08/13/2026
A milestone worth pausing on.
With this outstanding achievement, Dr. Agalliu and his team have delivered the strongest mechanistic evidence to date for the "infection → immune signaling → BBB dysfunction → neuropsychiatric symptoms" pathway that PANDAS parents, advocates, and healthcare allies have argued for since 1998.
Dr. Agalliu and Dr. Uğur Akcan have shared in their personal LinkedIn posts celebrating the official publication of this work that this paper took THREE YEARS to move through review and revision before it could be published.
That gap between scientific rigor and a family's lived urgency is one of the hardest parts of this fight. Your child doesn't get to wait for peer review, and it's okay to feel the weight of that.
But this is why milestones like this one matter so much. It's not just a paper — it's three years of researchers who kept showing up for our community, even through real threats to their own funding along the way.
Our community of patients, parents, extended family, advocates, donors, and those care providers who choose to listen and choose to be curious helps create the conditions for this kind of science to happen. Its up to all of us to continue contributing to that work however we are able.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-76232-w