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(NEW YORK) — Last week, the Trump administration announced it was banning the use of human fetal tissue from some abortions in federally funded medical research. 

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) said the policy would go into effect immediately and advance “science by investing in breakthrough technologies more capable of modeling human health and disease,” NIH director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said in a statement.

Scientists told ABC News that research using human fetal tissue has contributed to understanding diseases better, such as HIV and Ebola, and helped in the development of some vaccines and drugs.

Some scientists worry the ban could prevent groundbreaking discoveries about the behaviors of certain diseases and stop the development of life-saving therapies.

“It’s not a scientific decision,” Dr. Lawrence Goldstein, a professor emeritus of cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California, San Diego, told ABC News. “It’s a moral decision that places the rights of fetal tissue that would be discarded above the rights of sick people who will benefit from that research.”

How human fetal tissue has been used

Human fetal tissue has been used to study serious diseases and disorders, including AIDS, cancer, Parkinson’s disease, dengue, Ebola, hepatitis C, diabetes and spinal cord injuries.

Cell lines have been created from human fetal tissue that have led to the development of vaccines for rubella, rabies, chickenpox, shingles and hepatitis A. Research has also led to the development of drugs to treat HIV, hemophilia and sepsis.

President Donald Trump himself benefited from the research: the experimental antibody treatment he took to treat COVID-19 was developed using cells derived from human fetal tissue. At the time, Trump praised the treatment as a “cure.”

The tissue has been also used in reproductive medicine research to study fertility issues, pregnancy issues, and pregnancy conditions such as pre-eclampsia.

Goldstein said that human fetal tissue research also helps create humanized mouse models to study human immune systems.

“Using fetal tissue, you can make mice that have human blood-forming and immune systems,” Goldstein said. “And that’s valuable because a lot of the viruses that trouble human health don’t grow properly in mice. But if you can make mice with human blood and immune systems, those viruses will frequently grow, and you can learn how to make therapies to block them.”

There are very strict guidelines that researchers have to follow when using human fetal tissue, ensuring they are in compliance with federal and sometimes state requirements.

Additionally, the research must be reviewed and approved by the NIH’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), which specifically assesses federally funded research that uses human subjects.

The IRB assures that donation and reception of human fetal tissue were done with consent and not coercion and that there were no enticements provided to the participant, the clinic or the research team.

A researcher with knowledge of the matter, who asked that their name not be used due to fears of retribution, told ABC News that federal law states that donation cannot be even brought up to a pregnant individual deciding to terminate their pregnancy before the decision to terminate.

“These are extremely important guardrails that are in place to ensure that everything is handled properly,” the researcher with knowledge of the matter said.

Impacts of ending NIH funding

The Trump administration first instituted a ban ending all human fetal tissue research at NIH in 2019, but it was reversed by the Biden administration in 2021.

The current ban stops NIH funds from supporting all “grants, cooperative agreements, other transaction awards and research and development contracts,” the agency said in a statement.

Some groups praised the Trump administration’s new policy, including the Independent Medical Alliance, a group that promoted unproven treatments during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There is no ethical justification for performing experiments on tissue derived from aborted human beings,” Dr. Joseph Varon, president and chief medical officer of the Independent Medical Alliance, said in a statement. “The fact this practice continued for years within federally funded research institutions shows just how far removed parts of HHS had become from foundational medical ethics. This correction is long overdue.”

However, some scientists say the ban will affect ongoing and future work.

Dr. Anita Bhattacharyya, an associate professor of cell and regenerative biology in the school of medicine and public health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said she was hoping to apply for a future NIH grant to study human fetal tissue research and will now not be able to do so.

Bhattacharyya explained she currently uses human-induced pluripotent stem cells, which are reprogrammed cells that are similar to embryonic stem cells, in her work. However, the loss of NIH funding for human fetal tissue research could affect future work.

“My reaction was, ‘How are we going to do some of our research if we can no longer use human fetal tissue?'” she recalled to ABC News. “In particular, my lab studies Down syndrome and so we know that in Down syndrome, the brain develops differently to lead to the intellectual disability that people with Down syndrome have.”

Bhattacharyya said human fetal tissue is valuable when studying Down syndrome or neuropsychiatric disorders because it can recapitulate what’s happening in brain development.

“And so that’s where the human fetal tissue really provides us with a benchmark or the ground truth so that we can validate our models,” she said.

Finding alternative methods of funding is another issue, scientists told ABC News. The NIH was the largest funder of research involving human fetal tissue, and no longer financially supporting such research may leave scientists scrambling to find other donors.

Goldstein said there are private disease foundations that will sometimes fund human fetal tissue research, such as the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which funds stem-cell-related research in California.

However, experts say the hole left behind by the lack of NIH funding cannot be made up through private donations.

