"This year has been a major turning point in American health care," reports USA Today, "and patients can anticipate several major developments in the new year," including the beginning of a CRISPR "revolution" and "a new reckoning with drug prices that could change the landscape of the U.S. health care system for decades to come." Health care officials expect 2024 to bring a wave of innovation and change in medicine, treatment and public health... Many think 2024 could be the year more people have the tools to follow through on New Year's resolutions about weight loss. If they can afford them and manage to stick with them, people can turn to a new generation of remarkably effective weight-loss drugs, also called GLP-1s, which offer the potential for substantial weight loss...

In 2023, mental health issues became among the nation's most deadly, costly and pervasive health crises... The dearth of remedies has also paved the way for an unsuspecting class of drugs: psychedelics. MDMA, a party drug commonly known as "ecstasy," could win approval for legal distribution in 2024, as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Another psychedelic, a ketamine derivative eskatemine, sold as Spravato, was approved in 2019 to treat depression, but it is being treated like a conventional therapy that must be dosed regularly, not like a psychedelic that provides a long-lasting learning experience, said Matthew Johnson, an expert in psychedelics at Johns Hopkins University. MDMA (midomafetamine capsules) would be different, as the first true psychedelic to win FDA approval.

In a late-stage trial of patients with moderate or severe post-traumatic stress disorder, close to 90% showed clinically significant improvements four months after three treatments with MDMA and more than 70% no longer met the criteria for having the disorder, which represented "really impressive results," according to Matthew Johnson, an expert in psychedelics at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Psilocybin, known colloquially as "magic mushrooms," is also working its way through the federal approval process, but it likely won't come up before officials for another year, Johnson said. Psychedelics are something to keep an eye on in the future, as they're being used to treat an array of mental health issues: eskatimine for depression, MDMA for PTSD and psilocybin for addiction. Johnson said his research suggests that psychedelics will probably have a generalizable benefit across many mental health challenges in the years to come.
2024 will also be the first year America's drug-makers face new limits on how much they can increase prices for drugs covered by the federal health insurance program Medicare.

There's already a powerful immunotherapy that "involves engineering a patient's T cells so they recognize and attack cancer cells," writes one of America's top cancer hospitals. The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center notes that CAR T cell therapy has already begun to revolutionize cancer treatment," with these "chimeric" T cells "multiplied in a lab and given back to the patient to be a continual fighting force against the cancer."

But now "New research from the lab of physician-scientist Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD, shows that disrupting a single gene in the CAR T cells can make them more potent and able to fight tumors longer." In a paper published in Cancer Discovery, the team demonstrated that disrupting the gene SUV39H1 causes a ripple effect: It restores the expression of multiple genes that help sustain the T cells' longevity. The researchers showed that this approach improved CAR T cell effectiveness against multiple cancers in mice...

The researchers used the gene-editing tool CRISPR/Cas9 to alter SUV39H1 in human CAR T cells. They placed these modified CAR T cells into mice that had been implanted with either human leukemia cells or prostate cancer cells. For both cancers, the CAR T cells were able to sustain their function without becoming exhausted, leading to tumor elimination. By contrast, mice with unedited CAR T cells did not survive the cancer. "The edited CAR T cells can maintain their anti-cancer effects, even when we challenged them repeatedly by exposing them to new tumors over time," Dr. Zhao says. "These results suggest that SUV39H1-edited CAR T cells may reduce tumor relapse in patients."

There did not appear to be serious side effects in the mice, although researchers will need to confirm the safety of this approach in humans. The biotechnology company Mnemo Therapeutics is exploring the possibility of conducting clinical trials based on this research.

Cells have a protein receptor that will cause that cell to die — in theory. Unfortunately, "Previous efforts to target this receptor have been unsuccessful," says Jogender Tushir-Singh, an associate professor in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California, Davis.

But he's now led a team of researchers at the university's Comprehensive Cancer Center that's identified a receptor-activating protein section. And more importantly, "now that we've identified this epitope, there could be a therapeutic path forward" for targeting that receptor... in tumors. The findings were published Oct. 14 in the Nature journal Cell Death & Differentiation... Death receptors do precisely what their name implies — when targeted, they trigger programmed cell death of tumor cells. They offer a potential workaround that could simultaneously kill tumor cells and pave the way for more effective immunotherapies and CAR T-cell therapy...

