beat · 27 stories
Merck and Moderna's vaccine improved recurrence-free survival in a 1,137-patient Phase 3 melanoma trial. A BioNTech halt in colorectal cancer shows the platform being matched, cancer by cancer.
The Small paper reports an antibody-free way to isolate extracellular vesicles — the cell's natural 'shipping parcels' — and a light-triggered switch that releases cargo inside target cells, tested in primary human liver cells.
PONG 2.0 reads immune genetics from cheap DNA-chip data already in biobank samples with comparable accuracy across African, South Asian, East Asian, European, and Admixed American samples.
Aptamers, short engineered DNA strands that grab a specific target, can now be profiled at 11,792 candidates per run, with Delta and Omicron binders pulled out in the same screen.
Frozen-section pathology, the quick lab slice of a tumor in the OR, averaged 36.3 minutes; a femtosecond, ultrashort-pulse laser plus a deep-learning model finished in 5.4 in a 144-patient Shanghai trial.
A new review says the chemistry of light-controlled pain medicine has matured, but the engineering to get the molecules to the right tissue at the right time is the harder problem.
A freestanding ceramic mesh converts magnetic fields into local electricity, giving researchers a contact-free way to steer precursor cells that mature into neurons and a mental model for next-generation devices that interface with living tissue.
Kappa free light chain — a protein fragment produced by immune cells active inside the brain — flags autoimmune encephalitis, a rare disorder in which the immune system attacks the brain, early in the disease course, while neurofilament light
A phase 2 analysis of survodutide, an experimental injectable weight-loss drug, finds it repairs inflamed and scarred livers in patients with MASH — metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis, the severe form of fatty liver disease — largely
A Nature Metabolism study in mice names the enzyme UBE2N as the lever that decides when fatty liver disease becomes the inflammatory, scarring form (MASH), which has only one approved drug.
One peer-reviewed paper finds a common pattern in how DNA is folded inside cells across long Covid, chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), PTSD, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis.
A new study pinpoints a fuel-maintenance pathway that the cancer-driving stem cells in high-risk myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) depend on, while healthy blood-forming cells adapt without it.