Tufts faculty have been discovering everything from how to measure stress levels and make cancer vaccines work to the ways that coffee seems to protect health
Going for the weight loss gold standard with a fourth target, in this case a tetra-agonist peptide. Image: Hassan @ScienceBrush
Researchers across Tufts cover a very wide range of subjects, and each year stories about their work are among our most popular. These are some of the top-read stories of 2025 from the worlds of chemistry, nutrition, neuroscience, biomedical engineering, biology, economics, and political science.
Tufts Chemists Design a Next Generation of Weight Loss Drugs
Weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy are widely popular, but have to be injected and sometimes come with unpleasant side effects. The current drugs target up to three hormone receptors related to the desire to eat, but now a team led by Krishna Kumar, Robinson Professor of Chemistry, has designed a new, next-generation compound that targets a fourth hormone that could be more effective with fewer side effects.
“Obesity is linked to over 180 different disease conditions, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, osteoarthritis, liver disease, and type 2 diabetes,” said Kumar. “What drives us is the idea that we can design a single drug to treat obesity and simultaneously mitigate the risk of developing a long list of health problems plaguing society.”
Hold the Cream and Sugar: Black Coffee Linked to Lower Risk of Death
Good news for coffee drinkers—at least those who don’t add in a lot of cream and sugar.
Photo: Alonso Nichols
Black coffee and coffee with low levels of added sugar and saturated fat had a 14% lower risk of all-cause mortality, compared to people who don’t have their morning joe. But add more than a dash of sugar and a tablespoon of half-and-half, and the benefits disappear.
“The health benefits of coffee might be attributable to its bioactive compounds,” said Fang Fang Zhang, senior author of the study and the Neely Family Professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.
Dental Implants Could Feel More Like Real Teeth
For the millions of people who get dental implants each year, there is now hope that their implants could feel like their natural teeth.
Photo: Jenna Schad
Tufts dental researchers have developed an implant wrapped in a biodegradable coating that contains stem cells and a special protein that helps the cells multiply and turn into nerve tissue.
As the coating dissolves during the healing process, the stem cells and protein fuel the growth of new nerve tissue around the implant. “This new implant and minimally invasive technique should help reconnect nerves, allowing the implant to ‘talk’ to the brain much like a real tooth,” said Jake Jinkun Chen, professor of periodontology.
Mapping How We Learn—and Why Minds Sometimes Go Off Course
Uncertainty is built into the brain’s wiring, with groups of neurons casting votes—some optimistic, some pessimistic.
Illustration: Shutterstock
Our decisions usually reflect the average result, but the brain can assign too much meaning to random events, as happens in schizophrenia, or become stuck in rigid patterns, as in obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Now, a new kind of computer model—grounded in real biology—lets researchers simulate how brain circuits make decisions and adapt when the rules change. It could lay the groundwork for more precise treatments for mental health disorders, says Michael Halassa, professor of neuroscience.
A Dental Floss That Can Measure Stress
Chronic stress can lead to high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, depression, and anxiety, among other afflictions.
Illustration: Nafize Ishtiaque Hossain
Too often, though, monitoring stress is difficult or imprecise, but now a Tufts engineer and his team have devised a specially designed floss that can easily and accurately measure cortisol, a stress hormone, in real time.
The saliva-sensing dental floss device looks just like a common floss pick. Bringing the device into the home and in the hands of individuals without need for training will make it possible to fold stress monitoring into many aspects of health care, says Sameer Sonkusale, professor of electrical and computer engineering.
New Research Deepens Understanding of How Vitamin K Affects Brain Health
Many people don’t know about vitamin K—it’s found in green leafy vegetables such as Brussels sprouts, broccoli, kale, and spinach.
Brussels sprouts, kale, collard greens, and spinach are foods that are rich in vitamin K. Photo: Shutterstock
It’s known to play an essential role in blood clotting, and research suggests it may also have positive effects on cardiovascular health as well as joint health.
Now researchers have found that insufficient consumption of vitamin K may adversely affect cognition as people get older. Low levels of the vitamin may increase inflammation and hamper proliferation of neural cells in the hippocampus, a portion of the brain that is central to functions such as learning and memory.
