13 May 2026

Today’s Protostar is Elias Sayour, a pediatric oncologist whose work on “universal” mRNA cancer vaccines made him a finalist for the 2026 BioInnovation Institute & Science Prize for Innovation. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including polymers designed for reuse and recycling and dinosaurs that dug with weird-looking arms.

polymer Chemistry | Science

A new step toward recyclable plastic

Scientists are constantly coming up with creative strategies for dealing with plastic pollution. To break down polystyrene, one of the world’s most stubborn plastic polymers, one team even turned to cockroaches. Other researchers are looking to create synthetic versions of natural polymers, with many efforts focused on mimicking biodegradable polyesters known as polyhydroxyalkanoates. Such materials, however, have proven difficult to recycle and expensive to manufacture at large scales.

Now, scientists may have found a way to address these problems. One of the main problems with synthetic polyhydroxyalkanoates, the team notes in a new paper, is that the chains that make up the polymers tend to degrade during chemical recycling processes, breaking down into random fragments rather than reusable building blocks.

Using a compound called isobutyric acid, which can be derived from organic material, researchers developed a new type of building block that resists this degradation. By tinkering with the material’s structure and properties, the team was able to transform their new polymer into strong fibers, powerful adhesives, and flexible plastics that can be easily heated and reshaped.

Read the paper

Paleontology | Proceedings of the ROyal Society B

My, what strange arms you have! All the better to dig with…

artist's reconstruction of Manipulonyx, an alvarezsaurid theropod

Alvarezsaurid theropods like this Manipulonyx may have used their teeny arms to dig deep. TotalDino via WIKIMEDIA COMMONS | CC BY

Folks love to make fun of Tyrannosaurus rex for having wimpy little arms, but the lizard king’s forelimbs weren’t nearly as bizarre as those belonging to the alvarezsauroids. These tiny theropod dinosaurs had stupendously stubby arms, which ended in one large, clawed finger and two much smaller digits. Some scientists have long suspected that alvarezsauroids used their oddly shaped forelimbs to dig into ant and termite mounds, but other research suggests that the dinosaurs pilfered eggs instead.

Now, a new study may have revived this debate. Researchers used digital models of bones from two alvarezsauroid species to assess the range of motion in the dinosaurs’ shoulder and elbow joints, demonstrating that digging behaviors would indeed have been feasible for them. The team also found some similarities between the forelimb muscles of alvarezsauroid dinosaurs and those of modern mammals known to specialize in digging, such as anteaters and moles.

These results, the study authors explained, support the idea that alvarezsauroids fed on ants and termites: “Despite their short length, the powerful forelimb could have been used to break into above-ground substrates like dead logs.” T. rex’s puny arms, by contrast, may have just been an evolutionary tradeoff for its enormous head.

Read the paper

Neuroscience | PNAS

Your brain on anesthesia

If you’ve undergone major surgery, chances are you’ve had anesthesia. It’s great for eliminating the perception of pain—but with brain activity significantly suppressed, you don’t experience the benefits of sleep, either. Scientists wanted to better understand what the anesthetized brain is actually doing—and whether it more closely mimics sleeping or a coma.

Researchers recorded whole-head electroencephalograms (EEGs) for 28 patients under anesthesia, 14 patients who were resting but awake, 20 patients in REM sleep, and 40 comatose patients. They found that, at different frequencies, the brain waves of anesthetized patients shared properties of both sleep and comas. Brains in REM sleep, in particular, overlapped heavily with those under anesthesia. But there were brain waves unique to anesthesia, too, leading the authors to conclude it is indeed its own state of neural activity.

The team hopes their findings can be used to improve the experience of anesthesia for patients. Tuning anesthesia to “resemble sleep-like activity patterns rather than coma-like states may help mitigate postoperative complications and minimize cognitive side effects,” they explain.

Read the paper

SPONSORED

Mapping the forces shaping global food systems

A new AI-enabled research approach is mapping the people, institutions, and incentives driving change across global food systems—offering insight into how sustainable transitions take hold.

