Science

A gift from their mothers might reenergize the cells of children who carry faulty mitochondria, the organelles that serve as cells’ power plants. A research team is testing a strategy that involves soaking patients’ blood cells in a broth of healthy mitochondria from their mothers and then reinfusing them. Early signs suggest the intervention is safe and may improve the children’s health and development, and the researchers are planning a follow-up clinical trial. This approach “is different from what anyone else is doing,” says Mary Kay Koenig, a pediatric neurologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center, Houston, who wasn’t connected to the study, published today in Science Translational Medicine. Although the result...

PUBLIC HEALTH Ebola vaccine trial on hold A planned clinical trial of vaccines against the Sudan ebolavirus likely will not go forward, after traditional containment methods appear to have stamped out the outbreak of Ebola that surfaced in Uganda on 20 September. An international effort moved at record speed to deliver two experimental vaccines against the virus, which differs from the Zaire ebolavirus that caused the massive West Africa outbreak in 2014–16. The vaccines arrived in Uganda last week, and a third is on the way. But the planned “ring trial” depended on vaccinating recent contacts of people with confirmed Sudan ebolavirus infections. The last known case in Uganda left the hospital 3 weeks ago, and the number of contac...