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Kane Foster

@kanefos.bsky.social
545 followers 1.3K following 42 posts

I'm interested in the immune response to cancer. Postdoc at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Broad Institute, Boston USA. I also like sci-fi literature & electronic dance music. he/him

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Reposted by Kane Foster
Prof Sheena Cruickshank @sheencr.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
Horrific story of a young woman dying of cancer complications after refusing cancer care under the guidance of her influencer mother who charges £70/y for an annual membership to her site & £195 for a consultation & personalised 12-week programme. Thanks to @profstevegriffin.bsky.social for sharing
bbc.co.uk
Our sister died because of our mum's cancer conspiracy theories, say brothers
Paloma Shemirani’s brothers say she refused chemotherapy because of their mother’s beliefs.
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depths of wikipedia @depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social · 13/06/2025
it's the 10 year anniversary of a very important study
In 2015, researchers Limb, Limb, Limb and Limb found that British doctors have surnames related to their specialties more often than expected by chance. Reproductive medicine had the largest proportion, with 1 in 52 doctors having specialty-relevant surnames including Horn, Hussey, and Woodcock. Second was Urology, with 1 in 59 related names such as Burns, Waterfall, Ball, and Koch.[96] "Dr Pain" appeared most commonly in general surgery.[96]

Specialty	Surname
frequency

Surname examples
Cardiology	8 (1 in 213)	Hart, Pump, Payne
Dermatology	4 (1 in 243)	Boyle or Hickey
General medicine	63 (1 in 101)	Mysore, Safe, Warning
General surgery	56 (1 in 91)	Gore, Butcher, Boyle, Blunt
Paediatric medicine	46 (1 in 119)	Boys, Gal, Child, Kinder
Plastic surgery	7 (1 in 140)	Carver, Mole, Price
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Jason Moore @moorejh.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
Vibe coding www.wired.com/story/vibe-c... #coding #programming #vibecoding
wired.com
Vibe Coding Is Coming for Engineering Jobs
Engineering was once the most stable and lucrative job in tech. Then AI learned to code.
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Reposted by Kane Foster
Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 18/05/2025
There is a false dichotomy drawn between "the ivory tower" and "the real world," and I'm here to report that in a post-industrial society, your real-world economy absolutely hinges on the university. University towns are factory towns. Universities drive economic activity, not the other way around.
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Reposted by Kane Foster
NEJM.org @nejm.org · 15/05/2025
A lipid nanoparticle–delivered base-editing therapy was custom designed for an infant with a ureacycle disorder. The affected infant was treated at approximately 7 and 8 months of age. Read the Brief Report: nej.md/42XF03F #ASGCT2025 #MedSky @asgct.bsky.social
nej.md
Patient-Specific In Vivo Gene Editing to Treat a Rare Genetic Disease | NEJM
Base editors can correct disease-causing genetic variants. After a neonate had received a diagnosis of severe carbamoyl-phosphate synthetase 1 deficiency, a disease with an estimated 50% mortality ...
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Reposted by Kane Foster
Michael Baym @baym.lol · 14/05/2025
Yesterday, the NIH R35 “Outstanding Investigator” grant to fund scientists in my lab studying antibiotic resistance was terminated for reasons not related to the content of the science, or any actions taken by me or members of my lab
A screenshot of the termination notice showing "Outstanding Investigator Grants"A screenshot of the termination notice with "This award is terminated effective the date of this award, due to unsafe antisemitic actions that suggest the institution lacks concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students." highlighted
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Reposted by Kane Foster
Joshua Shapiro @josh.shapiro.foo · 15/05/2025
A depressing article about drug pricing for cancer patients, specifically for multiple myeloma. The good news in this case is that generic competition should be coming next year. The bad news is there will be another case jaut like this. www.propublica.org/article/revl...
propublica.org
The Price of Remission
When I was diagnosed with cancer, I set out to understand why a single pill of Revlimid cost the same as a new iPhone. I’ve covered high drug prices as a reporter for years. What I discovered shocked ...
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Reposted by Kane Foster
Michal Caspi Tal, PhD @immunofever.bsky.social · 11/05/2025
1/ A long standing paradox in my mind (from always seeing immune "strength" or reactivity drawn as a spectrum from immunodeficiency to autoimmunity) was resolved this year at #AAI #Immunology2025. WHY do SO many people have both simultaneously? Each infection brings risk of developing autoimmunity!!
Figure 4 from "How persistent infection overcomes peripheral tolerance
mechanisms to cause T cell-mediated autoimmune disease" by Arup Chakraborty
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Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia.bsky.social · 12/05/2025
“The visa fees are so exceedingly high that it makes coming here very difficult for some people. We are fishing for the best scientists in the world. They want to come and work here because we are such an effective country at science, but if we have these high costs, they can and will go elsewhere.”
observer.co.uk
Is the UK paying the price for world’s most expensive visas? | The Observer
Competing political and economic goals on immigration are resulting in the loss of valuable skills and talent in the UK
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Kane Foster @kanefos.bsky.social · 12/05/2025
Great collection from one of the best paper hounds out there!
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Kane Foster @kanefos.bsky.social · 10/05/2025
Now this is the future La Guin and Wells imagined
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Kane Foster @kanefos.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
This is a breakthrough in multi-modal single-cell technology
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Dropped Mike @rebrafsim.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
*pronouncing leo XIV like arXIV*
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Arjun Raj @arjunraj.bsky.social · 07/05/2025
Wow, just implemented the new Cellpose-SAM from @computingnature.bsky.social in NimbusImage and it's *awesome*! Give it a try! nimbusimage.com
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Nature Reviews Immunology @natrevimmunol.nature.com · 07/05/2025
NEW Preprint Watch from Annette Wu & @wenjiang-nano.bsky.social @preprintclub.bsky.social reporting on @biorxiv-immuno.bsky.social preprint by @colinraposo.bsky.social et al. showing that checkpoint blockade drives expansion of exhausted T cell clones that develop functional memory rdcu.be/ek1kY
rdcu.be
Progenitor exhausted T cells contribute to the formation of immunological memory
Nature Reviews Immunology - A preprint by Raposo et al. shows that immune checkpoint blockade drives the expansion of certain clones of exhausted T cells that can develop into functional memory...
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Reposted by Kane Foster
Max Kozlov @maxkozlov.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
With NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya dismissing my reporting as "false" and "spreading rumors" hours before releasing a policy that confirmed said "rumors," I feel compelled to respond. Here's an inside look into how this story was reported. It was a weird one. 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/d41...
On a Nature news article reporting that NIH planned to suspend subawards for foreign collaborations:
“No, that’s false. There’s going to be a policy on tracking subawards. The NIH and the government should be able to see where the money’s going.”

