Hi Reddit, We are members of the Tropical Aquaculture Laboratory (TAL) and the Indian River Research and Education Center (IRREC), two University of Florida labs, who have aquacultured the Pacific blue tang (Paracanthurus hepatus) for the first (TAL) and second (IRREC) documented times. This species is the most commonly imported member of the surgeonfish family at approximately 200,000 individuals per year. Recent popular animated movies such as Finding Nemo and Finding Dory have only increased the interest this species. Many marine fish species are collected directly from the ocean’s reefs. Collection of the Pacific blue tang can cause damage to the reefs where these fish live. Rising Tide Conservation is a program designed to develop aquaculture for marine fish to provide alternative sources for these beautiful animals. You can read more about the journey here. Here are the pictures of our babies (TAL)(IRREC). Ask us anything! Our bios: Eric Cassiano, biologist at TAL who specializes in live feed production and larval rearing. Isaac Lee, masters student at IRREC who works on marine ornamentals Andrew Palau, technician at IRREC who specializes in live feed production and larval rearing Carter Cyr, Masters Student at IRREC who worked on marine ornamentals and sportfish Cortney Ohs, Associate Professor at IRREC We’ll be back at 1 pm EST (10 am PST, 5 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask us anything! Edit: Cortney, Andrew, Isaac, Carter and Eric here to answer your questions. Edit2: Thanks for your questions /r/science. Hopefully we’ll be back again with more exciting news.

Hi Reddit, We’re Igor Grigoriev, Steve Goodwin and Gert HJ KEMA, and we recently published an article titled Combating a Global Threat to a Clonal Crop: Banana Black Sigatoka Pathogen Pseudocercospora fijiensis (Synonym Mycosphaerella fijiensis) Genomes Reveal Clues for Disease Control in PLOS Genetics. Gert HJ Kema, Professor of Tropical Phytopathology at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, researches fungal diseases in banana and wheat, with a focus on genetic diversity and mechanisms of pathogenicity of the causal agents. Igor Grigoriev, Head of Fungal Genomics program at the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute and Adjunct Professor of Plant and Microbial Biology at University of California Berkeley, employs genomics tools to explore fungal diversity for energy and environment science and applications. Steve Goodwin, Research Plant Pathologist with the Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Adjunct Professor of Plant Pathology at Purdue University, uses genetics, genomics and bioinformatics approaches to analyze host-pathogen interactions between wheat and fungal pathogens and to utilize genetic diversity in hosts and pathogens. The PLOS Genetics article focused on determining the DNA sequence of the fungus and applies it by focusing on two major aspects of current banana production: overall susceptibility of the crop and reduced efficacy of disease control agents (fungicides). The overall susceptibility of the major export Cavendish banana varieties - that essentially form one huge monoculture around the globe - is the underlying problem of the unsustainable banana production. Hence, the only way to manage black Sigatoka is the use of fungicides. However, due to the high application frequencies (between 50-70 times per year) their efficacy continually decreases, which in turn requires more/different control strategies. Our paper unveils the unsustainable status quo by showing the need and possibility for developing new and better varieties with improved disease resistance. This helps growers in the developing world and meets consumer demands for a caring society. To learn more about the featured study, read Gert’s PLOS Blogs post on Biologue. See for another effect of the global banana monoculture the PLOS Pathogens study Worse Comes to Worst: Bananas and Panama Disease—When Plant and Pathogen Clones Meet. Also, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter: DOE Joint Genome Institute and USDA and Wageningen University. Visit us at www.panamadisease.org and/or subscribe to the newsletter. We’ll be back at 1 pm EST (10 am PST, 5 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask us anything!