Alternative Approach to Lyme Disease Vaccine Development Shows Promise in Pre-clinical Models
Lyme disease infects about 476,000 people in the U.S. each year and can come with severe complications such as ongoing fatigue and joint issues. While vaccine developers have come close to success, no human vaccine for Lyme disease has yet been commercially viable.
Photo: Shutterstock
Now a new study by an international team of researchers has identified a promising new target—the Lyme bacterial protein CspZ, which the bacteria use to evade detection from the body’s immune system.
Yi-Pin Lin, an associate professor of infectious disease and global health at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, and his collaborators identified the specific tweaks to CspZ’s genetic code to create an engineered protein that produced a robust immune response in pre-clinical studies in mice.
New Method Boosts Cancer Vaccine Potency
Vaccines for cancer are not easy to make.
Image: Yu Zhao
One hurdle is the difficulty in finding antigens in tumors that look foreign enough to trigger an immune response. Now researchers at Tufts have developed a cancer vaccine that effectively amplifies the visibility of tumor antigens to the immune system, which leads to a potent immune response.
Developed by a team led by postdoctoral scholar Yu Zhao and Qiaobing Xu, professor of biomedical engineering, the method avoids the need to hunt down a specific tumor antigen, instead relying on a digested mix of protein fragments called a lysate that can be generated from any solid tumor.
New Study Links Millions of Diabetes and Heart Disease Cases Globally to Sugary Drinks
Some 2.2 million new cases of type 2 diabetes and 1.2 million new cases of cardiovascular disease occur each year globally due to consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, according to a new study.
Photo: Shutterstock
The situation is particularly sobering in developing countries. Sugar-sweetened beverages contributed to more than 21% of all new diabetes cases in Sub-Saharan Africa, and nearly 24% in Latin America and the Caribbean.
“Sugar-sweetened beverages are heavily marketed and sold in low- and middle-income nations,” said Dariush Mozaffarian, director of the Food is Medicine Institute at the Friedman School. “Not only are these communities consuming harmful products, but they are also often less well equipped to deal with the long-term health consequences.”
How International Trade Affects the Economy
Large and persistent annual trade deficits have become the norm in the U.S., and there is talk about the corrosive effect on the U.S. economy.
Photo: Shutterstock
However, it’s normal for a country to have a bilateral deficit with some of its trading partners and bilateral trade surpluses with others.
And while there is evidence that the rapid and massive rise in trade with China harmed some local economies in the U.S., those have often been in places where an industry has already been phasing out, wages are relatively high, or education levels are low, said Michael Klein, William L. Clayton Professor of International Economic Affairs at The Fletcher School.
For the economy as a whole, “there is no systematic link between bigger trade deficits and slower economic growth,” he said.
Birds Found Thriving in a Very Large Commercial Forest in Maine
When a team of researchers recently repeated a bird population study they did 30 years earlier in a very large commercial forest landscape in Maine, they were stunned to find more birds than before.
Photo: Shutterstock
That was especially surprising since North America has lost an estimated 3 billion birds since 1970—a nearly 30% drop across species—mostly due to habitat loss and degradation.
“Numerous factors are likely behind the abundance of bird populations we see in northcentral Maine,” said Michael Reed, professor of biology. “We can’t know what they all are, but we know at least one: It’s all forest up there.”
Most Young People Support Democracy, but Many Are Skeptical It Works for Them
Researchers found that 62% of 18-29 year olds surveyed display “passive appreciation” for democracy, but that they are not civically engaged and do little more than vote, which doesn’t augur well for democracy. Another 31% of the Gen Z survey respondents do not buy into the value of democracy, have little confidence that the system works, and show higher support for authoritarian governments than other youth.
“When young people do not feel they have the tools or ability to participate in a political system, they are less likely to value it,” according to researchers. Photo: Shutterstock
The smallest subset, at 7%, are considered to have “hostile dissatisfaction” with the political system. They value democracy, are the most politically active of all youth, and are most likely to be liberal, but are very critical of the state of democracy in the U.S. today.
“When young people do not feel they have the tools or ability to participate in a political system, they are less likely to value it,” the researchers say.