Tushir-Singh and his colleagues knew they might be able to target cancer cells selectively if they found the right epitope. Having identified this specific epitope, he and other researchers can now design a new class of antibodies to selectively bind to and activate Fas to potentially destroy tumor cells specifically.
Singh says their research "sets the stage" to develop antibodies that selectively kill tumor cells.

"Software that controls your body should always respect your freedom," warns the program manager of the Free Software Foundation: In July, users of the proprietary software app LibreLink, who live in the UK and use Apple devices, found that the app they depend on to monitor their blood sugar was not working anymore after the developer Abbott pushed an update for the app... Despite what its name may suggest, there is nothing libre about the LibreLink app. It's proprietary software, which means users must depend on the company to keep it running and to distribute it. With free software, [a user] would have had the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve the software himself, or he could have leaned on a community of developers and users to share and fix the software, and the old version of the software would have been available to revert the update...

Two months later, with Apple's update to iOS 17, users of the FreeStyle LibreLink and Libre 2 apps had reason again to fear that the software they rely on wouldn't work after updating their iPhones. This time, users all over the world were affected. In September, Abbott warned Apple users: "As part of the upcoming iOS 17 release, Apple is introducing StandBy Mode and Assistive Access Mode ... this release may impact your experience with the FreeStyle Libre 2 app, the FreeStyle LibreLink app, or the FreeStyle LibreLinkUp app. We recommend that you disable automatic operating system updates on the smartphone using the mentioned apps." This warning was made because StandBy Mode would sometimes prohibit time-sensitive notifications such as glucose alarms, and the Assistive Access Mode would impact sensor activation and alarm setting modification in the app...

And a scenario where a company abandons service or updates to its users is not merely theoretical. This is the bitter reality faced by users of eye implants produced by Second Sight Medical Products since the company decided to abandon the technology in 2020 when facing the prospect of bankruptcy. [">According to IEEE Spectrum], Terry Byland, whose sight has been dependent on the first-generation Argus implant since 2004, says of his experience, "As long as nothing goes wrong, I'm fine. But if something does go wrong with it, well, I'm screwed. Because there's no way of getting it fixed." That's what also happened to Barbara Campbell, whose retinal implant suddenly stopped working when she was on a subway...

It's up to us advocates of free software to inform the people around us of the issues with proprietary software in medical aids. Let's encourage our friends, parents, and grandparents to ask their doctor about the software in their medical devices and to choose and insist upon free software over proprietary software.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: GSK will pay 23andMe $20 million for access to the genetic-testing company's vast trove of consumer DNA data, extending a five-year collaboration that's allowed the drugmaker to mine genetic data as it researches new medications. Under the new agreement, 23andMe will provide GSK with one year of access to anonymized DNA data from the approximately 80% of gene-testing customers who have agreed to share their information for research, 23andMe said in a statement Monday. The genetic-testing company will also provide data-analysis services to GSK.

23andMe is best known for its DNA-testing kits that give customers ancestry and health information. But the DNA it collects is also valuable, including for scientific research. With information from more than 14 million customers, the only data sets that rival the size of the 23andMe library belong to Ancestry.com and the Chinese government. The idea for drugmakers is to comb the data for hints about genetic pathways that might be at the root of disease, which could significantly speed up the long, slow process of drug development. GSK and 23andMe have already taken one potential medication to clinical trials: a cancer drug that works to block CD96, a protein that helps modulate the body's immune responses. It entered that testing phase in four years, compared to an industry average of about seven years. Overall, the partnership between GSK and 23andMe has produced more than 50 new drug targets, according to the statement.