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Hello Reddit! I’m Neil Brown, a fungal biologist and a BBSRC Future Leader Fellow at Rothamsted Research in the UK. In my school leavers book, my friends were asked “What will Neil end up doing?” They answered “saving trees”, to which I laughed. But it appears that they knew more about me than I did, as I now devote my days to understanding plant diseases, contributing to the knowledge and innovation needed to develop new ways to protect our crops. New approaches to control fungal diseases that threaten our food security and health, through the contamination of crops with harmful toxins, are urgently needed. To achieve this, I am asking: how does a fungal pathogen landing on a plant decide if it is a suitable host; how does it know where to infect or where to find the best source of food; and how does it know when to deploy different virulence strategies, such as the secretion of toxins or hydrolytic enzymes? These are the questions I hope to answer in my study of fungal ‘touch and taste’ receptors, similar to those found on our tongue. I will focus on Fusarium, a fungal pathogen that cause disease on wheat, barley, rice and maize. The goal is to determine whether these fungal ‘touch and taste’ receptors are biological targets that can potentially be drugged to prevent a pathogen from causing crop diseases and toxin contamination. It would be great to discuss my research with you. So go ahead. Ask me anything. I will be back at 11am ET (4pm BST). In the meantime, you are welcome to find out more about me, and my international experiences as an early career researcher, in a blog entry I recently wrote for Rothamsted Research’s ‘A day in the life of a Research Scientist’ blog series (http://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/day-life-dr-neil-brown). Hi everyone! Thank you all for this broad range of interesting questions. I will check back later to answer a any I missed. All the best, Neil

Available from: Shi, C., Runnels, A. M., & Murphy, C. T. (2015). Mating-induced Male Death and Pheromone Toxin-regulated Androstasis. doi:10.1101/034181

Hi Reddit! My most recent study (https://news.osu.edu/news/2016/06/16/overtime-women/) found that women, in particular, have higher rates of cancer, diabetes, heart disease and arthritis when they work long hours for many years. I think that life demands outside of work could contribute and help explain why we found these life-threatening problems for women but not for men. (More information about my work is available at: https://cph.osu.edu/people/adembe) I will be back at 1 pm ET (10 am PT) to answer your questions, ask me anything! UPDATE: I’d just like to say I’m really appreciative of having had the opportunity to talk with so many of you today. We had a huge turnout of more than 350 people asking questions and I’m sorry I was not able to provide information back to all of you. If you have additional questions, please contact me on my website, listed above. I know that many of you are struggling with trying to find work scheduling arrangements that will be most effective and appropriate for each of your situations and I’d very much like to have future opportunities to interact with you on these issues.

It may seem odd to assert that patient brooding and waiting for imaginative validation is the proper way of doing science; after all, most professional scientists and philosophers believe that the essence of science is ‘evidence’ derived from observations and experiments, synthesized by some kind of logical and rational method. But personal experience, history and theoretical considerations all suggest that a prolonged state of ‘patient brooding’ is the hallmark and prerequisite of ‘deep science’; a practical necessity for the most creative and significant breakthroughs.

We present the first detailed physically-based thermodynamic model of the Galaxy as obtained from high-resolution kinematical data from the inner stellar halo. We interpret the observed distribution of Hyper Velocity Stars (HVS) as a physical manifestation of the Maxwell-Boltzmann (M-B) probability distribution expected for a fully virialized galactic system existing in quasi-equilibrium with its surroundings. The conventional view is that the HVS sample originates from chance gravitational encounters that have attained enough speed to escape the Galaxy. We counter that the HVS population is created by thermodynamic effects and link the observed mid-disk velocity peak with the M-B most probable velocity VPeak ≈ Vmp=432 km/s. Most of the HVS population originates at the Galactic virialization radius of 23 kpc with the current observed sample reproducing the M-B distribution with fidelity.