Protostar

PHOTO: Courtesy of UF Health

Elias Sayour

Associate Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics, University of Florida

Sayour, E. Catching a chameleon. Science 392, (2026). DOI: 10.1126/science.aef9970

Elias Sayour, a pediatric oncologist and mRNA cancer vaccine researcher at the University of Florida, came to his work through a crisis of faith in his own field. A first-generation American whose parents emigrated from Syria, he trained at Duke, drawn to oncology for the relationships it allowed him to forge with his patients: Nobody told him he was spending too long with a patient when that child had cancer. But he wasn’t prepared for how crude the therapies were or what passed as a cure. “We were breaking the first rule of medicine every single time: to cure a fraction, but hurt all ten,” he said. “I thought I was done with medicine, maybe, and that I had chosen the wrong path.” A chance introduction to Dwayne Mitchell, a Duke pioneer in mRNA cell therapy changed his mind and pointed him towards research.

Now, he wants to teach the immune system to catch a chameleon. Cancer, as Sayour describes it, is a masquerading enemy that edits itself to evade detection and subverts the body’s own defenses into a state of tolerance. For the past decade, he has been working to reverse that dynamic using mRNA vaccines. This spring, he was named one of two finalists for the 2026 BioInnovation Institute & Science Prize for Innovation, recognized at a ceremony in Copenhagen for his work developing both personalized and universal mRNA vaccines to mobilize the immune system against cancer.

In his prize essay published in Science, Sayour lays out a new approach to cancer care: universal mRNA vaccines administered before surgery to mobilize immune cells from tumors to draining lymph nodes, followed by immune checkpoint inhibitors or personalized mRNA therapies that can be updated as tumors evolve. “For the chameleon that is cancer will not fool us forever,” he writes. “Though it may change its colors, we too are changing ours.”

ScienceAdviser spoke with Sayour about the unexpected discovery that upended his own assumptions about how mRNA vaccines work and why he thinks the immune system’s response to infection holds the blueprint for beating cancer. Below is that conversation, edited for brevity.

What sparked the discovery of mRNA vaccines priming tumors for treatment?
My project early on during my time at Duke was to create a nanoparticulate delivery system to do what we’re doing outside the body with mRNA inside the body. Very few nanoparticles had actually made it into the clinic, so I really started stratifying what we studied based on nanoparticulate approaches that actually had a chance, and focused on liposomal formulations. I still remember the date of the first nanoparticle experiment working. That feeling is honestly nothing like anything I experienced in medicine. But the reason I had gone back to graduate school, the reason I was doing all of this was: Can we translate it into something? Can we run a clinical trial that actually advances the paradigm?

The discovery that nonspecific mRNA could work was many years later, 2018. And I got to tell you, when all of a sudden you’re seeing these unbelievable responses, we use all different models, melanoma, brain cancer, sarcoma, you name it. And all of a sudden the controls were working. And it’s not like a eureka moment, but more like: Is everything we just published complete crap? Because the whole idea was that mRNA has to be specific. That’s what I had published on. So, it’s a frightening moment. What we came to realize is the bulk of the effects we were seeing, even with personalized vaccines, was really due to nonspecific innate immunity, which suggested you could create a universal vaccine.

In oncology, from the second a patient is diagnosed, you’re on the clock, which is even more true with a pediatric patient. If it’s taking 6, 8, 12-plus weeks to make a personalized vaccine, that’s just time the cancer is evolving. We really believed this could prime an immune response almost immediately. And that preceded the pandemic.

One of my graduate students, who’s now at MD Anderson, asked a very provocative question: If nonspecific mRNA vaccines can sensitize the immune response to immunotherapy, what happens to cancer patients receiving the COVID vaccine? This was a retrospective study (I always have to caution that) but my gosh, the result! There was a near doubling in survival outcome. When he shared those results, the magnitude of the effect really surprised me. Our lab then went back and made the exact COVID vaccine, the exact Pfizer design, because we hadn’t had it, and it worked really well in the animal models. We just published both papers, in tandem, in the last few months.We are now working with MD Anderson Cancer Center to initiate a phase II/III trial to answer this question proactively. And in parallel, we’re engineering a purpose-built universal vaccine.

In my opinion, I think the COVID vaccine is a poorly designed universal cancer vaccine. The coding region, the length, the untranslated regions can all be optimized. We believe we can build something more robust, and we’re hoping to move into a phase I/II trial as the phase II/III gets underway.

What is it about an mRNA vaccine that is so powerful at priming tumors for treatment?
There’s this sense that because the RNA is silenced, it’s not immunogenic. I can tell you, because we’ve studied this, the COVID vaccine is profoundly immunogenic. What I mean by that immunogenicity is the ability to elicit a cytokine-chemokine response that elicits immunologic trafficking. In cancer, the reason a therapeutic cancer vaccine hasn’t worked, even in the context of a specific antigen, is because the tumor microenvironment is immunosuppressed, and there’s also tremendous peripheral tolerance.