The new agreement changes some components of the collaboration. Any discoveries GSK makes with the 23andMe data will now be solely owned by the British pharmaceutical giant, while the genetic-testing company will be eligible for royalties on some projects. In the past, the two companies pursued new drug targets jointly. GSK's new deal with 23andMe is also non-exclusive, leaving the genetic-testing company free to license its database to other drugmakers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Egbert Edelbroek was acting as a sperm donor when he first wondered whether it's possible to have babies in space. Curious about the various ways that donated sperm can be used, Edelbroek, a Dutch entrepreneur, began to speculate on whether in vitro fertilization technology was possible beyond Earth -- or could even be improved by the conditions found there. Could the weightlessness of space be better than a flat laboratory petri dish? Now Edelbroek is CEO of SpaceBorn United, a biotech startup seeking to pioneer the study of human reproduction away from Earth. Next year, he plans to send a mini lab on a rocket into low Earth orbit, where in vitro fertilization, or IVF, will take place. If it succeeds, Edelbroek hopes his work could pave the way for future space settlements.

"Humanity needs a backup plan," he says. "If you want to be a sustainable species, you want to be a multiplanetary species." Beyond future space colonies, there is also a more pressing need to understand the effects of space on the human reproductive system. No one has ever become pregnant in space -- yet. But with the rise of space tourism, it's likely that it will eventually happen one day. Edelbroek thinks we should be prepared. Despite the burgeoning interest in deep space exploration and settlement, prompted in part by billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, we still know very little about what happens to our reproductive biology when we're in orbit. A report released in September by the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine points out that almost no research has been done on human reproduction in space, adding that our understanding of how space affects reproduction is "vital to long-term space exploration, but largely unexplored to date."

Some studies on animals have suggested that the various stages of reproduction -- from mating and fertilization to embryo development, implantation, pregnancy, and birth -- can function normally in space. For example, in the very first such experiment, eight Japanese medaka fish developed from egg to hatchling aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 1994. All eight survived the return to Earth and seemed to behave normally.Yet other studies have found evidence that points to potential problems. Pregnant rats that spent much of their third trimester -- a total of five days -- on a Soviet satellite in 1983 experienced complications during labor and delivery. Like all astronauts returning to Earth, the rats were exhausted and weak. Their deliveries lasted longer than usual, likely because of atrophied uterine muscles. All the pups in one of the litters died during delivery, the result of an obstruction thought to be due in part to the mother's weakened state.

To Edelbroek, these inconclusive results point to a need to systematically isolate each step in the reproductive process in order to better understand how it is affected by conditions like lower gravity and higher radiation exposure. The mini lab his company developed is designed to do exactly that. It is about the size of a shoebox and uses microfluidics to connect a chamber containing sperm to a chamber containing an egg. It can also rotate at different speeds to replicate the gravitational environment of Earth, the moon, or Mars. It is small enough to fit inside a capsule that can be housed on top of a rocket and launched into space.After the egg has been fertilized in the device, it splits into two cells, each of which divides again to form four cells and so on. After five to six days, the embryo reaches a stage known as a blastocyst, which looks like a hollow ball. At this point, the embryos in the mini lab will be cryogenically frozen for their return to Earth.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: A world-first trial of a gene therapy to cure a form of deafness has begun, potentially heralding a revolution in the treatment of hearing loss. Up to 18 children from the UK, Spain and the US are being recruited to the study, which aims to transform treatment of auditory neuropathy, a condition caused by the disruption of nerve impulses traveling from the inner ear to the brain. Participants will be monitored for five years to gauge whether their hearing improves, with initial results expected to be published next February.

Auditory neuropathy can be due to a variation in a single gene -- known as the OTOF gene -- which produces a protein called otoferlin. This protein typically allows the inner hair cells in the ear to communicate with the hearing nerve. Mutations in the OTOF gene can be identified by genetic testing. However, [Professor Manohar Bance, an ear surgeon at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust who is leading the trial in the UK] said it was a condition often missed when newborn babies were screened for potential hearing problems. "This is one of the few conditions where everything works except the transmission between the hair cells and the nerve. So everything else looks fine when you test it, but they can't hear anything. So these poor kids' [difficulties] end up being missed," Bance added.