As previously announced, /r/philosophy is hosting an AMA series this fall semester which kicked off with AMAs by Caspar Hare (MIT), Kevin Scharp and Kenneth Ehrenberg. Check out our series announcement post to see all the upcoming AMAs this semester. We continue our series this upcoming Wednesday with Geoff Pynn, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northern Illinois University. Hear it from him: Geoff Pynn is an associate professor of philosophy at Northern Illinois University. He earned his PhD from Yale University; specializes in epistemology and philosophy of language; and regularly teaches early modern European philosophy, philosophy of religion, and logic. He is also interested in the philosophical problems posed by addiction, anarchism, conspiracy theories, moral panics, and social justice movements. His favorite philosophers are Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, and the nineteenth-century anarchist feminist Voltairine De Cleyre. His most recent published work is on contextualism in epistemology. You can download all his papers from his academia.edu page. He has a number of Wi-Phi videos on: Critical thinking Deductive arguments Abductive arguments Inductive arguments (coming soon!) The tracking theory of knowledge Virtue epistemology Contextualism (coming soon!) Geoff’s current research focuses on social epistemology. Miranda Fricker coined the phrase “testimonial injustice” to describe what occurs when some prejudice or bias causes a person’s testimony to be granted less (or more) credibility than it deserves. For example, imagine a police officer who refuses to believe a suspect’s truthful eyewitness testimony simply because the suspect is black. Or consider how someone’s rural accent or stilted English can make you more skeptical than you’d otherwise be about whether he is telling the truth. Intuitively, it seems wrong to let your prejudices sway your credibility judgments, and it seems like people who are disbelieved because of someone else’s bias have a right to complain. But it’s hard to say why such treatment is wrongful. In one paper, Geoff is developing an account of the harm of testimonial injustice. The basic idea is that when you let your prejudices sway your credibility judgments, you’re degrading the speaker. Degradation is a complex social harm where a person a mistreated in a way that represents her as if she deserved the mistreatment in virtue of the kind of person she is. Epistemic degradation may not be as dramatic or painful as torture, revenge porn, or public humiliation, but it can be extremely demoralizing and have lasting effects. Like all forms of degrading treatment, biased credibility judgments reduce a person’s social standing, encouraging and rewarding behavior that treats them as if they deserved disrespect. (Working on this paper has also sparked Geoff’s interest in degradation, humiliation, shame, and other forms of psycho-social harm.) Geoff’s other current project is on testimonial injustice, plea bargaining, and false confessions. More than 90 percent of criminal cases in the U.S. never go to trial. Instead, a prosecutor extracts a guilty plea from a suspect by either promising him a reduced sentence in exchange for a guilty plea, or threatening him with a more severe charge should his case go to trial. While many people who accept plea bargains are guilty, at least some plead guilty simply to avoid the risk of a more severe punishment. Such cases involve a particularly nasty form of testimonial injustice: enticing a speaker to lie in order to treat her lie as if it were credible enough to justify punishing her. Geoff is also the graduate adviser for Northern Illinois University’s top-rated philosophy MA program, which caters primarily to students who want to get a PhD in philosophy, but do not have the background to get into a PhD program directly. Like many other terminal MA programs, NIU’s offers full funding and living stipends, and Geoff maintains a guide to funding opportunities at terminal MA programs. He’s happy to talk about any aspect of philosophy grad school. Some relevant papers: An overview of contextualism in epistemology (forthcoming in Oxford Handbooks) A piece on the “intuitive argument” for contextualism (forthcoming in the Routledge Companion to Epistemic Contextualism) A new form of contextualism, designed to side-step a slew of objections to the view that emerged in the early 2000s An explanation of the “illusion of ignorance” produced by skeptical arguments A sort of math-y piece dismantling a popular criticism of the Moorean response to skepticism AMA Professor Pynn will join us Wednesday for a couple hours of live Q&A on his research in epistemology, the philosophy of language and other areas. Please feel free to post questions for Professor Pynn here. He will look at this thread before he starts and begin with some questions from here while the initial questions in the new thread come in. Please join me in welcoming Professor Pynn to our community!

Hi redditors! We are Greg Mandt, System Program Director for NOAA’s GOES-R satellite series, and Dr. Steve Goodman, GOES-R Senior Scientist. Together, we have worked with our team to plan, develop, and launch NOAA’s GOES-R, a revolutionary new geostationary weather satellite! We cannot wait to see it launch atop its Atlas V 541 rocket and make its way to geostationary orbit. GOES-R is scheduled to head to space in less than 30 days—leaving Earth at 5:40pm EDT on November 4, 2016. GOES-R, or GOES-16 as it will be known once it reaches orbit, will provide five times faster weather coverage, more accurate data for hurricane tracking and intensity forecasts, real-time mapping of total lightning for improved severe weather prediction, advanced warning of space weather hazards, and improved transportation safety– all from ONE satellite! Want to know more about the mission, the satellite, the launch, or the science behind it all? We are here today to discuss all things GOES-R! Thank you everyone! We appreciate all of the questions. If you would like more information on the launch, please visit www.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES-R You can learn more about the GOES-R satellite series and see the countdown to launch here!

