<![CDATA[Anosognosia drives untreated schizophrenia into homelessness and jail. Here’s why civil care fails and how structured treatment can decrease the number of arrests.]]>
RegVelo AI Model Predicts Cell Fate, Tackles Developmental Disorders and Cancer
In a new study published in Cell titled, “RegVelo: gene-regulatory-informed dynamics of single cells,” researchers from Stowers Institute of Medical Research have developed a new AI model that connects two areas of single-cell biology that have often remained separate: estimating how cells change over time and inferring the gene regulatory networks controlling those changes.
“You can imagine if you had a very early set of cells, having a particular set of instructions could allow you to reproduce, in vitro, some of these cell types in a very natural way. These cells could then be used in cell therapies in regenerative medicine,” said Tatjana Sauka-Spengler, PhD, Stowers Institute Investigator and co-senior author of the study.
While development is often described as a series of static snapshots of cell states, RegVelo models how these fate decisions are encoded in gene regulatory networks over time and space, and what drives cell state transitions. In zebrafish neural crest development, RegVelo identified an early driver of pigment cell formation (tfec) and revealed a previously unknown regulator of pigment cell fate (elf1). The neural crest is a developmental system that gives rise to many different cell types, including pigment cells, craniofacial tissues, and parts of the peripheral nervous system.
CRISPR/Cas9-mediated knockout and single-cell Perturb-seq supported predictions, showing that the model could do more than describe developmental changes and generate biologically meaningful hypotheses that held up in living systems.
Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, PhD, Stowers President and chief scientific officer says RegVelo’s value “extends well beyond” neural crest cells and is applicable to any system in which cells change over time, from basic developmental biology to modeling tumor trajectories and the cellular outcomes that may inform treatment.
“Sauka-Spengler and her collaborators have developed a meaningfully different way to process this kind of data,” said Sánchez Alvarado. “It allows us to infer the most likely path of each component through space and time, and to use deep learning to predict those dynamics and test them experimentally.”
Single-cell biology research has made it possible to build increasingly detailed maps of development. RNA velocity methods can help researchers estimate how cells move through developmental landscapes, while gene regulatory network approaches can identify relationships among genes. However, these methods have typically been used in parallel rather than together.
“For a long time, cellular dynamics and gene regulation have largely been modeled separately,” said Fabian Theis, PhD, the study’s co-senior author and director of the institute of computational biology at Helmholtz Munich. “RegVelo brings those pieces together, allowing us to ask not only how cells are changing, but which regulatory interactions are helping drive those changes.”
The framework jointly models splicing kinetics and gene regulatory relationships, allowing researchers to map the hidden timeline of cell development, predict how cells shift from one state to another, and test what might happen when specific regulators are perturbed.
The framework can incorporate additional regulatory layers, including chromatin, protein activity, and other multimodal measurements. While the study’s limitations include simplifying assumptions around latent time, regulatory interactions, and computational cost, the results demonstrate a compelling proof of principle.
“When dynamic cell-state modeling is linked directly to gene regulation, it becomes possible to move closer to mechanism and then discovery,” Sauka-Spengler said.
The post RegVelo AI Model Predicts Cell Fate, Tackles Developmental Disorders and Cancer appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
Anna Sitar on Mental Health Fitness
Influencer Anna Sitar reflects on the importance of realness
In recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, the Child Mind Institute has launched the Mental Health Fitness campaign — a national call to action highlighting the importance that caring for one’s mental health is just as important as physical health.
Known for embodying the color yellow and sharing sunshine, influencer Anna Sitar always keeps it honest when it comes to her mental health. Rather than curating only the good moments, Anna shares how she keeps her mental well-being in check through small, consistent habits like journaling, therapy, and being vulnerable with her followers. Her message is simple — actively look for the good, even on harder days.
“Being able to share the way that I’m feeling, whether it’s my highest highs or my lowest lows, has shown me that there’s other people out there who feel the same way I do. It’s allowed me to inspire them to look for the good in their every day and hopefully improve their lives.”
About Anna Sitar
Anna Sitar is a content creator and influencer who’s amassed over 1.6 million followers on Instagram. She’s known for her refreshing honesty in conversations around mental health and normalizing vulnerability in digital spaces. Through her content, Anna encourages others to embrace authenticity and prioritize self-reflection.
About Mental Health Fitness
For decades, we’ve understood that physical fitness doesn’t just happen — it takes skills, regular practice, and a supportive environment. The same is true for mental health. Developed by experts at the Child Mind Institute for three different age groups, our Mental Health Fitness guides have been used by more than 1.8 million students, caregivers, and educators to build emotion regulation skills and resilience. Whether your child is 5 or 15, struggling or thriving, they can learn these skills. And you can practice alongside them. Learn more at Mental Health Fitness.
Related Resources
- How to Help Children Calm Down
- What Is Co-Regulation?
- How to Model Healthy Coping Skills
- Raising Confident, Independent Children
The post Anna Sitar on Mental Health Fitness appeared first on Child Mind Institute.
<![CDATA[Large meta-analysis finds GLP-1 drugs don’t raise depression or suicidality and modestly boost quality of life and eating control in diabetes/obesity.]]>
Fostering breakthrough AI innovation through customer-back engineering
Despite years of digitization, organizations capture less than one-third of the value expected from digital investments, according to McKinsey research. That’s because most big companies begin with technological capabilities and bolt applications onto them, rather than starting with customer needs and working backward to technology solutions. Not prioritizing the customer can create fragmented solutions; disjointed customer experiences; and ultimately, failed transformations.