I think nature has given us the tools on how to keep the immune system primed and active, and it’s really through infection. mRNA preceded DNA evolutionarily. Any cell that has RNA injected into it elicits a damage response, elicits trafficking of immune cells. So, when you give a COVID vaccine, or any mRNA vaccine, you’re getting a cytokine-chemokine cascade that mobilizes cells from the tumor microenvironments. You have all these immune cells just sitting there in the tumor: some are senescent, some are suppressive, but they have tumor antigens. If you could elicit mobilization of those cells to lymph nodes, and now with the inflammatory orchestra, allow presentation in a manner that can activate a T cell response, you’ve now primed tumor-specific immunity.

The beauty of mRNA is that the orchestra plays. Type 1 interferon is central, we’ve shown that, but there has to be this orchestration of signals. Imagine going to a symphony and seeing all these instruments playing harmoniously. Right now in cancer immunotherapy it’s kind of early days where we’re fumbling around playing one instrument or two, and it sounds like noise. Cancer is so effective at creating immune noise, you just want to tolerate it, ignore it. But if you could create a symphony where each node amplifies the next, you can now truly get breakthrough immunity.

I don’t think we fully understand how to do that yet, but I do think mRNA is a potent tool to initiate that cascade. In and of itself it’s probably not enough. The other thing we’ve been working on is the delivery design. We published a paper a couple of years ago showing that you could aggregate mRNA into almost an onionlike cluster. When we inject that intravenously—holy cow! It’s one of the most immunogenic things. For a tumor like melanoma or lung cancer, maybe we could get away with just the COVID vaccine alone. But for some of the most immune-refractory tumors, we may need to design things in a way that is more aggressive, to shock the immune system back into immunologic function.

What does this prize mean to you?
It feels weird to get recognition for this. It’s very nice, and I’m very grateful and overwhelmed and humbled. But it feels weird because the stories that I’m writing about are patient stories. People who have suffered the unimaginable, who are really the real heroes and who deserve the recognition, not me. I mean, look, I haven’t helped these people. We’re trying to, and unfortunately we do have a long way to go. But I do think progress is being made. Their stories, their inspiration, their fight, that is the foundation of all of this. To see what a pediatric family can do in terms of raising funds, awareness, research, wow! It’s truly heroic. And I wish that was recognized more.

Read the Essay

Et Cetera

Don’t be jelly of this sustainable skin care

Collagen is a popular ingredient in skin care products, but getting enough of it can be costly—especially for the planet. That’s because the protein is mostly sourced from livestock, even though lots of other animals make the stuff. A team of scientists has shown that the collagen extracted from jellies—which are caught by accident in fishers’ nets—is just as good as any sourced from cows or pigs. “We wanted to explore whether something currently considered waste, or a nuisance, could instead become a valuable marine resource within a circular bioeconomy framework,” one of the team explained.

Frontiers in Marine Science Paper | Read more at C&EN

My citation—is it real?

An analysis of some 2.5 million biomedical papers has found more than 2800 with made-up references. The worst part, though, is that they’ve become more common. Just 3 years ago, about one in 2800 papers had a fake citation. In the first 7 weeks of 2026, that was up to roughly one in 280. “Whether they’re fabricated by a computer or fabricated by a human being, that’s a question that remains open,” one expert noted, adding that “the growth in the problem suggests that there is a generative AI component.”

The Lancet Paper | Read more at Nature

I’ll lay where she’s laying

Building a good home is hard, especially when you’re young and inexperienced. It’s so tricky, in fact, that three species of honeycreepers in Hawaii often resort to grand larceny instead, stealing the carefully constructed nests of others—whether or not they’ve moved out first. “They’re minimizing the energy that they need to spend, and the risks associated with building nests, which makes sense in terms of natural selection,” a study scientist said.

American Naturalist Paper | Read more at The New York Times

Dismissing the full [National Science Board] without explanation, without replacement, and without plans to ensure continuity of the Board’s work is an assault on both the independence of American science and the rule of law.
—Ed Markey (D–MA) and 25 other U.S. senators

ScienceInsider | 12 May 2026 | Daniel Garisto

Last but not least

Today I learned that “turfgrass researcher” is an actual profession—and that a whole lot of thought went into the wee blades that, in about a month, will get totally trampled by cleats.

Christie Wilcox, Editor, ScienceAdviser

With contributions from Phie Jacobs, Hannah Richter, and Ana Georgescu

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