April 10, 2024
(Wired) – God help the babies! Or, absent God, a fertility startup called Orchid. It offers prospective parents a fantastical choice: Have a regular baby or have an Orchid baby. A regular baby might grow up and get cancer. Or … Read More
April 8, 2024
(Quartz) – Brooklyn-based brain chip startup Synchron launched a registry Monday to recruit patients and healthcare providers ahead of a planned large-scale clinical trial. The company, a rival to Elon Musk’s Neuralink, produces a brain implant, known as brain-computer interface … Read More
April 8, 2024
(STAT News) – The world’s first recipient of a kidney transplant from a genetically modified pig experienced a rejection episode before recovering and leaving the hospital last week, a Massachusetts General Hospital doctor told STAT. But in his first few … Read More
April 5, 2024
(Axios) – The success of the world’s first pig kidney transplant could stoke large-scale clinical trials on implanting animal tissues in humans to help ease the organ shortage crisis. Why it matters: Demand for donated organs is vast as transplants … Read More
April 4, 2024
(New York Times) – The first patient to receive a kidney transplanted from a genetically modified pig has fared so well that he was discharged from the hospital on Wednesday, just two weeks after the groundbreaking surgery. The transplant and … Read More
April 3, 2024
(Vox) – This is unquestionably good news for Slayman, and while routine pig kidney transplants are still a few years off, it’s obviously good for people with kidney failure to have more options. We shouldn’t let the news distract us, … Read More
April 3, 2024
(Wired) – For the first time, scientists are attempting to grow a new, miniature liver inside of a person. It sounds like science fiction; in fact, the idea was the plot of a Grey’s Anatomy episode that aired in 2018. … Read More
April 3, 2024
(New York Times) – A troubled heart pump that has now been linked to 49 deaths and dozens of injuries worldwide will be allowed to remain in use, despite the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to issue an alert about … Read More
April 2, 2024
(IEEE Spectrum) – Now, a team from the University of Utah says they’ve developed a better solution: an all-in-one hybrid energy-generation unit specifically designed for eye-based tech. In a paper published in the journal Small on 13 March, the researchers … Read More
April 1, 2024
(Wired) – Effective altruism pitches itself as a hyperrational method of using any resource for the maximum good of the world. Here in Silicon Valley, EA has become a secular religion of the elites. Effective altruists filled the board of … Read More
March 27, 2024
(Reuters) – A U.S. lawmaker involved in health policy has asked the Food and Drug Administration why it did not inspect Elon Musk’s Neuralink before allowing the brain implant company to test its device in humans. Reuters reported last month … Read More
March 26, 2024
(Wall Street Journal) – Jeffrey Keefer lay on an operating table in the oldest hospital in America surrounded by a surgical team, a group of engineers and a gaggle of spectators hoping to witness the early stages of a healthcare … Read More
March 21, 2024
(New York Times) – Surgeons in Boston have transplanted a kidney from a genetically engineered pig into an ailing 62-year-old man, the first procedure of its kind. If successful, the breakthrough offers hope to hundreds of thousands of Americans whose … Read More
March 21, 2024
(Nature) – A small Indian biotechnology company is producing a home-grown version of a cutting-edge cancer treatment known as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy that was pioneered in the United States. CAR-T therapies are used mainly to treat blood … Read More
March 21, 2024
(Wired) – On Wednesday, Neuralink introduced the first human subject to receive the company’s brain implant, a 29-year-old man who has been paralyzed from the shoulders down for eight years after a diving accident. In a brief livestream on the … Read More
March 19, 2024
(Axios) – One of the fastest-growing trends in health and wellness circles was once seen solely as the domain of diabetics: watching your blood sugar. Why it matters: The weight-loss drug boom and online health influencers’ attention on regulating blood … Read More
March 18, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – For too long, modern medicine has focused on treating disease rather than preventing it, they say. They believe that it’s time to move from reactive healthcare to proactive healthcare. And to do so in a credible … Read More
March 15, 2024
(Axios) – Food and Drug Administration advisers Friday will weigh the risk of premature patient deaths from adverse events when they consider expanding the use of two CAR-T therapies for multiple myeloma. Why it matters: CAR-T treatments have shown promise … Read More
March 14, 2024
(ABC News) – A new strategy to fight an extremely aggressive type of brain tumor showed promise in a pair of experiments with a handful of patients. Scientists took patients’ own immune cells and turned them into “living drugs” able … Read More
March 11, 2024
(Wall Street Journal) – It sounds like science fiction, but Odunsi is among dozens of people participating in studies on a controversial new forefront of the gene-editing revolution. Regulators last year approved the world’s first medicine using Crispr, the Nobel … Read More
March 7, 2024
(The Atlantic) – The disease once guaranteed an early death—but a new treatment has given many patients a chance to live decades longer than expected. What do they do now? After a year on Trikafta, Jenny told Teresa something that … Read More
March 5, 2024
(Nature) – Cells taken from the fluid around growing fetuses have been used to make organoids, 3D bundles of cells that mimic tissue. These organoids could help researchers to understand diseases that develop in the fetus during pregnancy. The researchers … Read More
March 1, 2024
(Associated Press) – Two scientists at a high-security infectious disease laboratory in Canada lost their jobs after reviews found they failed to protect sensitive material and information and did not acknowledge links with China, newly released records show. The scientists, … Read More
February 29, 2024
(NPR) – At the end of the drive, I meet David Ayares, who runs Revivicor Inc., a biotech company based in Blacksburg, Virginia. Ayares has invited me to be the first journalist to tour the company’s research farm, which is … Read More
February 29, 2024
(Reuters) – U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspectors found problems with record keeping and quality controls for animal experiments at Elon Musk’s Neuralink, less than a month after the startup said it was cleared to test its brain implants in … Read More
