It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, December 18, 2025
Ants: An untapped resource in the development of antibiotics?
A team of researchers led by Auburn University Assistant Professor Clint Penick studied ants like these, which are easily found in the Southeastern United States.
Has a crucial component to the development of human medicine been hiding under our feet?
Auburn University Assistant Professor of Entomology Clint Penick and a team of graduate students may have found that ants are far ahead of humans in antibiotic innovation. “In our study, we tested how ants use antibiotic compounds to fight off pathogens and asked why their chemical defenses remain effective over evolutionary time,” Penick said.
“Humans have relied on antibiotics for less than a century, yet many pathogens have already evolved resistance, giving rise to ‘superbugs.’’ Ants, by contrast, have been using antibiotics for tens of millions of years, and they might hold the key to using these powerful drugs more wisely.
The team looked at just six ant species, all found easily in the Southeastern United States.
“These are the ants that live in our backyards and live on college campuses,” Penick said. “And yet some of the most powerful antibiotics we found come from ants we typically consider pests, like fire ants.”
In a study recently published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, the team tested two hypotheses about how ants might be using antibiotics without promoting antibiotic resistance. First, they examined whether ants might produce multiple types of antibiotics using different chemical compounds.
“It’s just like when you go to the doctor, and they try one antibiotic. If it's not working, they're going to try another one,” Penick said.
When the team tested whether extracts using different solvents showed antimicrobial activity, they found evidence that ants do indeed produce multiple classes of antimicrobials. “Just like us, ants seem to have different medicines in their medicine cabinet that they can try if the first one doesn’t work.”
The second hypothesis they tested was whether ants produce compounds targeted to specific microbes — one of science’s biggest challenges today.
“If we just dump antibiotics into systems to kill everything, we're not only killing our target pathogen but also killing all these other microbes that aren’t harming us,” Penick explained. “By doing that, we're helping breed resistant genes in non-target populations that can lead to drug resistance down the line.”
The team found evidence that ants produce compounds specific to different pathogens: some that target fungi, others that target gram-negative bacteria, and still others that act on gram-positive bacteria.
“This is something that people are really interested in within human medicine — figuring out more targeted antibiotics," Penick said. "And it looks like ants have been doing this for millions of years.”
While not the primary focus of the paper, the team found that nearly all of the ant species tested killed an emerging human superbug — Candida auris. This pathogen has been spreading in hospitals with few options for control, yet ant extracts were highly effective against it.
The work was funded by the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station, and the team included Katy Chon, Kennesaw State University graduate student, and Darmon Kahvazadeh, Auburn entomology and plant pathology graduate research assistant.
The next step, said Penick, is to look at what types of compounds ants are producing and how they're using them.
“It could help inform our own practices or potentially we could discover new compounds that have medical importance,” Penick said. “Our findings suggest that ants could represent a vast and largely untapped source of new antibiotics, including ones capable of combating today’s most dangerous drug-resistant infections.”
Journal
Biological Journal of the Linnean Society
Subject of Research
Animals
Article Title
Dual strategies in ant antimicrobial defences: evidence for chemical diversity and microbial specificity
Article Publication Date
17-Dec-2025
Accelerated cancer drug approvals deliver limited survival gains at high cost
Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute
Early access to new cancer drugs, granted accelerated approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), has provided mixed benefits for patients while costing Medicare billions of dollars, reveals new research published in the journal BMJ Medicine.
Researchers found that between 2012 and 2020, 178,000 Medicare beneficiaries received early access to cancer drugs through the FDA’s accelerated approval pathway. While the pathway aims to give patients faster access to promising treatments, fewer than half of these drugs were later shown to help people live longer.
Key Findings:
Limited Survival Gains: Only 45% of Medicare beneficiaries who received accelerated approval drugs were treated with drugs that ultimately improved survival.
Life-Years Added: Early access to accelerated approval drugs delivered an estimated 76,000 extra years of life for Medicare beneficiaries.
Concentrated Benefits: Just three drugs—for melanoma and lung cancer—accounted for over two-thirds of all extra life-years gained.
High Cost: Medicare spent over $20 billion more on early access to cancer drugs than on alternative treatments, averaging $263,000 per additional year of life. Costs ranged from $26,000 per life-year for melanoma drugs to $4.5 million per life-year for some breast cancer drugs.
