. Former President Obama directed health agencies to fund research into firearms after the Sandy Hook shooting, but experts say the issue remains underfunded. In light of Tuesday's mass shooting at a Florida school, Azar told a House committee yesterday that researching violence is a "priority" for the health department: "We're in the science business and the evidence-generating business, and so I will have our agency certainly working in this field, as they do across the broad spectrum of disease control and prevention."

The flu shot is falling short this season

New CDC estimates show roughly 75 percent of people who got a flu shot this season weren't protected against H3N2 flu, the viruses that caused the bulk of the illnesses. The numbers help explain why so many people have fallen ill with the flu this season. They're also sparking concern among public health experts about the credibility of flu vaccines. “We are a bit concerned that the performance of the vaccine right now might reduce interest in getting vaccinated in the future,” acting CDC director Dr. Anne Schuchat told STAT's Helen Branswell. “But we have the other side that flu was just so bad so far this season, so many people have been sick and see how miserable it is.”

ACLU files lawsuit over Ohio abortion law

The ACLU is taking the Ohio health department to court over a new law that prevents doctors from performing abortions based on a Down syndrome diagnosis. The law makes it a felony for a physician to provide an abortion based on a Down syndrome diagnosis and would also require the state’s medical board to revoke a doctor’s license if he or she is convicted. Republican Governor John Kasich signed the law in December. The ACLU filed the lawsuit on behalf of Planned Parenthood and other individual abortion providers in the state, arguing that it’s an attempt to stop women from exercising their constitutional right to abortion.

Thought-leaders from Google, NASA, Roche, and more convene in San Francisco

BioData World West will take place on March 13th and 14th in San Francisco, and this year they are thrilled to announce a partnership with NASA. The 2018 conference will focus on three streams: artificial intelligence, genomics and health, and precision medicine. With over 150 expert speakers from the pharma, biotech, and healthcare industries, this is a conference you can’t miss. Learn more.

Three cool new inventions join CRISPR's toolkit

SHERLOCK paper test strips developed by feng zhang's lab. (Zhang Lab / Broad Institute)

Some of the world’s leading CRISPR scientists have tweaked the genome editing tool to make it do three new tricks. Researchers published papers in Science this week on the new tools, all which come with clever acronyms:

§ DETECTR: Scientists programmed CRISPR to hunt DNA sequences that are unique to specific human papillomaviruses, which cause cervical cancer. DETECTR was able to identify different strains in test tubes, without all the fancy equipment that’s currently used in virus detection kits.

§ SHERLOCK: This genetic sleuth works by detecting specific sequences of DNA and RNA in a sample if it contains, for example, the Zika virus or dengue virus, which cause similar symptoms. The inventors of both DETECTR and SHERLOCK are hoping tools like the paper SHERLOCK test strips shown here can help make rapid diagnoses during disease outbreaks.

§ CAMERA: Researchers harnessed CRISPR’s core talent — altering a cell’s DNA by snipping out a particular region — to capture whether a cell experienced a certain event in the past, like if it’s been exposed to a specific drug.

STAT’s Sharon Begley has more details on the new tools here, and as a reminder, she'll be hosting a free webinar on the future of CRISPR next week. And in other cool gene-editing news, the long-awaited CRISPR Journal just launched — check it out here.

Inside STAT: A 'Robogut' researcher becomes a reluctant entrepreneur

In her lab in Ontario, Emma Allen-Vercoe isolates bacteria from donated human waste and uses a mechanical colon dubbed the Robogut to see how the microscopic communities in it shift under different conditions. That work has given her an impressive intimacy with the smells of human digestion. “Every donor that we use has a distinct aroma, because they have a different profile of microbes in the gut,” she says, “so it’s like a fine wine — just not quite so fine.” Her gut bug-growing services have been in demand among microbiologists, but now, Allen-Vercoe has started providing bacteria to patients, too. STAT’s Eric Boodman has the story — read here.

New guidelines to cut down on pregnancy interventions

The World Health Organization is out with new guidelines to cut down on the number of unnecessary medical interventions used when women are in labor. Health officials say that in the past two decades, interventions that were mainly used to treat or prevent complications — like C-sections and infusions of the labor-inducing hormone oxytocin — are increasingly being used to speed up labor. The health agency says it put out the new recommendations as a way to prevent health providers from using those interventions in cases when they’re “needless and potentially harmful.”

Health historians push back on sugar industry's influence

Two public health historians are pushing back on stories about the sugar industry’s long-running role in scientific research. In 2016, a group of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco announced they’d discovered long-buried documents showing the sugar industry secretly paid Harvard nutrition scientists to write a review that downplayed the link between sugar and heart disease, which some experts called a smoking gun that pointed to the sugar industry’s not-so-sweet tactics.

The authors of the new paper says it’s not that simple — and argue that taking the story out of the historical context is harmful. “Conspiratorial narratives in science can distort the past in the service of contemporary causes and obscure genuine uncertainty that surrounds aspects of research, impairing efforts to formulate good evidence-informed policies,” they write.