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A young Pakistani suffering from the blood disorder Thalassemia receives a blood transfusion

Credit: Arshad Arbab/EPA/Shutterstock

Gene-therapy trials offer hope for sickle cell

Two pioneering gene therapies that target the root cause of sickle-cell anaemia show promise against the painful and debilitating disease. The condition is caused by a flaw in the body’s oxygen-carrying protein, haemoglobin, and both treatments aim to boost the production of an alternative form of the protein, called fetal haemoglobin. One approach shuttles in the code for an RNA that alters expression of the fetal haemoglobin gene. The other does so using CRISPR–Cas9 genome editing, and it provides an important proof of concept for that technology: the first published account of using the gene-editing system to treat heritable diseases. And it also shows promise against a related genetic disorder called β-thalassaemia. Both clinical trials have enrolled only a handful of participants, and it is too soon to say how long the effects will last — and both treatments have risks.

Nature | 5 min read

Scientists love and hate pay-to-publish

South African scientists think the country’s pay-for-publications reward system decreases the quality of papers and could lead to unethical behaviour — but they want to keep it. The system, which was introduced in 2005, awards researchers up to 120,000 rand (US$8,000) for a single article. It was meant to stimulate science, and it appears to have worked. But a recent survey found that more than two-thirds of scientists think it leads to ‘salami slicing’ to produce more papers at the expense of quality. A majority of respondents also think it leads to unethical publication behaviour and inappropriate authorship. Yet only 13% want to get rid of the system. “With the current crunch in research funding, [incentives] will become even more important for researchers,” says geologist David Hedding.

Nature | 4 min

“She knows what it takes to fight a global epidemic”

Scientists have welcomed the announcement that renowned HIV researcher Rochelle Walensky will become the new head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) after Joe Biden takes over as the country’s president in the new year. “As a prominent AIDS researcher, she knows what it takes to fight a global epidemic,” said Michelle Williams, dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. “I'm honored to be called to lead the brilliant team at the CDC,” wrote Walensky on Twitter. “We are ready to combat this virus with science and facts.”

Nature | 5 min read

COVID-19 vaccine update

News

First published vaccine trial results

The first formally published results from a large clinical trial of a COVID-19 vaccine suggest that the AstraZeneca–Oxford vaccine is safe and effective. But the data highlight a number of lingering unknowns, including questions about the most effective dosing regimen and how well it works in older adults. The vaccine has been closely watched, in part because it is likely to be among the cheapest (US$2–3 per dose) and easiest to distribute (unlike the two RNA-based vaccines from Pfizer–BioNTech and Moderna, it doesn’t have to be kept extremely cold).

• One of the biggest puzzles is an unexpected increase in efficacy among a subset of study participants who, due to a measurement error, received a lower initial dose of the two-dose regimen.

• Another lingering question is whether the vaccine is capable of fighting asymptomatic infections. The Oxford–AstraZeneca team is the only one of the three leading vaccine developers that monitored this. The data show that the low-dose vaccine regimen was about 60% effective in reducing asymptomatic infections, but it was unclear whether the standard dose significantly reduced such infections at all.

Nature | 6 min read

Reference: The Lancet paper

News/Feature

UAE says Sinopharm vaccine is effective

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has approved a COVID vaccine made by Sinopharm, a state-owned pharmaceutical company in China. The UAE says it reviewed preliminary data that showed that the vaccine is 86% effective in protecting against the disease and 100% effective in preventing moderate and severe cases. The vaccine relies on chemically inactivated SARS-CoV-2 virus to trigger an immune response. There are many outstanding questions about the details of the data, how they were analysed and how transparent the company will be about its results, reports The New York Times.

The choice of an inactivated-virus technique has been met with criticism because of fears that it might trigger more severe illness, known as ‘enhanced respiratory disease’, in immunized people who do get infected. “I really don’t think the inactivated vaccine is a good idea,” Moncef Slaoui, the scientific head of Warp Speed, told Science last month in a feature mapping the Chinese vaccine landscape, which looks very different from the United States and Europe. With the pandemic firmly under control at home, vaccines developed by researchers in China have been widely tested abroad, opening the door to ‘vaccine diplomacy’. The country hopes to use vaccines to support its foreign-policy objectives, says global-health specialist Yanzhong Huang, and “fill in the void left by the United States”.

The New York Times | 3 min read and Science | 16 min read (from November)

Opinion

Help medical regulators to get it together

The global race to produce COVID vaccines is a chance for regulators and drug companies to create a more harmonized approvals process, argues a Nature editorial. The process of vaccine authorization has revealed a patchwork of approvals processes, with some countries rolling out jabs deemed safe and effective while others are still making their decisions (and some going ahead even before the conclusion of clinical trials). Greater harmonization would save time, smooth the path of research and build public trust. One of the biggest hurdles will be access to the same data, which regulators are currently often not permitted to share.

Nature | 6 min read

Notable quotable

“I rang up Guy’s hospital… and I said ‘what’s this thing you’re doing, the vaccination?’... They duly put me on the list, I went off and had rather a nasty lunch, and then came back and they were ready for me.”

Extremely British man Martin Kenyon popped out to get the Pfizer—BioNTech COVID vaccine in London yesterday, on the first day it was available. (CNN | 5 min video)

Features & opinion

True colour satellite image of Manicouagan Reservoir (also Lake Manicouagan), an annular lake in northern Quebec, Canada

Life might have begun in bodies of water on land, perhaps in craters similar to Canada’s Lake Manicouagan, formed by an ancient impact.Credit: Planet Observer/Universal Images Group/Getty

Was the cradle of life a puddle?

Living things depend on water, but it breaks down DNA and other key molecules. So how did the earliest cells deal with the water paradox? Emerging evidence has caused many researchers to abandon the idea that life emerged in the oceans and instead focus on land environments, in places that were alternately wet and dry. Some of the answers might lie in the distant Jezero Crater on Mars, where NASA’s Perseverance rover might find traces of just such a puddle of prebiotic chemistry.

Nature | 14 min read

News & views

Figure 1: A Loon flight in the stratosphere that uses automation to steer to people and places that need connectivity.

Figure 1 | An unmanned balloon in the stratosphere. Project Loon is using balloons such as this to set up an aerial wireless network for telecommunications.Credit: Loon

Science balloons take flight with AI pilots

Researchers have trained an autonomous control system that can keep a research balloon in place in the stratosphere for weeks at a time, no matter what wild winds blow. They added randomly generated ‘noise’ to historical records of global winds to teach an artificial-intelligence (AI) system how to change altitude to ensure that the prevailing breezes correct the balloon’s position above Earth. “The advent of effective autonomous super-pressure balloons would open up a range of commercial and scientific applications for probing Earth’s atmosphere and that of other planets,” writes atmospheric scientist Scott Osprey, as well as for environmental monitoring, tracking animal migrations, crime spotting and building an aerial wireless telecommunications network.

Nature | 7 min read

Reference: Nature paper