DAILY DOSE: Measles Outbreak Explodes in South Carolina, Passing 400 Cases; Ancient Gut Microbes Point to New Antibiotics in a Post-Antibiotic World.

Measles Outbreak Explodes in South Carolina, Passing 400 Cases : South Carolina’s measles outbreak has climbed to 434 confirmed cases after 124 new infections, prompting 409 people to quarantine and 17 to isolate, with some quarantines lasting until Feb. 6. Officials are deploying mobile vaccine units and urging residents to get the MMR shot; vaccination within 72 hours of exposure can prevent infection, they said. Nearly all cases are in the Upstate, centered on Spartanburg County, with exposures reported at schools and churches. The outbreak is concentrated in communities with low vaccination coverage and religious exemptions; one charter school tied to early exposures reported a 17% vaccination rate in the 2024-25 school year. Of patients tracked, 378 are unvaccinated, 47 have unknown status, and most are children ages 5-17 (287 cases). ( CIDRAP ) How to “Deliver” Genome Editors Inside the Body Is Becoming the Main Bottleneck : CRISPR and other genome editors keep getting sharper-but in vivo delivery (getting the editor into the right cells, at the right dose, without collateral damage) is now the hard part. A new Nature Biotechnology review maps the delivery landscape: viral vectors such as AAV (powerful, but dose- and immune-limited), lipid nanoparticles (successful for RNA, increasingly adaptable for editors), and emerging strategies that add cell-type “address labels” through engineered capsids, targeted ligands, tissue-tuned chemistry, and smarter payload designs. The authors emphasize practical tradeoffs-efficiency vs. specificity, durability vs. reversibility, and safety issues like off-target exposure and immune responses-arguing that the next wave of therapeutic editing will be won or lost on delivery engineering as much as on editing enzymes. ( nature.com ) Ancient Gut Microbes Point to New Antibiotics in a Post-Antibiotic World : Researchers are increasingly “mining” microbial DNA for antimicrobial peptides-short protein fragments that can kill bacteria in ways classic antibiotics can’t. A new Nature Communications paper pushes that idea into deep time, systematically characterizing antimicrobial candidates derived from ancient biological material and testing them against modern pathogens. The work combines large-scale computational screening with lab validation to identify peptides that remain potent despite today’s resistance landscape, then probes how these molecules work and how stable/safe they might be as drug leads. The big pitch: ancient microbial ecosystems faced their own chemical warfare, and some of those solutions may still function against contemporary bacteria-offering a new pipeline for antibiotic discovery that doesn’t rely on re-tweaking the same old scaffolds. ( Nature ) CRISPR-Cas3 Takes Aim at Transthyretin Amyloidosis With Big, Clean Deletions : Cas9 is the celebrity editor, but Cas3 edits differently-more like a molecular “shredder” that can delete longer DNA stretches. In a study highlighted by Phys.org , researchers tested CRISPR-Cas3 against the TTR gene, a major target in transthyretin amyloidosis (ATTR). Using lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) to deliver the system to the liver in mice, they report substantial editing (over 48% hepatic editing ) and an ~80% drop in serum TTR after a single treatment, with results suggesting fewer problematic off-target outcomes than some Cas9 approaches. If it holds up in...

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