“There’s really nothing adequate to substitute for the federal effort,” Goldstein said. “It is the largest funder of medical research in the United States. It has systems in place to regulate quality and ensure that ethics and scientific principles are being adhered to. We really can’t move ahead as efficiently as we would like with the absence of the NIH.”

Although the NIH said tissue from spontaneous abortions will still be available, the researcher with knowledge of the matter said this tissue is very often not suitable for research purposes.

“The reason is because, most often, spontaneous abortion happens as a result of some sort of genetic abnormality or some injury, infection, some kind of damage to the fetus itself, that renders that tissue completely unusable for scientific research,” they said.

“Additionally, because spontaneous abortions are just that, they’re spontaneous and therefore completely unpredictable,” the researcher continued. “We have to be very careful in the way that we handle that tissue. It makes those studies intractable. And so, for that reason, spontaneous abortions are not a suitable replacement for fetal tissue research that we would normally obtain.”

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(NEW YORK) — Earlier this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention abruptly changed the childhood immunization schedule, reducing the number of recommended shots for all children from 18 down to only 11.

According to the new schedule, shots will now be categorized in three groups: those recommended for all children, those recommended for only certain high-risk children and others left up to shared clinical decision making, meaning only given if recommended by an individual’s doctor or based on parental preference.

Some pediatricians told ABC News that this decision will only cause more confusion and fuel a growing trend of vaccine skepticism and refusal amid a rise in some vaccine-preventable illnesses around the U.S. 

Dr. Anita Henderson, a pediatrician at the Pediatric Clinic in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, told ABC News that removing seven shots from the schedule recommended for all kids is “reckless” and confusing.

This isn’t the first change to vaccine recommendations that has been made in the past year by the Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In 2025, guidance for vaccinating healthy children against COVID-19 was reversed and the universal birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine was eliminated. Kennedy also fired all 17 members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel and handpicked their replacements, and has been criticized.

“Pediatricians are already facing families who are confused about vaccine recommendations. This confusion is intentional and meant to weaken vaccination rates in the US and sow seeds of doubt and division,” Henderson said. 

Under the updated schedule, only seven vaccines are recommended based on shared clinical decision making between a doctor and parent and are no longer universally recommended for all children.

These include shots that protect against influenza, COVID-19, rotavirus and some types of bacterial meningitis and viral hepatitis. All of these vaccine-preventable illnesses can lead to severe infections or death and have limited to no treatment options.

“These latest changes will undoubtedly shake confidence in vaccines even further, to the detriment of the children we care for,” Dr. Molly O’Shea, a practicing pediatrician and spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told ABC News. 

O’Shea said that, in her practice, she’s had to navigate more vaccine skepticism and refusal over the past year, but wants parents to know that the science on effectiveness and safety hasn’t shifted “even though the recommended vaccine schedule has shifted.”

She continued, “The reason for that shift has nothing to do with whether or not vaccines are safe and effective and all children benefit from avoiding illness and being healthy, to attend school and be a part of the community.”

To address growing concerns about vaccines, O’Shea said the pediatric offices she works in have had to change their workflow to allow more time for discussions about vaccines and to address vaccine misinformation.

While happy to have these conversations with families, O’Shea said reserving time for these additional visits for vaccine counseling becomes more difficult during flu season, when more kids need to be seen due to illnesses.

She added that the offices have already had to scale back ordering some vaccines in bulk because uptake has decreased for some shots. 

Henderson and O’Shea both reaffirmed that vaccines are safe — far safer than the dangerous illnesses they prevent.

“Over the last 30 years, I have hospitalized hundreds of children with complications from influenza, RSV, rotavirus and other vaccine-preventable diseases that have now been removed from the CDC schedule,” Henderson said. “I have never hospitalized a child from a vaccine reaction. Vaccines are safe and effective and protect our most vulnerable patients … our babies and children.”

“Vaccines are the safest way for a child’s immune system to become familiar with any of these illnesses, way safer than the disease itself,” O’Shea added. 

Doctors are also concerned that the vaccination schedule updates may have secondary impacts, including how often children and families see their pediatrician.

Pediatric wellness checks include recommended vaccines, particularly in young childhood, but pediatricians say that there’s more to those visits than shots alone. Skipping visits could miss critical windows of a child’s growth, development, and recommended screenings.   

“Absent vaccine, kids are really going to miss out on important other screening aspects of the wellness visits if their parents are opting out,” O’Shea said.

Pediatricians continue to urge parents to talk to their own child’s doctor and to trust their medical guidance.

“Your pediatrician really is your trusted source of information, and we have nothing to gain in the way things are going here,” O’Shea said.

“Vaccines are certainly not a way in which we make any money,” she went on. “But [a] pediatrician’s goal is to partner with parents to make the right decision for your child, and so, bringing your concerns and questions to your pediatrician is the best way to get quality information.”

