Could we one day vaccinate against every cancer?
The newsletter opens with STAT's daily health and medicine signup and notes the Nobel Prize for medicine was announced early Monday morning. The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to U.S. and German scientists for optogenetics research: Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel are joint recipients for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics, the Karolinska Institutet announced. Deisseroth is a professor at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Stanford University; Hegemann is at Humboldt University in Berlin; and Nagel is at the University of Würzburg. They developed a method that uses light combined with genetic modifications of neurons to switch individual cells on or off in a living brain, making it possible to show how nerve cells shape memories, feelings, and behavior; it is also being studied as a treatment for disease. A related First Opinion asks whether human Nobel Prize winners are about to become an endangered species now that AI is around.
The next section focuses on stem cells. STAT's Margaret Manto, while at a peptide conference last month, heard a lot about another regenerative medicine: stem cells. Proponents for peptides argue that stem cells are also a revolutionary treatment, though the data does not bear that out. Normally that would be a problem for winning FDA approval, but Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s health department seems much more open to these kinds of treatments. The stem cell industry sees the FDA's tentative embrace of peptides as its chance to get a foot in the door and bring stem cells from the grey market to millions of Americans; the item asks what that could mean for eager patients.
The final section covers cancer vaccines. In August, two drug companies announced that their mRNA vaccine, combined with an immunotherapy drug, had substantially cut the risk of the return of melanoma. That raised the exciting possibility that personalized vaccines could one day protect against many types of cancer. But days later, a German drugmaker said it was ending its trial of a colorectal vaccine after early data showed the treatment was not working. That tale of two vaccines has experts scratching their heads, and the article explores how they are making sense of the results and what it might teach about which cancers can be beaten by vaccines and which will require more creative approaches. It also promises a helpful explanation of how cancer vaccines rally the body's immune system. The excerpt ends with the beginning of an unrelated sentence: 'It's been a little'.