The 17 members abruptly terminated June 9 from the U.S. CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) are not going gently into the night. Instead, they’re raging against what could be the dying of the light. The 17 raised their collective voices in a June 16 JAMA opinion piece to decry what’s at stake with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy’s efforts, in his words, to “reestablish public confidence in vaccine science” by cleansing ACIP of what he claimed were conflicts due to members’ financial ties to industry.

The Alphafold machine learning system for predicting a protein’s structure from its amino acid sequence has been adapted to make it possible to design de novo proteins that fold in a particular way and bind to prespecified target proteins. The sister system, called Alphadesign, works by generating random strings of amino acids, using Alphafold to predict their structure, and then iteratively optimizing the design.

With plenty of GLP-1 money to spend, Eli Lilly and Co. is buying Verve Therapeutics Inc. and its gene-editing program for about $1.3 billion. Two of Verve’s one-time treatments are in the clinic. Lead candidate VERVE-102, a gene-editing treatment targeting PCSK9, is in a phase Ib study to reduce cholesterol levels.