Huseyin Naci, Associate Professor of Health Policy at the London School of Economics, and lead author of the study, said: "Early access to new cancer drugs through FDA’s accelerated approval pathway can save lives, but our findings show that most offered little or no survival benefit while costing Medicare substantial sums. This raises important questions about how to balance rapid access to novel treatments with solid evidence of effectiveness."
FDA’s accelerated pathway allows new drugs to enter the market based on interim measures rather than waiting for long-term results like overall survival. Pharmaceutical companies are required to run follow-up studies after initial approval to confirm the benefits, but these studies are not always completed. From 1992 to 2020, nearly half of the drugs approved through this pathway were still missing these follow-up studies.
Joseph Ross, Professor of Medicine and Public Health at Yale University and co-author of the study, said: “Treatments which have been approved for use must be followed up with trials measuring overall survival and then appropriate regulatory actions put in place. This will help direct Medicare funds towards treatments with proven clinical benefits.”
Anita Wagner, Associate Professor of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and senior author of the study, added “Importantly, FDA should also clearly communicate the degree of uncertainty about drugs which have had accelerated approvals. This will help clinicians and patients be more informed as they make important health decisions.”
Journal
BMJ Medicine
Article Title
Costs and benefits of early access to new cancer drugs through the US Food and Drug Administration’s accelerated approval pathway: retrospective observational study and economic evaluation
Article Publication Date
17-Dec-2025
Life on lava: How microbes colonize new habitats
The first in-depth look at primary succession on freshly deposited lava provides insights into how life establishes itself in environments that didn't exist before
Wearing protective gear against toxic gases, Solange Duhamel stands next to a lava flow during an outing to collect samples of freshly deposited lava rock.
Life has a way of bouncing back, even after catastrophic events like forest fires or volcanic eruptions. While nature's resilience to natural disasters has long been recognized, not much is known about how organisms colonize brand-new habitats for the first time. A new study led by a team of ecologists and planetary scientists from the University of Arizona provides glimpses into a poorly understood process.
The team conducted field research in Iceland following a series of eruptions of the Fagradalsfjall volcano, located on the southwestern tip of the island. The volcano erupted for a total of three times over the course of the study period, from 2021 until 2023. With each eruption, lava flows blanketed the tundra around the volcano, in some places even covering lava deposits from the previous year.
"The lava coming out of the ground is over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, so obviously it is completely sterile," said Nathan Hadland, a doctoral student in the U of A Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and first author of a paper published in Nature Communications Biology. "It's a clean slate that essentially provides a natural laboratory to understand how microbes are colonizing it."
To untangle the ecological dynamics involved in that process, Hadland and his team searched for clues about where the microbes that colonize fresh lava come from. They collected samples from a variety of different potential sources, including lava that had solidified mere hours before, rainwater, and aerosols – particles floating in the air. For context, they sampled soil and rocks from surrounding areas.
The researchers then extracted DNA from these samples and used sophisticated statistical and machine learning techniques to identify the organisms present on freshly imposed lava flows, the composition of these micro-habitats and where they originated.
While Iceland receives a considerable amount of precipitation, freshly deposited lava rocks don't hold much water and contain little to no organic nutrients, Hadland explained. To thrive in that scarce environment, organisms have to deal with very low amounts of water and nutrients.
"These lava flows are among the lowest biomass environments on Earth," said co-author Solange Duhamel, associate professor at the U of A's Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, in the College of Science, as well as LPL. "They are comparable to Antarctica or the Atacama Desert in Chile, which is not that surprising considering they start out as a blank slate. But our samples revealed that single-celled organisms are colonizing them pretty quickly."
As microbes colonized the new habitat, biodiversity increased over the course of the first year following an eruption. But after the first winter, diversity "tanked," according to Hadland, probably because the seasonal shifts in environmental conditions were selecting for a specific subset that could survive those conditions. With each subsequent winter, the analyses revealed less turnover and showed that diversity stabilized over time. With all these data, a picture began to emerge.
'Badass microbes' move in first
"It appears that the first colonizers are these 'badass' microbes, for lack of a better term, the ones that can survive these initial conditions," Hadland said, "because there's not a lot of water and there's very little nutrients. Even when it rains, these rocks dry out really fast."
