closer look
Cancun abortion clinic opens with Americans in mind
Daniel Slim/AFP via Getty Images
You may recall that last year, just three months after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a constitutional right to abortion, its counterpart in Mexico found that criminalization of abortion was unconstitutional. Now MSI Reproductive Choices, an international reproductive health nonprofit, is opening an abortion clinic in Cancun, partly designed to cater to travelers from the U.S. who are unable to get an abortion in their home states.
"You have a lot more direct flights to Cancun than to any other city in Mexico," Araceli Lopez Nava Vázquez, regional managing director of MSI Reproductive Choices in Latin America, told STAT's Olivia Goldhill. "That was an important thing for us to consider…. We're aiming to help more American women." Read more.
health care
Capping ambulance rides at $100 out of pocket
Ambulance trips are a ride nobody really asks for, STAT's Tara Bannow and Bob Herman note, so surprise bills can really sting. Now government advisers have endorsed ways for Congress to protect patients from this particularly thorny problem, including a cap on how much they would have to pay if they took an ambulance. Surprise bills have been eliminated for most health care services, but not yet for out-of-network ground ambulance rides.
After a two-day meeting, the federal ambulance committee (primarily people from the ground ambulance industry) hit upon $100 as the most a patient would pay out of pocket. But how to pick up the rest of tab remains in question. A new collaboration from STAT and the health policy podcast Tradeoffs explores how the potential solutions could pan out, based in large part on the experiences of 14 states that have already tried to fix the issue somehow. Read more.
synthetic biology
First lab-made yeast genome nears completion
For thousands of years, ordinary brewer's yeast has helped humans brew, distill, and bake our way into a delicious modern existence. But along the way, its genes got kind of stale. If this industrial workhorse was going to be put to more ambitious tasks in the future — like burping out ethanol, antibiotics, and other useful biochemicals — it would need a more flexible genome.
STAT's Megan Molteni explains that for the last 15 years, more than 250 researchers from around the globe have been building exactly that. The project, Sc2.0, set out to swap the yeast's naturally evolved genetic material for engineered replacements more conducive to tinkering and adding in new traits. In 2014, it announced the completion of its first synthetic yeast chromosome, followed by five more in 2017.
In 10 new papers published Wednesday in the journals Cell, Molecular Cell, and Cell Genomics, the group reports the assembly of eight additional non-naturally occurring chromosomes. It expects to publish the final two later this year. The final challenge will be to consolidate all 16 synthetic chromosomes into a single living yeast strain. Only once that's done will we see what a customizable synthetic life form can really do.
Yesterday, were you looking for that Nature Communications paper about the prospect of nearby tissue predicting lung cancer progression? Here's the paper. (Apologies for sending you to the journal's home page yesterday.)
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