“I’m really uncomfortable with this conversation, because you’re like, actually spreading rumors that you don’t know anything about. … Nature also is spreading rumors. Halt foreign collaborations, that’s not true.”

“We’re working on the policy, Jocelyn. You shouldn’t be reporting rumors. I know there’s leaks all over here, but the leaks don’t actually reflect what’s happening. Don’t write about rumors. It actually makes the things that you and I care about worse. Like it spreads panic.”

Later that day, NIH released a policy that halted future subawards to foreign scientists and said they will need to apply directly for money under a system still in development.
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Dan Jagger @auditorynerves.bsky.social · 05/05/2025
British scientists are “over the moon” to be back in the EU’s Horizon funding programme after a 3-year Brexit lockout. New data reveals they have been awarded about £500m in grants since re-entry. International isolationism never works well. 🧪🔬⚛️🔭 www.theguardian.com/science/2025...
theguardian.com
UK wins £500m in science grants from EU Horizon scheme after Brexit lockout
Exclusive: British scientists ‘over the moon’ with re-entry to funding scheme after losing out for three years
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Kane Foster @kanefos.bsky.social · 24/04/2025
Really happy to share this amazing story from my talented colleague Felipe Galvez-Cancino and many others. Really interesting work about the nature of anti-tumour immunity in the brain and how it can be modulated, in mice and humans! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Regulatory T cell depletion promotes myeloid cell activation and glioblastoma response to anti-PD1 and tumor-targeting antibodies
Glioblastoma is invariably lethal and responds poorly to immune checkpoint blockade. Here, we examined the impact of regulatory T (Treg) cell depletio…
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Jonathan Frazer @jonnyfrazer.bsky.social · 19/04/2025
www.nature.com/articles/d42...
nature.com
Why biotech is booming in Barcelona
World-class research institutes and university hospitals, a culture of groundbreaking science and a thriving investment ecosystem make Barcelona a rising star in the life sciences industry, as these t...
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Reposted by Kane Foster
Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 17/04/2025
Nasty work. www.vanityfair.com/news/story/m...
But their defense also hinges on the argument that the individual books themselves are, essentially, worthless—one expert witness for Meta describes that the influence of a single book in LLM pretraining “adjusted its performance by less than 0.06% on industry standard benchmarks, a meaningless change no different from noise.” Furthermore, Meta says, that while the company “has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in LLM development,” they see no market in paying authors to license their books because “for there to be a market, there must be something of value to exchange, but none of Plaintiffs works has economic value, individually, as training data.” (An argument essential to fair use, but that also sounds like a scaled up version of a scenario in which the New York Philharmonic board argues against paying individual members of the orchestra because the organization spent a lot of money on the upkeep of David Geffen Hall, and also, a solo bassoon cannot play every part in “The Rite of Spring.”)
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David Neuzerling @md.neuzerl.ing · 16/04/2025
You call it an ifelse statement, I call it a lightweight, agentic decision module operating within a deterministic inference framework
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University of Oxford @ox.ac.uk · 15/04/2025
'What’s the problem? Well, pretty much everything. These aren’t species returned from extinction.' @oxfordgeography.bsky.social's Dr Richard Grenyer argues that extinction is, for the time being, a symptom of our global economic system ⬇️
theconversation.com
Why ‘de-extinct’ dire wolves are a Trojan horse to hide humanity’s destruction of nature
Extinction is, for the time being, forever – and a symptom of our global economic system.
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Reposted by Kane Foster
Cameron Thrash @jcamthrash.bsky.social · 14/04/2025
"...remember: your work is an act of resistance. Every experiment, every line of code, every collaboration defies those who would silence science." Dear US researchers: break the outrage addiction. I survived the besieging of science. So can you www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
Dear US researchers: break the outrage addiction. I survived the besieging of science. So can you
As I watch US researchers respond to threats against science, I’m reminded of when scientists in Brazil navigated a similar storm.
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Reposted by Kane Foster
Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 13/04/2025
