Christopher Garris

@casanova_lab Congratulations on the move. Did you know there is also a Paris in Texas? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris,_Te…

9/ Dallas, the birthplace of the frozen margarita machine, is the 9th largest US city (4th when combined with Fort Worth), has the largest contiguous urban arts district in the US, and boasts more restaurants per capita than NYC (more studies are needed to confirm this claim!😉).

1/ We are thrilled to announce that our American branch of the Laboratory of Human Genetics of Infectious Diseases (HGID) will relocate to @UTSWMedCenter in Dallas, Texas, effective July 1, 2026 J

Excited to share our latest @NatureNano led by @MJMitchell_Lab Postdoctoral Fellow @ShiQiangqiang on a new class of ionizable lipids that act as prodrugs to create an in situ vaccine within solid tumors that also eradicate distant tumors! Free access: rdcu.be/e8Lq6

@PatrickHeizer Point taken, but these days it is good to get a small win for science in the mass media - especially with the controversies surrounding mRNA vaccines.

Sorry to be the downer because this is an impressive story in some senses. But it is ~trivially easy to make a single mRNA vaccine. It's not hard. I cure mice of various cancers with various therapeutics all the time. I've made mice lose more weight in a month than tirzepatide does in a year. What is hard and expensive is proving its BOTH safe AND effective **in a randomized and controlled study in humans** while ALSO manufacturing it at clinical scale and grade. I am happy for this man and his dog. It is impressive. But y'all are overhyping it.

Excited to share our latest in Nature Protocols @NatureProtocols led by @MJMitchell_Lab PhD student @HannahGeisler_ describing a workflow to engineer protein-conjugated targeted LNPs for precision nucleic acid delivery! Free access to the article: rdcu.be/e7zyA

@MuradRMamedov Congrats! You will no doubt also have the classiest dressed lab.

New Lab Alert! I am thrilled to share that next month I am starting my new role as an Assistant Professor at The Wistar Institute. I am extremely excited to work with fantastic new colleagues at Wistar and collaborate with researchers across UPenn.

@GrageDustin It would be great if the baseball game gave some kind of legislative advantage overall to the winner. It would be a soft way of making “term limits” for the members of Congress.

Republicans are winning the Congressional softball game for the next decade.

@curiosityonx @grok what time can this be seen in Boston.

NEWS🚨: The Moon is about to turn blood red for more than 56 minutes tonight, March 2-3, visible to nearly six billion people.

@deniswirtz @YounisJoseph Funding rates have also dropped dramatically by changing the accounting for DoD awards which now calculate total costs, inclusive of indirects, into their award budgets. Indirect costs can be substantial.

@YounisJoseph New rule seems to be no new grant, as the number of new funding opportunities has been zero for a year.

This is all temporary. New administration new rules

Flt3L from interfollicular stroma maintains resident dendritic cells dlvr.it/TR35jr

Nature research paper: Individualized mRNA vaccines evoke durable T cell immunity in adjuvant TNBC go.nature.com/3OnBrz1

@niccruzpatane Sounds like the next generation Juicero.

San Francisco-based company Weave Robotics offers a $8,000 robot that is specially engineered to JUST fold laundry. If you’re folding a ridiculous amount of laundry, this robot is for you. 😂 One time purchase: $7,999 Monthly Subscription: $450

@TTRAmyloid The intravenous TLR7/8 agonist (EIK1001) is essentially Resiquimod sulfate plus some other formulation to make it soluble. They have to dose it very low and I am surprised it isn’t more toxic than they have shown.

So the biotech VCs have been talking about the awesome private companies they have and then they IPO $eikn; going after melanoma and nsclc with a immunotherapy in Combo with a PD1. They have no PD1 controlled data after all these years being private. Also they have >40% grade 3 TRAE. And the VCs are SHOCKED that $eikn is trading down. This company should probably trade close to cash 🤣

@itchdoctor @CellCellPress @Nature @ScienceMagazine It’s funny how science optimizes for the most painful paths possible for transformative innovations to develop.

They don’t fund your grant, you publish anyway. They don’t fund your grant, you develop a device. They finally fund your grant… for the thing that already works. Other labs publish @CellCellPress @Nature @ScienceMagazine papers in 2026. New idea. Reset.

