“For millions around the world living with type 1 diabetes, treatment to keep blood sugar in check means lifelong daily insulin. However, using insulin comes with its own risks.

If blood sugar drops too low, it can cause hypoglycaemia, or ‘hypos’, which in severe cases may lead to seizures or even death. It is no surprise that constantly balancing between high and low blood sugars takes a heavy toll on both physical and mental health…

Teplizumab offers a completely different approach. Instead of simply replacing insulin, it targets the immune attack that causes type 1 diabetes…

Teplizumab works by retraining the immune system and dialling down the specific cells that target the pancreas. Studies show it can delay the disease and the need for insulin therapy by two to three years, with generally mild side-effects…

The drug is already approved in the US and is under review for routine NHS use, although a few children and teenagers in the UK have also received it through special access programmes.”

From The Conversation.

“By 2023, Gavi had worked with over 40 countries to provide the HPV vaccine to 23.7 million girls. This massive immunisation effort is projected to avert over 605,000 future deaths from cervical cancer, a testament to the vaccine’s life-saving potential.

In 2023 alone, Gavi-supported countries vaccinated more than 14 million girls – more than the total number vaccinated in the previous decade combined. Thanks to an unprecedented scale-up of vaccine introductions, dedicated investment and expanded access since 2023, Gavi is on track to reach its ambitious goal of protecting 86 million girls with the HPV vaccine by 2025, a milestone that is expected to prevent more than 1.4 million future cervical cancer deaths.”

From Gavi.

“In the early 1980s, Nepal’s children suffered from some of the highest death rates from pneumonia in the world, with over 1,400 deaths for every 100,000 children under five. That meant around 39,000 children died from pneumonia each year, more than from any other cause.

Since then, Nepal has made huge progress. The death rate has fallen almost 20-fold. This improvement is due to various measures, including pneumococcal and Hib vaccines, better access to healthcare and antibiotics, and improved nutrition.”

From Our World in Data.

“With the rise of CAR T-cell therapy in oncology, Dr. Georg Schett, a rheumatologist and immunologist at the University of Erlangen in Germany, started mulling a new idea to help lupus patients.

Lupus causes the body’s B cells — white blood cells that produce antibodies — to go haywire. In CAR T-cell therapy, a patient’s own T cells, a type of immune cell, are extracted and engineered to wipe out disease-causing B cells. They’re then put back in the body, where they replicate, acting like ‘serial killers’ that can clear out B cells even from deep within tissues that other drugs can’t reach, Dr. Schett said.

Perhaps most tantalizing to Dr. Schett was the idea that a single infusion might do the trick, freeing young women from the constraints, and uncertainty, of living with lupus…

Of the two dozen lupus patients Dr. Schett has treated, all but one went into remission and remained off treatment after at least six months, and some for longer than four years. (One patient who had a relapse underwent CAR T-cell therapy a second time and is now symptom free.)

It will be years before doctors know for sure whether those results can last. In the meantime, patients say the treatment has given them an opportunity to live a normal life.”

From New York Times.