Breathe in, breathe out. That’s how easy it is for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, to enter your nose. And though remarkable progress has been made in developing intramuscular vaccines against SARS-CoV- 2, such as the readily available Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, nothing yet - like a nasal vaccine - has been approved to provide mucosal immunity in the nose, the first barrier against the virus before it travels down to the lungs.

Using a virus that grows in black-eyed pea plants, nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego developed a new treatment that could keep metastatic cancers at bay from the lungs. The treatment not only slowed tumor growth in the lungs of mice with either metastatic breast cancer or melanoma, it also prevented or drastically minimized the spread of these cancers to the lungs of healthy mice that were challenged with the disease.

An expert review by an international group of scientists, including some at the WHO and FDA, concludes that, even for the delta variant, vaccine efficacy against severe COVID is so high that booster doses for the general population are not appropriate at this stage in the pandemic.

The review, published in The Lancet, summarises the currently available evidence from randomised controlled trials and observational studies published in peer-reviewed journals and pre-print servers.

Chronic lesions with inflamed rims, or "smoldering" plaques, in the brains of people with multiple sclerosis (MS) have been linked to more aggressive and disabling forms of the disease. Using brain tissue from humans, researchers at the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) built a detailed cellular map of chronic MS lesions, identifying genes that play a critical role in lesion repair and revealing potential new therapeutic targets for progressive MS.

The first patients have been enrolled in a phase 1 randomized placebo-controlled clinical trial to study a therapeutic vaccine for opioid use disorder developed by researchers at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

Funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, the trial will test the safety and potential efficacy of a vaccine that is designed to selectively prevent the euphoric and toxic effects of oxycodone.

Federal and Kaiser Permanente researchers combing the health records of 6.2 million patients found no serious health effects that could be linked to the 2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

The study published September 2 in JAMA reports the first comprehensive findings of the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), which studies patient records for 12 million people in 5 Kaiser Permanente service regions along with HealthPartners in Minneapolis, the Marshfield Clinic in Wisconsin, and Denver Health.

Blood vessels supply tumors with nutrients and, on the other hand, enable cancer cells to spread throughout the body. The settlement of circulating tumor cells in a distant organ is promoted by factors whose production is induced by the primary tumor itself. Scientists from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the Medical Faculty Mannheim, Heidelberg University, have now identified a new growth factor produced by blood vessels that enables tumor cells to metastatically colonize organs.