Over the next several months and seasonal shifts, the study revealed, the microbial community begins to stabilize, as more microbes are added with rainwater and "moved in" from adjacent areas.
A major finding of the study pointed to rainwater playing a critical role in shaping microbial communities on freshly deposited lava, according to the researchers.
"Early on, it appears colonizers are mostly coming from soil that is blown onto the lava surface, as well as aerosols being deposited," Hadland said. "But later, after that winter shift in diversity we observed, we see most of the microbes are coming from rainwater, and that's a pretty interesting result."
Scientists have long known that rainwater is not sterile; microbes in the atmosphere, either free floating or attached to dust particles, can even function as cloud condensation nuclei, which are microscopic particles that offer water vapor a surface to latch on to and grow into tiny droplets. In other words, tiny, invisible creatures may play outsized roles in weather and climate phenomena.
"Seeing this huge shift after the winter was pretty amazing," Duhamel said, "and the fact that it was so replicable and consistent over the three different eruptions – we were not expecting that."
While previous studies have looked at how organisms colonize habitat, most of them focus on secondary ecological succession – the technical term for organisms reclaiming disturbed habitat – and macro ecology, in other words, plants and animals. But the research in this paper is the first in-depth look at primary succession by microbes – organisms moving into new habitat as it is being formed, according to the authors. And unlike previous research based on samples collected months after a volcanic eruption, Hadland's team sampled lava flows as soon as they cooled. Finally, because the eruptions were going on over three years, the team was able to piece together an ecological picture with unprecedented resolution.
"The fact that we were able to do this three times – following each eruption in the same area – is what sets our project apart," Hadland said. "In science, we want to measure things three times – what we call a 'triplicate,' if possible, and that is very rare in a natural environment. For this study, nature essentially is giving us a triplicate."
From Arizona to Iceland to Mars
"For the first time, we are beginning to gain a mechanistic understanding of how a biological community established over time, from the very beginning," Duhamel said, adding that one of the study's implications is to potentially inform the habitability on other worlds such as Mars.
Most of the Martian surface is basaltic and has beenmodified by volcanic processes just like Earth, Duhamel explained, even though volcanism has quieted down considerably on Mars.
"Volcanic activity injects a lot of heat into the system, and it releases volatile gases, it can melt frozen water beneath the surface," Duhamel said. "We can observe these widespread, large volcanic terrains on Mars with remote sensing, and so the idea is that past volcanic eruptions could have created transient periods of habitability."
How microbes could potentially colonize new environments and unraveling their spatial distribution patterns is a first step toward probing the potential of life on other planets. Earlier this year, Duhamel was part of a team of U of A researchers selected for the inaugural "Big Idea Challenge" award, administered by the Office of Research and Partnerships. Finalist teams will receive $250,000 over two years and strategic guidance to support transformative research that seeks novel solutions to grand challenges.
"We can begin to tackle questions like, 'How does volcanism influence habitability?' 'How do microbes take advantage of those types of environments?' and apply the answers to similar types of systems that we have observed on Mars." Duhamel said. "Understanding how life could establish itself on a new lava flow on the surface of Mars, or at least how it could have done so in the past and knowing what kinds of biosignature we should look for and could potentially retrieve is a crucial step in that direction."
Co-authors on the paper include Christopher Hamilton, U of A associate professor in the Department of Planetary Sciences, and SnædÃs Björnsdóttirwith the University of Iceland in Reykjavik.
Three eruptions at the Fagradalsfjall Volcano in Iceland show rapid and predictable microbial community establishment
On March 23, 2021, glowing lava is seen oozing from Iceland's Fagradalsfjall volcano during one of its repeated eruptions over the course of the 3-year study period.
Nathan Hadland collects rock samples from a fresh lava flow.
Solange Duhamel climbs onto a freshly cooled lava flow to collect samples. Because the eruptions were going on over three years, the team was able to piece together an ecological picture with unprecedented resolution.
Credit
Christopher Hamilton
How intersections of race, education, and socioeconomic status may predict unequal greenspace exposure
A new study suggests that considering these factors jointly can capture a more accurate representation of disparities in residential greenspace exposure, driven by structural racism and decades of disinvestment in marginalized communities.