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Hi Reddit, The Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry is hosting the 5th Australasian annual meeting this week and has asked experts from across academia, government and industry to answer questions on a wide array of environmental issues. The theme for this year’s conference is “Industry, Science and Environment: Towards a Sustainable Future”. We will have experts across a wide range of environmental science topics including pesticides, metals, pharmaceuticals, nanotechnology, microplastics, oil and gas, risk assessment and remediation in extreme environments, environmental analysis and monitoring, sustainable waste management and human health issues and many more. If you have questions about chemicals or toxicants in the environment – we’ll try to get you the best possible answers according to the latest science. Please do note that we are asking members of the society who represent researchers from a variety of disciplines and sectors; the answers are not official SETAC positions. We encourage discussion and debate! Just keep it professional. For more information on SETAC http://www.setac.org EDIT: We’re here having lunch and answering questions! Post your question and the organizers of the conference will find someone to answer it as soon as possible. Answers to questions will begin at 12:30PM AEST (2:30PM NZDT, 9:30AM AWST, 7:30AM BST, 9:30PM 5/10/16 EST, 6:30PM 5/10/16 PST) until 4:30PM AEST (6:30PM NZDT, 1:30PM AWST, 11:30AM BST, 1:30AM EST, 10:30PM 5/10/16 PST). Edit (5:00pm AEST): And we’re done. Thanks for all your questions! We hope you got something out of it! If you’re interested in following us on twitter you can do so at https://twitter.com/SETAC_AU Or on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/SETACAu Our conference is on for one more day, so you can follow along at the hashtag #setacau2016 Thanks everyone!

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Hi reddit! The Zika virus outbreak in the Americas has caused global concern. To help advance the fight against this debilitating virus, we launched OpenZika. OpenZika is a project running on World Community Grid, an IBM philanthropic initiative which provides scientists with free, massive computing resources, donated by volunteers worldwide. Specifically, we’re enlisting the help of World Community Grid volunteers to run docking experiments against crystal structures and homology models of Zika proteins (and other related flavivirus targets that are structurally similar) on their computers and Android devices. We are harnessing World Community Grid’s massive computational power to search through thousands of current drugs (to see if they can be re-purposed against Zika) and millions of drug-like compounds (to lay the foundation for subsequent drug development against Zika). After we have selected and our collaborators have tested compounds that could be effective in killing the Zika virus, we will publish our data and results and share them with the public. As soon as we have proven that some of the candidate compounds can actually either (a) prevent the replication of the Zika virus in cell-based tests or (b) prevent the virus from infecting cells, we and other labs can then modify and evolve these molecules to increase their potency against the virus, improve their other properties (such as solubility, permeability, and metabolic stability), and reduce their toxic side effects, to advance and accelerate the discovery and development of new antiviral drugs against the Zika virus. Carolina Horta Andrade – I am Adjunct Professor at Faculty of Pharmacy of Federal University of Goias, Brazil, and head of LabMol – Laboratory for Molecular Modeling and Drug Design. My research focuses on Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD) for Neglected Tropical Diseases and Cancer, using an integration of computational and experimental approaches in order to identify new hit and lead compounds for malaria, tuberculosis, leishmaniosis, schistosomiasis, dengue, Chagas disease, as well as for cancer. My group is also focused on the development of in silico tools to predict ADME and toxicity properties of chemical compounds, and development of web platforms as alternatives for animal testing. My laboratory is working in collaboration with many researchers in the US and Europe, as well as in Brazil, integrating computational and experimental approaches to drug design and discovery. We believe that drug discovery is an interdisciplinary process and we need to collaborate to advance science. Alexander L. Perryman - I am a senior researcher in Joel Freundlich’s lab at the Rutgers University, New Jersey Medical School. I have been studying protein structures and how they interact with other molecules for 2 decades. For the past 18 years, I have been developing and applying computational approaches to help advance drug discovery and development research, with a focus on discerning mechanisms of multi-drug resistance and figuring out how to defeat them. I devoted a couple years to cancer research at MU, followed by a dozen years working on HIV at UCSD and TSRI (including running the day-to-day operations of FightAIDS@Home on World Community Grid for 6 years). I also designed and ran the GO Fight Against Malaria (GO FAM) project on World Community Grid, which is when I began working on malaria and tuberculosis. In the Freundlich lab, I am the computational core that helps guide our research on tuberculosis and the drug-resistant ESKAPE pathogens (such as MRSA). Sean Ekins- I am CEO of Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, Inc. I have spent 20 years working on using computers to help drug discovery. Over the last 8 years I have worked on neglected diseases like tuberculosis, Chagas disease, Ebola and Zika. We will be back at 4 pm ET to answer your questions, ask us anything!

