From disease eradication efforts to advances in vaccination and maternal health, this archive tracks real progress in public health. Stories here focus on what’s working — policies, interventions, and research that are improving and extending lives around the world.
Following promising results from this recent trail, the combination of Moderna’s new mRNA-4157 and KEYTRUDA has been granted Breakthrough Therapy Designation by the FDA in the U.S., and accepted into the Priority Medicines scheme by the European Medicines Agency, for the treatment of high-risk melanoma.
A new study from Australia’s Murdoch University evaluating the effectiveness of an eight-week program focusing on self-compassion and mindfulness found that it reduced symptoms of post-traumatic stress and improved quality of life and connectivity in parts of the brain that regulate emotions.
A new class of antibiotics has been discovered for the first time in more than 60 years, and artificial intelligence helped get us there. MIT researchers trained deep-learning models to sift through roughly 12 million chemical compounds, eventually landing on two promising candidates that each cut MRSA populations tenfold in mouse studies. Just as importantly, the team built their AI to be transparent, so scientists can actually see why certain molecules work. That matters because the same framework could be turned loose on other drug-resistant infections, offering real hope against superbugs that kill tens of thousands of people every year.
New research from Maryland-based Sunstone Therapies found that psilocybin-assisted therapy for cancer patients induced a clinically meaningful improvement in depression symptoms, with 80% of participants demonstrating a sustained response and 50% showing full remission of depression symptoms at week one, which was sustained for eight weeks.
A new breast cancer vaccine sparked an immune response in three out of four patients during its first human safety trial — with no serious side effects reported. The Cleveland Clinic study targeted triple-negative breast cancer, an aggressive subtype that resists most standard treatments and disproportionately affects younger women and Black women. The vaccine works by training the immune system to recognize a lactation protein found in most TNBC tumors but absent in healthy adult tissue, giving immune cells a clear target. Next come larger trials testing whether it can prevent recurrence and even attack active tumors. It’s an early but hopeful signal in the growing field of cancer immunotherapy, where teaching the body to find cancer itself is reshaping what treatment can look like.
Drug patent seizures are back on the table for the first time in over 40 years, with the Biden administration releasing a draft roadmap that explicitly lets the federal government license out medicines to competitors when companies charge prices most Americans can’t afford. The power has existed since 1980 but was never used or even defined — until now. Price itself is now a factor: if a drug was built on taxpayer-funded research through agencies like the NIH, and the company sells it out of reach of ordinary patients, generics could be authorized. Even as a credible threat, this reframes who publicly funded science is really for — and could shift drug pricing fights well beyond U.S. borders.
In the first trial, at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Center in Australia, CRC patients receiving just divarasib had a 35.9% positive response rate, which was considered extremely promising.
After only two doses, nearly eight out of ten participants in a phase 2 trial by Toronto-based pharmaceutical company Cybin experienced remission from major depressive disorder at six weeks. The company has a planned phase 3 study slated to commence by the end of Q1 2024.
Whole-eye transplant surgery has been performed successfully for the first time, with a team at NYU Langone Health spending more than 20 hours combining a donor eyeball, a partial face transplant, and a stem cell infusion into the optic nerve. The patient, Aaron James, lost much of his face in a 2021 electrical accident, and surgeons had carefully preserved his optic nerve in anticipation of exactly this kind of operation. Doctors say the transplanted eye is healthy and blood is flowing to the retina, though James has not regained sight. Restoring vision may still be years away, but this opens a real door for people with catastrophic eye injuries — proof that something once considered impossible is now a starting point.
Researchers from the Cleveland Clinic have conducted the first human trials of a new drug, lepodisiran, that has the potential to eliminate a risk factor for cardiovascular disease for which there is currently no treatment.