Amid the shrinking childhood vaccine schedule, many vaccine-preventable illnesses remain common in the U.S. and other diseases, such as measles and whooping cough, are increasing.

Last year, the U.S. saw more measles cases than at any other time in the last 30 years and three people died from the disease. Two children died from whooping cough during an outbreak in Louisiana and more kids died from influenza than in any other year on record since it became a reportable illness in 2004. 

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(NEW YORK) — From robotic surgery performed 7,000 miles away to the first blood test to help diagnose Alzheimer’s disease, 2025 has been a year full of medical breakthroughs.

Scientists discovered a brain implant to give some patients back their independence, prevented others from needing to take opioids and made a discovery that could help solve the organ shortage crisis.

Here are seven of the biggest innovations in the health and science space this year.

ALS patient is 1st to control iPad by thought with implantable brain sensor

A patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) became the first person in the world to control an iPad entirely by thought, neurotech company Synchron announced earlier this year.

The patient, Mark Jackson, from western Pennsylvania, controls the tablet without using his hands or voice command but rather with an implantable brain-computer interface (BCI) that translates his thoughts into actions.

At the time, Jackson told ABC News he doesn’t have use of his arms so the BCI helps him watch TV shows, listen to audiobooks, browse social media and send text messages to his children.

BCIs are sensors implanted in the brain and translate brain signals into actions outside of the body. The BCI that Jackson is using was developed by the company Synchron, which involves a device implanted into one of the veins within the brain in a minimally invasive procedure.

“This is really an exciting field, because I think the opportunities are boundless,” Dr. Leah Croll, a neurologist at Maimonides Medical Center in New York City, told ABC News. “I think that we’re going to see, moving forward, not only using BCIs to control other electronic devices, but also using them to give patients back movement, to give patients back language, really bodily functions that they weren’t able to do after whatever neurologic insult happened to them.”

Croll said it’s important, going forward, to consider legal and ethical considerations such as privacy and data storage.

She also encouraged more research and clinical trials to generate data on how patients can be protected in both research and real-world settings.

“There’s so much we haven’t figured out legally and ethically when it comes to storing personal, private data from your brain, and how is that used, and how do we manage that responsibly,” she said. “There’s a lot of bio-ethical minds at work as to how we deal with this issue and how do we make it so that a patient isn’t sort of signing away the rights to their entire brain and inner world and manage something responsibly for them that’s helpful and not harmful.”

First pill for obstructive sleep apnea may be around the corner

The first oral pill for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) could soon be available after a late-clinical showed positive results, according to pharmaceutical company Apnimed Inc.

The drug, AD109, showed “clinically meaningful and statistically significant reductions” in airway obstruction after 26 weeks, the company said in a press release in July.

OSA is a sleep disorder in which the airways become narrowed or blocked while sleeping, causing breathing to pause.

The investigational once-daily pill is a neuromuscular modulator that stabilizes upper airway muscles and prevents them collapsing, improving oxygenation.

OSA patients treated with the medication saw a nearly 50% reduction in the severity from baseline at week 26, compared to 6.8% of those in the placebo group.

The reduction was “significant” at the end of the study period, which concluded at 51 weeks. At the end of the trial, nearly 23% of participants saw “complete disease control.”

More recent trial data published in October found that a meaningful number of patients achieved complete disease control and experienced significant improvements in oxygenation measures.  

First non-opioid medication in more than 20 years approved by FDA

Earlier this year, the FDA approved a new type of non-opioid pain medication to treat moderate to severe acute pain, the first of its kind on more than 20 years.

Suzetrigine, also known by the brand name, Journavx, is manufactured by biotech company Vertex Pharmaceuticals and doesn’t have addictive properties, unlike opioids often used for this type of pain.

“It’s significant in light of all the concerns about the opioid epidemic and addiction substance use disorder,” Dr. Jianguo Cheng, a professor of anesthesiology and medical director of the Cleveland Clinic Consortium for Pain at Cleveland Clinic, told ABC News.

In two clinical trials, tested on adults between ages 18 and 80, Journavx was found to reduce moderate to severe acute pain for adults from baseline by about 50% in 48 hours.

The average time to meaningful pain relief ranged from two to four hours, compared to eight hours in the placebo group, according to the trial.

Cheng, who was not involved in the clinical trials, said the studies demonstrated efficacy of the drug not compared to not only placebo, but also to weak opioids.

“Its efficacy is as good as a weak opioid. So why that is important?” Cheng said. “Because not all patients need opioids, and not all patients need a strong opioid. … If most of them do need a weak opioid, and if this can replace the weak opioid, that can be a big deal.”

Scientists discover immune reaction behind pig kidney rejection in transplant patients

Although gene-edited pig kidneys have been seen as a way to help ease the shortage of organs available for those on transplant waiting lists, many of the organs have been rejected not long after transplant surgery.

