January 31, 2024
(Wall Street Journal) – 23andMe went public in 2021 and its valuation briefly topped $6 billion. Forbes anointed Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe’s chief executive and a Silicon Valley celebrity, as the “newest self-made billionaire.” Now Wojcicki’s self-made billions have vanished. 23andMe’s … Read More
January 31, 2024
(Axios) – As everyone in health care is trying to figure out which patients should get pricey new weight-loss drugs, a biotech company spun out of the Mayo Clinic is betting the genetics-based approach it’s pioneering may hold the answer. … Read More
January 29, 2024
(RAND) – A complex, high-threat landscape is emerging in which future wars might be fought with humans controlling hyper-sophisticated machines with their thoughts; the military-industrial base is disturbed by synthetically generated, genomically targeted plagues; and the future warfighter goes beyond … Read More
January 29, 2024
January 24, 2024
(New York Times) – Maximila Imali, a top Kenyan sprinter, did not lose her eligibility to compete in the Paris Olympics because she cheated. She did not fail a doping test. She broke no rules. Instead, she is set to … Read More
January 24, 2024
(Nature) – Moreau and a few other researchers have alerted publishers to 96 papers over the past half-decade, and raised questions about genetic databases that hold data from minority ethnic groups. Ethical concerns are particularly acute in forensic science because … Read More
January 23, 2024
(New York Times) – Aissam Dam, an 11-year-old boy, grew up in a world of profound silence. He was born deaf and had never heard anything. While living in a poor community in Morocco, he expressed himself with a sign … Read More
January 23, 2024
(New York Times) – The Food and Drug Administration is requiring companies that make specialized cancer therapies known as CAR-T to add a boxed warning that the treatments themselves may cause cancers. The agency noted that the benefits still outweighed … Read More
January 23, 2024
(Nature) – Researchers have been trying for more than 50 years to tame the cells that are responsible for autoimmune disorders such as type 1 diabetes, lupus and multiple sclerosis. Most of the approved therapies for these conditions work by … Read More
January 22, 2024
(Knowable Magazine) – The fact that warfarin is riskier in some populations than others isn’t a surprise. Different geographic regions tend to host people with slightly different genetic makeups, and sometimes those genetic differences lead to radically different reactions to … Read More
January 22, 2024
(Wired) – In 2017, detectives at the East Bay Regional Park District Police Department working a cold case got an idea, one that might help them finally get a lead on the murder of Maria Jane Weidhofer. Officers had found … Read More
January 19, 2024
(Associated Press) – Surgeons externally attached a pig liver to a brain-dead human body and watched it successfully filter blood, a step toward eventually trying the technique in patients with liver failure. The University of Pennsylvania announced the novel experiment … Read More
January 17, 2024
(STAT News) – The new method developed by Su and her colleagues seeks to assess embryo quality by looking at pieces of genetic material called extracellular RNA (exRNA) left behind in the liquid that embryos are grown in. Their findings … Read More
January 15, 2024
(STAT News) – The Pashai family of Dallas on Thursday got some good news, but not exactly the news they had spent the last month praying for. The Texas Medicaid program, after denying coverage for an initial consult to begin … Read More
January 11, 2024
(New York Times) – Many researchers suspect that the disease is triggered by a virus, known as Epstein-Barr, which causes the immune system to attack the nerves and can leave patients struggling to walk or talk. But the virus can’t … Read More
January 9, 2024
(Wired) – The therapy for sickle cell disease is projected to cost over $2 million per patient, and only a small number of facilities in the US have the technological capability to provide it. We see a certain cycle over … Read More
January 8, 2024
January 3, 2024
(Wall Street Journal) – Instrumentation maker Thermo Fisher Scientific said it no longer sells certain DNA-based human-identification products in Tibet, building on a similar halt of sales to China’s Xinjiang region of technology that human-rights groups allege can be misused … Read More
January 3, 2024
(TechCrunch) – Facing more than 30 lawsuits from victims of its massive data breach, 23andMe is now deflecting the blame to the victims themselves in an attempt to absolve itself from any responsibility, according to a letter sent to a … Read More
January 2, 2024
(Wired) – In June 2023, Moolec revealed that it had inserted genes from pigs into soy plants in order to make soybeans that expressed porcine proteins. The experiments were carried out at the company’s greenhouses in Wisconsin. In some of … Read More
December 29, 2023
December 26, 2023
(NPR) – Gray’s transformation is the result of the landmark medical experiment that she launched and which culminated in December with a milestone: The Food and Drug Administration’s approved the first treatment that uses gene-editing to alleviate a human illness. … Read More
December 26, 2023
December 22, 2023
(MIT Technology Review) – Perhaps no technology has more power to transform medicine, and its vast potential is just beginning to be realized. Gene editing can be used to delete, insert, or alter portions of our genetic code. We’ve been … Read More
December 21, 2023
(Nature) – Researchers are closing in on ways to produce CAR T cells in the body, raising hopes that the notoriously expensive and bespoke cancer therapies might one day become more accessible. In CAR-T treatment, immune cells called T cells … Read More