Exposure to trees, grass, and other greenspace provides numerous benefits to physical and mental health. Inequities in access to greenspace persist today as a result of structural racism, driven by historical policies such as redlining and segregation, as well as economic and environmental disinvestment in marginalized communities.
While previous research has explored differences in greenspace access by individual factors of race/ethnicity, income, and education, a new study led by Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) researchers sheds light on how these factors also intersect to drive disparities in greenspace exposure, and how these disparities vary by type of vegetation.
Published in the journal Environmental Epidemiology, the study found that intersecting levels of race/ethnicity, education, and neighborhood social economic status (NSES) accounted for more disparities in residential exposure to greenspace than each of these factors individually.
The researchers utilized a powerful multi-level analysis called the Multilevel Analysis of Heterogeneity and Discriminatory Accuracy (MAIHDA) approach, along with street-view greenspace metrics, to quantify unequal distribution of residential greenspace by vegetation type for intersecting combinations of race/ethnicity, education, and NSES. The study group included nearly 6,000 geographically and racially diverse participants enrolled in the longitudinal Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, beginning in 2000. Exposure focused on the percentage of trees and grass among total vegetation in the participants’ neighborhoods.
Overall, White residents of all education and NSES levels had greater exposure to trees and grass compared to Black, Chinese American, or Hispanic residents, but these patterns became more nuanced when residents were grouped by intersecting levels of race/ethnicity, education, and NSES. For example, among those with more education and higher NSES, Black, Chinese American, and Hispanic participants were exposed to a higher percentage of trees (versus other vegetation), while White participants were exposed to a lower percentage of trees. But this trend persisted only for White participants in higher-density—i.e. urban—areas, which have less greenspace overall than lower-density, or rural, areas.
“These findings highlight the importance of viewing greenspace exposure through intersecting factors and by type of vegetation,” says study lead author Dr. Tara Jenson, a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Epidemiology at BUSPH. “Differences in exposure to different types of vegetation can have important implications for health outcomes. Research has shown that higher exposure to trees and other non-grass greenspace is associated with better cardiovascular and behavioral outcomes, compared to no benefits for higher grass exposure.”
In total, the team created 36 combinations of intersecting levels of race/ethnicity, education, and NSES (such as Hispanic participants with some college education living in a low socioeconomic area, or Black participants with a college degree living in a high socioeconomic area) and found that trees and grass exposures were higher overall for White participants than participants of other races/ethnicities.
“This study shows that race, education, and NSES are experienced jointly, and considering these factors together allows us to capture a more complex and realistic explanation of greenspace distribution,” says study senior author Dr. Marcia Pescador Jimenez, associate professor of epidemiology at BUSPH.
A core aim of epidemiologic studies is to generate evidence that can guide targeted interventions, she says. “Distinguishing between types of greenspace and their relative impacts allows us to better direct intervention efforts.”
It is also important to consider a “greening without gentrification” approach to prevent displacement of the long-time residents and community resources, says Dr. Jenson. “Interventions to improve residential greenspace in historically under-resourced areas where marginalized communities are concentrated can inadvertently lead to gentrification as more affluent populations move into the area in response to improved amenities and higher property values. This often results in the original residents, businesses and communities being displaced.”
The team says that further research is needed to better understand greenspace distribution patterns in urban and higher density areas. “Future work should investigate neighborhood socioeconomic level at a more narrow, granular level than the US Census tract level neighborhood area as an intersecting factor contributing to greenspace disparities. This is important as, as each Census level neighborhood can encompass a diverse range of housing types and amenities driven by different patterns and sources of economic segregation, inequalities and gentrification,” Dr. Jenson says. “This research should also incorporate additional area measures of economic segregation and inequality, as well as more nuanced measures of individual and family income, wealth and financial insecurity beyond just individuals’ income.”
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About Boston University School of Public Health
Founded in 1976, Boston University School of Public Health is one of the top ten ranked schools of public health in the world. It offers master's- and doctoral-level education in public health. The faculty in six departments conduct policy-changing public health research around the world, with the mission of improving the health of populations—especially the disadvantaged, underserved, and vulnerable—locally and globally.