The new gene therapy aims to deliver a working copy of the faulty OTOF gene using a modified, non-pathogenic virus. It will be delivered via an injection into the cochlea under general anaesthetic. Bance estimates that about 20,000 people across the US and five European countries -- the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy -- have auditory neuropathy due to OTOF mutations, underlining the potential significance of a successful treatment.[...] "If it works, it's 'one and done'" but the cost to health systems "is something that worries me," he added, noting that gene therapies could be priced in "the million dollar range" per patient. However, he hoped that "economies of scale" as the technology developed further would ultimately allow them to be provided more cheaply.

Kiley Price writes via Inside Climate News: In a new initiative announced on Tuesday, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is working with the nonprofit Revive & Restore and other partners to create a "genetic library" of the country's endangered species -- before it's too late. Through a process called biobanking, FWS field staff are gathering biological samples such as blood, tissues and reproductive cells from animals to be cryogenically preserved at extremely low temperatures (at least -256 degrees Fahrenheit) and stored at a USDA facility in Colorado. The samples will also be genetically sequenced and this information will be uploaded to a publicly available database called GenBank, where researchers can study them and compare their genomes to other members of their species.

In 2020 Serbian scientists were gifted China's "Fire-Eye" labs, remembers the Washington Post. The sophisticated portable labs "excelled not only at cracking the genetic code for viruses, but also for humans, with machines that can decipher genetic instructions contained within the cells of every person on Earth, according to its Chinese inventors."

Although some of them were temporary, "scores" of the portable labs "were donated or sold to foreign countries during the pandemic," reports the Washington Post. But it adds that now those same labs "are attracting the attention of Western intelligence agencies amid growing unease about China's intentions." Some analysts perceive China's largesse as part of a global attempt to tap into new sources of highly valuable human DNA data in countries around the world. That collection effort, underway for more than a decade, has included the acquisition of U.S. genetics companies as well as sophisticated hacking operations, U.S. and Western intelligence officials say. But more recently, it received an unexpected boost from the coronavirus pandemic, which created opportunities for Chinese companies and institutes to distribute gene-sequencing machines and build partnerships for genetic research in places where Beijing previously had little or no access, the officials said. Amid the pandemic, Fire-Eye labs would proliferate quickly, spreading to four continents and more than 20 countries, from Canada and Latvia to Saudi Arabia, and from Ethiopia and South Africa to Australia. Several, like the one in Belgrade, now function as permanent genetic-testing centers...

BGI Group, the Shenzhen-based company that makes Fire-Eye labs, said it has no access to genetic information collected by the lab it helped create in Serbia. But U.S. officials note that BGI was picked by Beijing to build and operate the China National GeneBank, a vast and growing government-owned repository that now includes genetic data drawn from millions of people around the world. The Pentagon last year officially listed BGI as one of several "Chinese military companies" operating in the United States, and a 2021 U.S. intelligence assessment linked the company to the Beijing-directed global effort to obtain even more human DNA, including from the United States. The U.S. government also has blacklisted Chinese subsidiaries of BGI for allegedly helping analyze genetic material gathered inside China to assist government crackdowns on the country's ethnic and religious minorities...

Beijing's drive to sweep up DNA from across the planet has occasionally stirred controversy, particularly after a 2021 Reuters series about aspects of the project. Chinese academics and military scientists have also attracted attention by debating the feasibility of creating biological weapons that might someday target populations based on their genes. Genetic-based weapons are regarded by experts as a distant prospect, at best, and some of the discussion appears to have been prompted by official paranoia about whether the United States and other countries are exploring such weapons.

U.S. intelligence officials believe China's global effort is mostly about beating the West economically, not militarily. There is no public evidence that Chinese companies have used foreign DNA for reasons other than scientific research. China has announced plans to become the world's leader in biotechnology by 2035, and it regards genetic information — sometimes called "the new gold" — as a crucial ingredient in a scientific revolution that could produce thousands of new drugs and cures...

