Australian wildlife teams have begun vaccinating wild little penguins against H5N1, while a personalised mRNA vaccine met its endpoints in resected melanoma, and a brain imaging study tracked synapse loss in schizophrenia.
Wildlife teams in Victoria, Australia, have started vaccinating about 5,000 little penguins at Phillip Island and the St Kilda breakwater against the H5N1 avian influenza virus. The virus reached the Australian mainland in June 2026 and was confirmed this month in a dead penguin at Phillip Island, whose breeding colony reaches 40,000 birds. Officials note this is the first time a wild population has been vaccinated on this scale.[1]
Merck and Moderna have announced that their INTerpath-001 trial met its primary endpoint of recurrence-free survival and its key secondary endpoint of distant metastasis-free survival. The experimental treatment, intismeran autogene, was tested in combination with Keytruda for completely resected stage IIB-IV cutaneous melanoma. The companies have not yet released the full data, providing only topline results.[2]
A PET imaging study of 122 people, including 29 with a schizophrenia diagnosis, identified widespread reductions in synaptic density that were notably greater in the brain's left hemisphere and concentrated in the frontal and temporal regions. The observational study, led by Rutgers and published in Molecular Psychiatry, highlights where synapses are missing in the cohort but does not show when the loss begins or whether it connects to the illness's origin.[3]