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Hi Reddit, The International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) conducts scientific ocean drilling expeditions throughout the world’s oceans in search of clues to Earth’s structure and past. The current expedition is Expedition 362: Sumatra Seismogenic Zone, aboard the U.S. vessel for scientific ocean drilling, the JOIDES Resolution http://www.joidesresolution.org. We want to know why earthquakes happen where and when they do. When earthquakes happen in the ocean, they can displace huge volumes of water and cause tsunamis, such as the 26 December 2004 Sumatra earthquake and the 11 March 2011 Tohoku-Oki (Fukushima) earthquake. The combination of ground shaking and flooding is destructive and deadly. Very large earthquakes like these are typically at subduction zones , places where tectonic plates converge and one plate gets pushed down beneath the other. Yet these earthquakes, as well as several others in the past 15 years, surprised earth scientists in terms of their size and the amount and location of the fault slip during the earthquake. Subduction zone earthquakes can happen many tens or even hundreds of kilometers below Earth’s surface. The shallower and larger the earthquake, the more damage it can cause by shaking. It is even more dangerous if it occurs under the ocean floor because it can trigger a tsunami. We can’t predict earthquakes, but we can learn more about what happens below the Earth’s surface and why rocks break and cause earthquakes that trigger tsunamis. A team of 30 scientists from around the globe are on board for two months to work on these questions. Hand-in-hand with the amazing technology required to drill deep into the ocean floor, we are collecting the core samples that hold clues to answer these questions. We will be back at 12 pm ET, Join us to ask us anything about this intriguing science, how we got here, what we hope to discover, and our lives on board the ship! AMA!

Hi Reddit! Today, Science Magazine published “Doing Science while Black,” by Dr. Ed Smith, a native of Sierra Leone who studied and now teaches in the US. He writes “Being an academic scientist in this country with my skin color and accent has not been easy, but I hope that my resilience amid significant challenges offers a path for younger minority scientists.” Dr. Smith’s article fits within an important conversation around bias within the field of science. Many leaders from the science community have been participating in that discussion, including Dr. Shirley Malcom, the director of the Education and Human Resource programs of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Dr. Malcom works tirelessly to improve the quality and increase access to education and careers in STEM fields as well as to enhance public science literacy. The American Association from the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is proud to offer a platform for conversations around identifying, confronting, and overcoming implicit bias, publishing articles such as Carrie Arnold’s “Countering gender bias at conferences;” hosting panels that explore how to counter implicit bias in peer review; and presenting sessions at our Annual Meeting—including last year’s “Opting out? Gender, Societal Affluence, and 8th Graders’ Aspirations for Math Jobs,” and “Expanding Potential: Overcoming Challenges of Underrepresented STEM Groups.” We’re teaming up to answer questions about how implicit bias is manifest in the sciences (for example, in peer review, in accepting articles for publication, in promoting people to leadership positions), how individuals can identify and overcome bias, and how institutions can put smart policies in place to minimize the impact of implicit bias. We are: Dr. Shirley Malcom is the head of Education and Human Resources Programs at AAAS. Dr. Ed Smith is a professor of comparative genomics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg Dr. Avery D. Posey, Jr., Ph.D.: I am an Instructor in the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. My laboratory develops chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies to target human and canine cancers, including leukemia, myeloma, pancreatic, prostate, breast, and colon cancer, specifically by recognizing cancer-specific glycosylation. I am passionate about inclusion and diversity in academic science, from trainee through faculty. Dr. Caleph B. Wilson, Ph.D.: I am an industry scientist, co-founder of the National Science & Technology News Service (@NSTNSorg) and logistics director of the National Science Policy Group (@NatSciPolGroup). In addition to my career as a researcher, I advocate for STEM equity and inclusion through science communication, outreach and policy reforms. We’ll be live at 4 PM EST (1 PM PST, 9 PM UTC)– ask us anything! EDIT: Thank you all for participating in this AMA with us. We enjoyed it, but have to get off now.