U.S. intelligence officials said in interviews that they have limited insight into how BGI handles DNA information acquired overseas, including whether genetic data from the Fire-Eye labs ultimately end up in the computers of China's military or intelligence services... Chinese law makes clear that any information collected using BGI's machines can be accessed by the Chinese government. A national intelligence law enacted in 2017 stipulates that Chinese firms and citizens are legally bound to share proprietary information acquired in foreign countries whenever requested.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article

A biotech company has conducted a small-scale trial involving the implantation of lab-made neurons into the brains of 12 people with Parkinson's disease. The implanted neurons are designed to produce dopamine, which is deficient in Parkinson's patients, and early data suggests they may have survived and improved symptoms in some cases. MIT Technology Review reports: The study is one of the largest and most costly tests yet of embryonic-stem-cell technology, the controversial and much-hyped approach of using stem cells taken from IVF embryos to produce replacement tissue and body parts. The replacement neurons were manufactured using powerful stem cells originally sourced from a human embryo created an in vitro fertilization procedure. According to data presented by Henchliffe and others on August 28 at the International Congress for Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorder in Copenhagen, there are also hints that the added cells had survived and were reducing patients' symptoms a year after the treatment.

These clues that the transplants helped came from brain scans that showed an increase in dopamine cells in the patients' brains as well as a decrease in "off time," or the number of hours per day the volunteers felt they were incapacitated by their symptoms. However, outside experts expressed caution in interpreting the findings, saying they seemed to show inconsistent effects -- some of which might be due to the placebo effect, not the treatment. Because researchers can't see the cells directly once they are in a person's head, they instead track their presence by giving people a radioactive precursor to dopamine and then watching its uptake in their brains in a PET scanner. "It is encouraging that the trial has not led to any safety concerns and that there may be some benefits," says Roger Barker, who studies Parkinson's disease at the University of Cambridge. But Barker called the evidence the transplanted cells had survived "a bit disappointing."

He said the results were not so strong, adding that it's "still a bit too early to know" whether the transplanted cells took hold and repaired the patients' brains.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: The Y chromosome is a never-ending source of fascination (particularly to men) because it bears genes that determine maleness and make sperm. It's also small and seriously weird; it carries few genes and is full of junk DNA that makes it horrendous to sequence. However, new "long-read" sequencing techniques have finally provided a reliable sequence from one end of the Y to the other. The paper describing this Herculean effort has been published in Nature. The findings provide a solid base to explore how genes for sex and sperm work, how the Y chromosome evolved, and whether -- as predicted -- it will disappear in a few million years. [...]

Spoiler alert -- the Y turns out to be just as weird as we expected from decades of gene mapping and the previous sequencing. A few new genes have been discovered, but these are extra copies of genes that were already known to exist in multiple copies. The border of the pseudoautosomal region (which is shared with the X) has been pushed a bit further toward the tip of the Y chromosome. We now know the structure of the centromere (a region of the chromosome that pulls copies apart when the cell divides), and have a complete readout of the complex mixture of repetitive sequences in the fluorescent end of the Y.

But perhaps the most important outcome is how useful the findings will be for scientists all over the world. Some groups will now examine the details of Y genes. They will look for sequences that might control how SRY and the sperm genes are expressed, and to see whether genes that have X partners have retained the same functions or evolved new ones. Others will closely examine the repeated sequences to determine where and how they originated, and why they were amplified. Many groups will also analyze the Y chromosomes of men from different corners of the world to detect signs of degeneration, or recent evolution of function. It's a new era for the poor old Y.

An international team of scientists has developed a new technology that can help detect (or even treat) cancer in hard-to-reach places, such as the colon. The team has published a paper in Science for the technique dubbed CATCH, or cellular assay for targeted, CRISPR-discriminated horizontal gene transfer. Engadget reports: For their lab experiments, the scientists used a species of bacterium called Acinetobacter baylyi. This bacterium has the ability to naturally take up free-floating DNA from its surroundings and then integrate it into its own genome, allowing it to produce new protein for growth. What the scientists did was engineer A. baylyi bacteria so that they'd contain long sequences of DNA mirroring the DNA found in human cancer cells. These sequences serve as some sort of one-half of a zipper that locks on to captured cancer DNA. For their tests, the scientists focus on the mutated KRAS gene that's commonly found in colorectal tumors. If an A. baylyi bacterium finds a mutated DNA and integrates it into its genome, a linked antibiotic resistance gene also gets activated. That's what the team used to confirm the presence of cancer cells: After all, only bacteria with active antibiotic resistance could grow on culture plates filled with antibiotics.