@SaligramaLab Point 3 should be reworded to “a cap” on multi year funding. “No more” suggests that the policy was eliminated (it isn’t).

Both chambers of Congress have now passed the #FY26 #minibus with #NIH provisions. The President will sign. (1) $48.7 billion for NIH (2) Full IDC recovery (3) No more multi-year funding (4) No NIH reorganization, maintaining the current IC structure.

@LocasaleLab The city prices out young researchers. A postdoc making $70,000 here is below 80% Area Median Income. This qualifies them for public housing assistance, yet universities provide little support for affordable housing in the Boston ecosystem. Lose this pool, lose talent.

Boston’s life-sciences slowdown has little to do with the talking points listed here. A large share of the region’s biotech ecosystem was financially and reputationally levered to Moderna and adjacent mRNA bets. When that was exposed—and when it became clear the platform and the vaccines it produced were not what they were sold as—the spillover hit the entire sector. That’s what happens when an ecosystem overconcentrates around a single narrative. Layer on the macroeconomics. Much of modern biotech is structurally dependent on near-zero interest rates and excess capital. When money is cheap, long timelines and speculative platforms get funded. When rates rise, those models break. That's basic finance. On the academic side, Boston mostly through Harvard's hospital systems built decades of growth on indirect-cost expansion and administrative scaling tied to federal funds. That was always a house of cards. No system can sustain exponential growth in overhead funded by taxpayers. Finally, the region has entangled science with political ideology. When purported industry leaders posture as moral or geopolitical authorities—like this guy who is branding himself with symbols like Ukraine flags—they turn science into a political identity and predictably alienate the public especially when power shifts. ht @X0_1_7ex

@JMaraganore @MassBio One thing to mention is the cost of living in Boston is so high that a standard postdoc salary in the area - typically $70,000 and largely paid by grant funding is far below 80% of Area Median Income, which would qualify most postdocs for public housing assistance.

Great to join @MassBio #PolicyLeadership26! My message to Mass lawmakers: We are at grave risk of losing the Mass life sciences miracle due to: 1. Hybrid workforce 2. Federal policies attacking science and innovation 3. Reverse brain drain due to #2 and immigration policies 4. Mass “Millionaires Tax” causing venture capitalists to flee Bay State 5. Global competition from China We must act now!

@DelgiornoKathy Yeah. It’s basically a lottery that you have 6 tickets to enter.

That's horrible! I'm so sorry to hear that. That makes NCI funding essentially impossible for nearly all applicants. Moving to the fund all at once model significantly cuts grant submissions, and labs if universities won't provide support, which i assume is the point, but transparency would be nice

If you're feeling down about federal funding, you're not alone. My last year: NIGMS R35 renewal - checked with PO about topic - administratively pulled for being off topic, will resubmit; NIDDK R01 - 17%, one reviewer noted no weaknesses another felt it was not important at all, resubmitted; NCI R01 - 21st percentile, not discussed on resubmission - seeking other funding sources; NCI R01 #2 - competitive not discussed, will submit as a new grant; VA Merit Award - 53rd percentile, but positive comments, will resubmit. Not the best time for the NIH to break with the new baby, but will keep trying

@silvirouskin Maybe a small target GoFundMe could raise some money?

Guys, this maybe my villain origin story. In the middle of writing 3 grants and a manuscript, our in press Science Advances paper data is about to vanish because the domain auto‑renewed on a canceled corporate card. I could put it on my personal card, but I’m genuinely scared to log in and see my bank account on a negative due to how much lab stuff I’m already bankrolling - an allegedly grown‑up assistant professor at Harvard Med, 2026.

Antigen selection for therapeutic neoantigen vaccines - Please consider: 1. Antigen sources beyond small somatic mutations 2. Predicting from long-read (not just short-read) sequencing (i.e. find the large structural variants) 3. Confirming HLA presentation with immunopeptidomics 4. Selecting antigens that cover all tumor subclones 5. Selecting antigens presented by HLAs encoded by both copies of chromosome 6 6. Subject to the above constraints, selecting as few antigens as possible (i.e. respecting immunodominance) 7. Adapting the vaccine based on immunogenicity in vivo and tumor evolution under selection pressure from therapy