“Until 2021, we had never put one of these gene-edited pig organs into a human … so it was a bit of a mystery when we started doing the pig-to-human transplants, about what we were going to encounter,” Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, told ABC News.

Last month, a team at NYU Langone Health published a study in which they discovered immune reactions that may explain why these organs get rejected.

The team collected two months of data from a patient who was brain dead and had a genetically engineered pig kidney transplanted into them. The family had donated the patient’s body to science.

The team learned that pig organs were being rejected due to an immune system reaction from specific antibodies — which recognize and attach themselves to foreign substances so they can be removed from the body — and from T cells, which are white blood cells that help the body fight off germs and other unfamiliar invaders.

‘So you have this very coordinated immune response that involves antibodies and white cells, and it seems to happen somewhere between two and four weeks after the transplant,” said Montgomery, lead author of the study. “Now the good news on that front is that we can detect when it’s coming before rejection happens, and we can begin to respond, and we have very good therapeutics that can block the rejection and prevent it from causing damage.”

After rejection, the team used an FDA-approved drug combination to successfully reverse it, with no signs of permanent damage or reduced kidney function.

In a second study, Montgomery and his team looked at the body’s immune response to the pig organ in greater detail. By measuring levels of biomarkers in the blood, they were able to spot an attack up to five days before it would be visible in bodily tissue.

Montgomery said the findings could lead to a future where gene-edited pig organs are a realistic alternative to human organs.

“The pig organ can really replace a human organ and do all the things that a human organ can do, and it’s really just a matter of overcoming the immunosuppression and preventing rejection,” he said. “I think it’s going to happen … and people will be receiving xenotransplants on a regular basis. It’s going to be normalized, and it’s going to be something that will benefit thousands, first, and then millions of people around the world.”

FDA clears 1st blood test to help diagnose Alzheimer’s disease

In May, the FDA cleared the first blood test to help diagnose Alzheimer’s disease.

The test, manufactured by Fujirebio Diagnostics, is for those aged 55 and older who are already exhibiting signs and symptoms of the disease, according to the federal health agency.

The new blood test works by measuring the ratio of two proteins — pTau217 and β-amyloid 1-42 — which are found in human plasma, a component of blood. That ratio is then linked to the presence or absence of amyloid plaques in the brain to determine whether a patient is showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease.

In a clinical study, more than 91% of nearly 500 cognitively impaired patients who tested positive on the blood test had their results confirmed by other diagnostic tools.

“Essentially, it does provide a first quantitative measure of an Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis,” Dr. Jeffrey Savas, an associate professor in the department of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, told ABC News. “This is very important to identify patients which could be good candidates for some of the emerging therapeutics.

Savas said the test is rapid, highly accurate and less expensive or invasive compared to previous diagnostic tests.

Because many Alzheimer’s patients need to wait months to see a specialist, the test can allow primary care providers to start the diagnostic process.

“Many neurological research centers have huge backlogs of patients, and there’s not enough physicians or nurses to really see the patients in a timely manner,” Savas said.

“Having this quick diagnostic test, which could be taken in other medical settings, should pave the way for quicker, more effective opportunities and chances for being treated in a timely manner.”

In October, the FDA cleared a second blood-based test called Elecsys pTau181, made by Roche.

Groundbreaking remote robotic surgery

A patient living in Angola with prostate cancer underwent surgery this year to cut the cancer out, but the doctor performing the surgery was 7,000 miles away in Orlando, Florida.

The patient was the first in a groundbreaking human clinical trial approved by the FDA to test transcontinental robotic telesurgery.

A team at OrlandoHealth operated on the patient via a multimillion-dollar robot with enhanced visuals and nimble controls.

Using a robot allows for the procedure to be less invasive, more precise and typically comes with a faster recovery time.

The team has said underserved areas in the U.S. and around the world could benefit from the technology by having a surgeon perform an operation even if they are not nearby.

1st-ever gene fix for rare deadly disease saves baby’s life

A baby with a rare and life-threatening metabolic disorder underwent a personalized treatment involving a first-of-its-kind type of gene-editing.

KJ Muldoon was diagnosed as a newborn with carbamoyl-phosphate synthetase 1 deficiency as a newborn. The disorder affects a bodily cycle that causes deadly levels of ammonia to build up in the blood, which can lead to severe and permanent brain damage.

If left untreated, it will typically result in the death of the patient, according to the National Organization for Rare Disorders.

The treatment for KJ involved the powerful gene-editing tool CRISPR, which allows scientists to precisely slice and repair faulty genes. Using CRISPR, the team was able to create a treatment tailored to the baby’s specific genetic mutation.

In June, KJ went home after spending the majority of his life at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Earlier this month, he reached a big milestone: taking his first steps ahead of Christmas.

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