While the scientists were successfully able to detect tumor DNA in mice injected with colorectal cancer cells in the lab, the technology is still not ready to be used for actual diagnosis. The team said it's still working on the next steps, including improving the technique's efficiency and evaluating how it performs compared to other diagnostic tests. In the future, the technology could also be used for targeted biological therapy that can deploy treatment to specific parts of the body based on the presence of certain DNA sequences.

In an effort to discover new 2D materials, a team of scientists from Ames National Laboratory determined the structure of boron monoxide. Phys.Org reports: This compound was first discovered in the 1940s and maintained research interest throughout the years. Scientists were, however, unable to determine the structure of the material due to technological limitations of the time. Using new NMR methods and previously unavailable analytical tools, the team from Ames Lab finally solved the structure of this deceptively simple material. "We initially weren't really looking into studying this particular material," said Frederic Perras, a scientist from Ames Lab and member of the research team. "We were actually trying to make a carbon-free covalent organic framework." A covalent organic framework is a low-density and porous material with a periodically ordered crystal structure. It is composed of organic molecules that are linked together through covalent bonds. [...]

Perras explained that boron monoxide is made using a precursor molecule that acts like building blocks. These molecules stick together through dehydration reactions. The key to understating the structure is to figure out how the blocks are physically arranged. "So we developed some NMR methods that allow us to study the orientation of these building blocks relative to each other. Basically, we found that adjacent precursor molecules were getting organized parallel to each other, which matched one of the previously proposed models," Perras said. "We also applied a lot of other techniques, including powder X-ray diffraction, which showed that these nanosheets organized themselves into what's called a turbostratic arrangement," said Perras. He explained that these stacked nanosheets are like a stack of paper thrown onto a desk. Once they land, they are not perfectly aligned, but they remain in a stack. The findings have been published in the journal American Chemical Society.

Following months of intense scrutiny of his scientific work, Marc Tessier-Lavigne announced Wednesday that he would resign as president of Stanford University after an independent review of his research found significant flaws in studies he supervised going back decades. From a report: The review, conducted by an outside panel of scientists, refuted the most serious claim involving Dr. Tessier-Lavigne's work -- that an important 2009 Alzheimer's study was the subject of an investigation that found falsified data and that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had covered it up. The panel concluded that the claim, published in February by The Stanford Daily, the campus newspaper, "appear to be mistaken" and that there was no evidence of falsified data, or that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had otherwise engaged in fraud.

But the review also stated that the 2009 study, conducted while he was an executive at the biotech company Genentech, had "multiple problems" and "fell below customary standards of scientific rigor and process," especially for a paper of such potential consequences. As a result of the review, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne said he would retract a 1999 paper that appeared in the journal Cell and two others that appeared in Science in 2001. Two other papers published in Nature, including the 2009 Alzheimer's study, would also undergo what was described as comprehensive correction. Stanford is known for its leadership in scientific research, and even though the claims involved work published before Dr. Tessier-Lavigne's arrival at the university in 2016, the allegations reflected poorly on the university's integrity.

eGenesis has started transplanting gene-edited pigs' hearts into infant baboons -- and humans may be next. From a report: The baby baboon is wearing a mesh gown and appears to be sitting upright. "This little lady ... looks pretty philosophical, I would say," says Eli Katz, who is showing me the image over a Zoom call. This baboon is the first to receive a heart transplant from a young gene-edited pig as part of a study that should pave the way for similar transplants in human babies, says Katz, chief medical officer at the biotech company eGenesis. The company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has developed a technique that uses the gene-editing tool CRISPR to make around 70 edits to a pig's genome. These edits should allow the organs to be successfully transplanted into people, the team says. As soon as next year, eGenesis hopes to transplant pig hearts into babies with serious heart defects. The goal is to buy them more time to wait for a human heart.