Hi reddit! My name is Christian Schwägerl, and I write for Yale Environment 360 magazine. In my work as a journalist and book author, I have covered science, environment and politics for more than 20 years. In recent years, my main focus is the Anthropocene, the now widely known idea that our human impact on Earth is not only profound and global, but also long-lasting enough to be put on the geological time-scale. My book “The Anthropocene” (Synergetic, 2014) explores pathways towards an Anthropocene that is better than today’s destructive and degenerative practicies. In my recent Yale Environment 360 investigation, “Vanishing Act: Why Insects are declining and why it matters”, scientists Rodolfo Dirzo and Wägele J. Wolfgang join me to understand why the dwindling insect populations was really disconcerting in this respect. Not only do insect populations decline, but monitoring and research fall far behind what would be necessary to really understand and address the problem. Like with so many other things we take for granted, the small and invisible is hugely important. An extinct bug might make most people shrug. But our lives depend more on healthy insect ecology than we think. In future articles, I want to explore the huge importance of small organisms further. My name is Rodolfo Dirzo and I am an ecologist at Stanford University. My work examines the study of species interactions in tropical ecosystems from Latin America and Africa. My recent research highlights the decline of animal life (“defaunation”), and how this affects ecosystem processes/services. I developed a global index for invertebrate abundance that showed a 45 percent decline over the last four decades, published in 2014 in Science, “Defaunation in the Anthropocene.” My name is Wägele J. Wolfgang and I am a biologist and Director of the Zoological Research Museum in Bonn, Germany. With the help of my team, I have developed a plan for an automated biodiversity surveillance system, which would photograph, videotape, capture, or audio-record animal and insect species and perform automatic analysis of species richness and abundance. We have weather stations for climate research all over the country, so we want to add a dense network of biodiversity stations so we can measure automatically how much life there is in our landscapes. We plan to use automated identification techniques, either through artificial intelligence image analysis or genetic fingerprinting, or by matching acoustic recordings with data collections. This system could collect, identify, and record species data 24/7 and gather data we desperately need to assess the decline of insects. We will be answering your questions at 11am EST – Ask Us Anything!

Hi reddit! I’m Wilson Smith, an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, studying solar energy. My team researches various ways to convert solar energy into electricity and chemical fuels using only water and CO2 as the raw materials. These processes try to replicate what nature has done for over a billion years in photosynthesis, and thus this process is sometimes called ‘artificial photosynthesis’. However, plants have generally very low efficiencies (~1%), so we try to find ways to beat nature using only cheap and abundant materials. Recently, we were able to achieve an efficiency of 12.7%, but still have our work cut out for us. Our ultimate goal is to design systems and devices that can help contribute to the global transition to a renewable energy society that is sustainable and clean. You can catch up with our work on our group website (www.smithsolarlab.com), or follow our updates on twitter (@smithsolarlab). Outside of r/Science, I’ve been known to lurk in r/Phish and r/ASOIAF, and went to high school with Jean-Ralphio from Parks and Rec. I’ll be here as long as it takes to answer your questions about solar fuels, sustainable energy technologies, and what its like to set up a research lab (and life) in Europe as an American. Lets get this going reddit, ask me anything! I’ll be back at 1 pm EST (10 am PST, 6 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask me anything!

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Kite Pharma is a biotech company that manufactures CAR-T cells. Essentially, CAR-T cells are T-cells taken from a patient, engineered to recognize and destroy the patient’s tumor, and then put back in the body to kill the cancer cells. The CAR-T concept has been exciting researchers for several years now, but clinical studies were typically small and mostly focused on testing the safety of the technology. Last night, KITE Pharma released new data from their ongoing pivotal (meaning intended to be used to apply for FDA approval) phase II study using CAR-T cells in Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. The results were very impressive. KTE-C19 (the CAR-T drug) met the primary endpoint of objective response rate (ORR), p < 0.0001, with an ORR of 76 percent, including 47 percent complete remissions (CR). Historically, standard of care has an 8% CR rate for these patients. While very exciting, there are still several concerns with the technology: namely safety, and duration of remission. A number of patients experienced adverse events related to the drug, and two died as a result of treatment. Additionally, while 47% of patients experienced a complete remission, some had relapsed three months later. This is part of the Science Discussion Series, so I will try to check in intermittently during the day to help discuss this clinical trial, CAR-T cells and other cool technologies in the immunotherapy space.