Sobering analysis by @nature.com on the Trump administration's NIH cuts. ~ 800 research projects have been terminated with research on HIV/AIDS, health disparities, transgender health, vaccines and COVID-19 being hit hardest, with some labs forced to close entirely. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
How Trump 2.0 is slashing NIH-backed research — in charts
Nature analyses which fields of science and US states are being hit hardest by grant terminations.
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 13/04/2025
Amazing 🚀 study w/ DNA seqFISH+, enabling mapping of 100,049 genomic loci, together with the nascent transcriptome for 17,856 genes, yielding unpredented insights into subnuclear structures in single cells www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Spatial multi-omics reveals cell-type-specific nuclear compartments - Nature
A genomic barcoding scheme called two-layer DNA seqFISH+ enables the simultaneous mapping of more than 100,000 loci and has been used to identify cell-type-specific subnuclear compartments in the mous...
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Reposted by Kane Foster
Nicolas Robine 🇪🇺🇫🇷🇺🇸 @nicorobine.bsky.social · 12/04/2025
George R. R. Martin on @biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social!
media.tenor.com
a man with a beard wearing a hat and glasses says ' hahahahahah ' on the screen
ALT: a man with a beard wearing a hat and glasses says ' hahahahahah ' on the screen
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Eugenio Contreras @eugecc.bsky.social · 09/04/2025
What if TCRs didn’t need to see peptides to bind MHC? A newly identified human TCR docks sideways onto HLA-DQ2.5—like an antibody. This could reshape how we think about antigen recognition 🧐🧐 @niclag.bsky.social @naturecomms.bsky.social
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Liz Szabo @lizszabo.bsky.social · 08/04/2025
China is beating U.S. in biotech advances, report warns www.axios.com/2025/04/08/c...
axios.com
China is beating U.S. in biotech advances, report warns
Beijing's ascendency in the sector could allow it to weaponize biotechnology against the U.S., the report warns.
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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
Contrary to popular belief, what is important in science is as much its spirit as its product: it is as much the openmindedness, the primacy of criticism, the submission to the unforeseen, however upsetting, as the result, however new that may be. – Francois Jacob www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Itai Yanai @itaiyanai.bsky.social · 02/04/2025
🔥New Night Science paper!! Discovery happens when your initial plans fall apart but it requires you to have a particular mindset: it's not extraverted, orderly, neurotic or agreeable that's the most important – discovery requires an OPENNESS to new ideas and unexpected insights.
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Benjamin Haibe-Kains @bhaibeka.bsky.social · 30/03/2025
www.nature.com/articles/d41... So let me get this straight 1. Academics spend decades building the PDB openly 2. A company trains AlphaFold on it, releases limited code under pressure 3. Academics work hard to create fully open versions 4. Companies then use the open models to build closed products
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Waggoner Lab @labwaggoner.bsky.social · 25/03/2025
Allotypic differences in peptides impact KIR recognition of HLA allowing NK cells to sense infection- or transformation-induced repertoire perturbations, particularly when intrinsic KIR/HLA interactions are of modest avidity @jimmunol.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/jimm...
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Alex Wayne @aawayne.bsky.social · 16/03/2025
Exclusive: NIH officials have advised scientists to remove reference to mRNA vaccines from their grant applications, in expectation the Trump administration intends to abandon most research in the field. By @arthurallen202.bsky.social kffhealthnews.org/news/article...
kffhealthnews.org
Scientists Say NIH Officials Told Them To Scrub mRNA References on Grants - KFF Health News
Two senior scientists say National Institutes of Health officials advised them to remove references to mRNA vaccines in grant applications, and they fear the Trump administration will abandon a promis...
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Caleb Lareau @caleblareau.bsky.social · 14/03/2025
Trying a slightly new model (for us at least) of #openscience. With @ronanchaligne.bsky.social and @karolisk.bsky.social, we pitted 10x Genomics Chromium GEM-X against Illumina PIPseq V head-to-head to understand these two platforms for single-cell genomics. Some thoughts off the bleeding edge: /1
media.tenor.com
a baby is eating a piece of food while sitting on the ground .
ALT: a baby is eating a piece of food while sitting on the ground .
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The Francis Crick Institute @crick.ac.uk · 11/03/2025
Researchers from the Crick, @dkfz.bsky.social and the German Red Cross Blood Donation Centre have found beneficial genetic changes that arise in the blood stem cells of people who regularly donate blood cells. www.crick.ac.uk/news-and-fea...
crick.ac.uk
Beneficial genetic changes observed in regular blood donors
Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute have identified genetic changes in blood stem cells from frequent blood donors that support the production of new, non-cancerous cells.
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Jamie Blundell @jamie-blundell.bsky.social · 06/03/2025
Delighted to share a major update on our work investigating age-related deceleration in clonal haematopoiesis. Takehome: Widespread and substantial deceleration in fitness with age! Amazing effort by PhD student Hamish MacGregor 💪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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Kane Foster @kanefos.bsky.social · 06/03/2025
One of the most fascinating papers I’ve read in a while. Every unique aspect of biology has been allowed to evolve at the discretion of a single unifying (perhaps the only true) goal - combat infection
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Harmit Singh Malik @harmitmalik.bsky.social · 20/02/2025
MacKenzie Scott has donated $19 billion. The impact? 'Transformational,' new study says - USA TODAY apple.news/A9xL6UoqkRSG...
apple.news
MacKenzie Scott has donated $19 billion. The impact? 'Transformational,' new study says — USA TODAY
As part of her divorce settlement with Jeff Bezos in 2019, MacKenzie Scott pledged to donate half of her wealth - about $38 billion - to charities.
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Albert Vilella, PhD. @albertvilella.bsky.social · 19/02/2025
Illumina will enter the Spatial-Omics market in 2026 with Connected Multiomics (ICM) open.substack.com/pub/albertvi...
open.substack.com
Illumina will enter the Spatial-Omics market in 2026 with Connected Multiomics (ICM)
Illumina announced two hours ago that they have a new spatial technology program aiming at mapping complex tissues and understand cellular behaviour at a high-throughput scale.
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Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
To the tune 🎶 of Murder on the Dancefloor 🕺: Chaos in the Brickyard www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... - we're so busy making bricks, we forgot to assemble them into useful edifices, and now all the loose bricks are in the way!
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Will Macnair @willmacnair.bsky.social · 12/02/2025
My experience has been that while really trying to get to the bottom of a biological question, you end up with analysis you want to do but for which no method exists yet. And this is actually a perfect method to develop - no competition!
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STAT @statnews.com · 10/02/2025
#BREAKING - 22 states sue to block Trump administration cuts to NIH research payments
buff.ly
22 states sue to block Trump administration cuts to NIH research payments
Attorneys general sued the Trump administration to block a NIH decision that would slash grant payments for research overhead
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Kane Foster @kanefos.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
Very exciting paper for bone marrow immunology fans that resolves some really fundamental Qs about myeloma immunology and has really exciting clinical implications
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Dr. Patrick Hwu @patrickhwumd.bsky.social · 08/02/2025
#ScienceSaturday 🧵 🧬 Personalized cancer vaccines (PCV) train the immune system to recognize mutations unique to a patient's tumor, helping the body mount a targeted immune response. ❓ Can this approach help prevent renal cell carcinoma (RCC) from returning after surgery?
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E John Wherry @ejohnwherry.bsky.social · 08/02/2025
This will kill science in the US. This is how China wins. Why is this not on the news? Why are people not more upset about this? grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...
grants.nih.gov
NOT-OD-25-068: Supplemental Guidance to the 2024 NIH Grants Policy Statement: Indirect Cost Rates
NIH Funding Opportunities and Notices in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts: Supplemental Guidance to the 2024 NIH Grants Policy Statement: Indirect Cost Rates NOT-OD-25-068. OD
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Waggoner Lab @labwaggoner.bsky.social · 05/02/2025
A personalized cancer vaccine to prevent the return of high-risk kidney cancer @nature.com @braunmdphd.bsky.social @drchoueiri.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/d41... www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
A personalized cancer vaccine to prevent the return of high-risk kidney cancer
A phase I clinical trial supports the safety and feasibility of a vaccine to limit disease recurrence in people with kidney cancer.
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Jeff Mold @jeffmold.bsky.social · 04/02/2025
For my own ongoing education and my improved mentoring of students during paper writing - can someone please tell me what use this sort of figure is? I would love a description of how you use it to understand immunology better: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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