Before that happens, the team at eGenesis will practice on 12 infant baboons. Two such surgeries have been performed so far. Neither animal survived beyond a matter of days. But the company is optimistic, as are others in the field. Many recipients of the first liver transplants didn't survive either -- but thousands of people have since benefited from such transplants, says Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, who has worked with rival company United Therapeutics. Babies born with heart conditions represent "a great population to be focusing on," he says, "because so many of them die." Over 100,000 people in the US alone are waiting for an organ transplant. Every day, around 17 of them die. Researchers are exploring multiple options, including the possibility of bioprinting organs or growing new ones inside people's bodies. Transplanting animal organs is another potential alternative to help meet the need.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Disgraced Theranos co-founder Elizabeth Holmes' prison sentence has been reduced by two years, according to the Bureau of Prisons records. Holmes was sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison for defrauding investors by claiming her blood-testing company provided quick and reliable results but she was found to have lied about the reliability of those tests. Holmes surrendered to the Bureau of Prisons in California on May 30 to serve out her sentence at a minimum-security all-female federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas.

Less than two months after she reported to prison, her sentence was quietly changed, with her new release date scheduled for December 29, 2032, the Bureau's site says. The Bureau has not provided additional information for why Holmes' projected release date was shortened, but its site says an inmate's good behavior, substance abuse program completion, and time credits they receive for activities and programs they've completed can result in a lessened sentence. Only last month, Theranos' former president and chief operating officer Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani's 13-year sentence was likewise reduced by two years, making his new projected release date April 11, 2034.

Holmes is serving out her remaining nine-year sentence at FPC Bryan, an all-female prison camp, where the women adhere to a strict schedule requiring them to begin work at 6 a.m. each day. Those who are considered eligible to work are assigned jobs earning between 12 cents and $1.15 an hour in roles like food service and factory employment.

George Church was part of the team that pioneered CRISPR gene editing. In 2021 he co-founded a kind of real-world "Jurassic Park" — Colossal Biosciences, a biotech startup working to de-extinct the Woolly Mammoth.

For the 30th anniversary of the movie Jurassic Park, Rolling Stone brought in Colossal's co-founder and CEO, Ben Lamm, to share how the movie inspired and influenced their plans. Lamm writes that in 1993 he was 11 years old when he'd first seen the movie Jurassic Park. And even then, "Yes, as an 11-year-old I thought, what if dinosaurs could be real?"

Lamm says he's now excited at "not just de-extincting animals but at the possibility for endless discoveries that would arise from the pursuit of doing so..." When I first told my lawyer that I was interested in starting Colossal and bringing back the woolly mammoth, he asked me if I had read Michael Crichton's book or seen Spielberg's Jurassic Park movie. Since then, it's a question that has come up in nearly every meeting with investors, journalists, and lawyers. I have, which meant that I spent a number of years thinking about if we should de-extinct animals before I set out to figure out if we could. (Thanks, Dr. Ian Malcolm.) Before ever setting foot in a lab, I spent many years and countless hours thinking about the moral questions at the heart of the story.

And, with each successive year, I watched, heard, and learned about more and more animals dying due to climate change — a modern-day extinction. I came to the conclusion that the question is no longer should we practice de-extinction science but how long do we have to get it right... [T]he scary vision of the future isn't one where dinosaurs escape Isla Nubar and fly to the mainland, putting a healthy planet at risk, but instead a future where there aren't enough animals left to support food webs and ecosystems. And that includes humans, too... [I]t is our belief that it is possible to safeguard against or even stop that fatalist future vision using a similar approach in the original movie with some slight variations. It all goes back to genetics and a lot of what I learned about when I first met George...

In the same way that wireless headsets, CAT scans, LEDs, the computer mouse, and thermal blankets are all products of going to the moon, de-extinction efforts have created breakthroughs already for both conservation and human healthcare. In Colossal's first few years of work, our woolly mammoth research alone has not only accelerated genetic rescue in elephants, but also, it is working to cure a deadly elephant virus that kills 25% of all baby elephants worldwide each year. The de-extinction toolkit is also establishing a genetic backup of all living elephant species, and building the necessary tools for elephant cloning and gestation. And now, unlike Dr. Hammond, who bought an island and hid his experiment from the world, governments are coming to us asking if we can help them to restore their critically endangered animals and help safeguard their keystone species.
Lamm points out that you can get good DNA samples from specimens frozen in permafrost, skeletons preserved in caves, and from preserved specimens in museums.

