Vaccine

According to CDC data, studies are getting better at estimating the influenza vaccine effectiveness. With the 2017-2018 flu season still going on in the USA, there are already some indication that vaccines have some effectiveness (although its target strains were mismatched). The CDC reports how it measures vaccine effectiveness here and I was interested in their confidence intervals (the interval that takes into account uncertainties to extrapolate to the broader, unknown population). ...

The terminator may not come at any time soon but medicines should be coming soon at a printer near you … Mid last year, Gartner mentioned " medical applications [of 3D printing] will have the biggest impact in the next two to five years". With 3D printing you can already create a lot of physical artifacts and medical applications go from building medical equipments to prosthetic parts, but also blood vessels, bone, heart valve, cartilage, etc. Complete organs are not too far, with companies like Organovo already printing functional liver assays, prospects to restore a body by replacing or consolidating personalized parts seem interesting. ...

Malaria is the 5th cause of death in low-income countries ( according to WHO). That’s why I’m very happy to read that a malaria vaccine showed promising results in a phase 3 clinical trial (in The Guardian, The New York Times or Google News). As usual, I find very interesting to get all the information at the source: the original scientific paper was just published in The New England Journal of Medicine. ...