But "You can't get DNA from amber. Trust us. It's porous and doesn't preserve well."

Long-time Slashdot reader hpickens writes: Richard A. Muller Has an interesting op-ed in the WSJ that asserts that World War III may not be what you expect (Source paywalled; alternative source) and that a two-front biological and cyberattack could lead to a U.S. defeat before we know what hit us. Muller paints a picture of what such a dual attack would look like. "The great value to the attacker of a two-pronged biological and cyber attack is the possibility of achieving destructive goals while keeping the whole operation covert," writes Muller. "Covid wasn't a deliberate attack, but it quickly and successfully damaged the American economy. Any nation thinking of using a deadly virus as a weapon of war would first need to immunize its own people, perhaps under the guise of a flu vaccination. Long-term population-level immunity would require the virus be sufficiently optimized, before release, to reduce the probability of further mutation."

The second prong of the attack would target hospitals with ransomware viruses. "Ransomware could simultaneously target energy grids, power plants, factories, refineries, trains, airlines, shipping, banking, water supplies, sewage-treatment plants and more. But hospitals would be the most salient targets. Avoiding obvious military targets would enhance the illusion that World War III hadn't begun."

"Deterring such an attack will require a clear, credible and articulated promise to respond to aggression. It can't be covert. If China, Russia or both attacked the U.S. this way, how would we react? Policy makers need to come up with an answer. An economic embargo seems suboptimal. Many would interpret nuclear retaliation as disproportionate. Developing a retaliatory virus would take time, and responding this way would clearly violate the Biological Weapons Convention."

"The first drug fully generated by artificial intelligence entered clinical trials with human patients this week," reports CNBC: Insilico Medicine, a Hong Kong-based biotech startup with more than $400 million in funding, created the drug, INS018_055, as a treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a chronic disease that causes scarring in the lungs. The condition, which has increased in prevalence in recent decades, currently affects about 100,000 people in the U.S. and can lead to death within two to five years if untreated, according to the National Institutes of Health.

"It is the first fully generative AI drug to reach human clinical trials, and specifically Phase II trials with patients," Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, told CNBC. "While there are other AI-designed drugs in trials, ours is the first drug with both a novel AI-discovered target and a novel AI-generated design...."

"When this company was launched, we were focused on algorithms — developing the technology that could discover and design new molecules," Zhavoronkov said. "I never imagined in those early days that I would be taking my own AI drugs into clinical trials with patients. But we realized that in order to validate our AI platform, we needed to not only design a new drug for a new target, but bring it into clinical trials to prove that our technology worked."
"The company has two other drugs partially generated by AI in the clinical stage..."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: For the first time, U.S. regulators on Wednesday approved the sale of chicken made from animal cells, allowing two California companies to offer "lab-grown" meat to the nation's restaurant tables and eventually, supermarket shelves. The Agriculture Department gave the green light to Upside Foods and Good Meat, firms that had been racing to be the first in the U.S. to sell meat that doesn't come from slaughtered animals -- what's now being referred to as "cell-cultivated" or "cultured" meat as it emerges from the laboratory and arrives on dinner plates. The companies received approvals for federal inspections required to sell meat and poultry in the U.S. The action came months after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration deemed that products from both companies are safe to eat. A manufacturing company called Joinn Biologics, which works with Good Meat, was also cleared to make the products.

Cultivated meat is grown in steel tanks, using cells that come from a living animal, a fertilized egg or a special bank of stored cells. In Upside's case, it comes out in large sheets that are then formed into shapes like chicken cutlets and sausages. Good Meat, which already sells cultivated meat in Singapore, the first country to allow it, turns masses of chicken cells into cutlets, nuggets, shredded meat and satays. But don't look for this novel meat in U.S. grocery stores anytime soon. Cultivated chicken is much more expensive than meat from whole, farmed birds and cannot yet be produced on the scale of traditional meat, said Ricardo San Martin, director of the Alt:Meat Lab at University of California Berkeley. The companies plan to serve the new food first in exclusive restaurants: Upside has partnered with a San Francisco restaurant called Bar Crenn, while Good Meat dishes will be served at a Washington, D.C., restaurant run by chef and owner Jose Andres.