Organizations that achieve outsized results from AI flip the script. They adopt a “customer-back engineering” mindset, putting customers at the heart of technology transformation.
It’s a strategy in which products and services are developed with the customer experience first in mind, including the customers’ challenges, needs, and expectations. Product development teams then work backward in a nimble and agile way to find the steps necessary to design and build solutions that achieve the desired experience.
“When you get your engineers closer to customers, you get a lot more sideways innovation,” says Ashish Agrawal, managing vice president of business cards and payments tech at Capital One. “That leads to a multiplier effect, because engineers can approach a problem from a different dimension that can be unique to the sales or product perspective.”
The case for customer-centricity in engineering
Engineers are problem-solvers by nature, says Agrawal. When they hear about challenges customers are experiencing, or how they are using products and services in the real world, they can devise ways to efficiently address customer needs, since they are naturally closer to systems and data than many other teams across the company.
“Fostering a customer-centric culture has a motivational effect on engineers when they actually start seeing how the core changes they’re making, or the features they’re adding, are having a direct impact on the lives of customers,” says Agrawal.
It also takes discipline. Agrawal explains that Capital One has set a goal for every engineer in his organization to establish several touchpoints with customers throughout the year in different forms, including:
- Digital empathy sessions to observe user journeys and identify where users hit friction
- Embedded customer support for periods of time to deepen understanding of servicing needs
- Engineering ride-alongs, in which engineers join customer success, sales, and support staff on calls or on-site visits
- Hackathon competitions to build solutions around real customer problems
The AI opportunities with customer-centricity
“The biggest challenge engineers within large companies face is a lack of direct access to customers,” says Agrawal. “This can make it harder for technologists to work with customers to identify problems and innovate solutions.”
AI has accelerated the challenges as well as the opportunities. The lifecycle of launching products has become significantly faster. But the good news is that engineers are closer to the data that feeds into AI, so they can more rapidly apply AI-informed data techniques to solve customer problems.
Agrawal outlines a recent scenario: In the customer servicing space, conversations can instantly be summarized and give a customer agent context on the member’s original request and remaining action points. Agentic AI can also be enabled to ask pointed follow-up questions about the interaction that would otherwise take human agents time to read through the entire thread.
“A solution would have been a lot harder in an ecosystem without a lot of high-quality data,” says Agrawal. “But when you combine a rich data ecosystem with agentic tools, you move from incremental fixes to high-velocity transformation.”
By investing in AI data and tools and focusing on rapid experimentation, Agrawal says the cycle of deploying solutions can be accelerated. Teams learn that if they meet customer needs and iterate on a wider range of solutions much faster, then the entire innovation cycle speeds up.
For example, Capital One used customer insights to build a state-of-the-art, multi-agent AI framework called Chat Concierge to enhance the customer experience for car buyers and dealers. In a single conversation, Chat Concierge can perform tasks like comparing vehicles to help car buyers decide on the best choice and scheduling test drives or appointments with salespeople.
Agrawal explains that car buyers can engage with Chat Concierge directly through participating dealer websites. Dealers can access and can take over the chat through Navigator Platform. The AI assistant consists of multiple logical agents that work together to mimic human reasoning, allowing it to provide information and take action based on the customer’s requests.
The elements of an AI-first mindset
According to a recent MIT Technology Review Insights survey, 70% of leaders say their firm uses agentic AI to some degree. Roughly half of executives say agentic AI systems are highly capable of improving fraud detection (56%) and security (51%), reducing cost and increasing efficiency (41%), and improving the customer experience (41%).
Looking into the future, achieving these outcomes looks even more likely. More than half of the banking executives surveyed say they expect to continue to improve fraud detection (75%), security (64%), and the customer experience (51%). Agentic AI use cases that show strong potential to transform the customer experience in financial services include responding to customer services requests, adjusting bill payments to align with regular paychecks, or extracting key terms and conditions from financial agreements.
Placing the customer at the center of a transformation requires an AI-first mindset. Companies must shift from simply augmenting an existing product to fundamentally reimagining the problem and the user’s needs through the lens of AI’s capabilities.
A few best practices that Agrawal recommends include:
Reimagine the core function of AI to solve a user’s problem: “The true value isn’t in chasing the AI hype; it’s in solving meaningful customer problems. By focusing on impact, we ensure that our innovation isn’t just fast; it’s transformative,” says Agrawal.
Start with high-quality, well-governed data as the foundation: “Data readiness and unified information across systems are the non-negotiable foundations of AI. A clean data layer is what orchestrates the agentic loop— enabling the perception, reasoning, and execution required to solve a customer’s problem before they even have to ask,” explains Agrawal.
Rebuild workflows with AI embedded from the start: “People treat models as black boxes, but agentic systems require tremendous rigor and oversight. Having a data ecosystem that is well-governed and responsible AI standards are essential pillars for building trust in these systems,” says Agrawal.
Build a cross-functional team involving data science, engineering, product, design, and other partners: Agrawal advises, “It’s important to be open and nimble to transforming how we work and create impact as AI becomes more integrated into workflows. It’s also important to take a ‘crawl, walk, run approach’ if you are new to AI, as opposed to simply jumping into it.”
In the end, achieving end-to-end transformation depends on empowering engineers and partner teams to start with customer needs and work backward to technology solutions, rather than starting with technological capabilities first and finding applications for them. When organizations make a customer-back approach second nature, they are able to not only reimagine the customer experience from the inside out, but to also place the customer front and center from the very start.
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.
<![CDATA[Review news from the last week in psychiatry. ]]>
<![CDATA[Poor schizophrenia control drives relapse, homelessness and caregiver strain; data show $367B burden—why relapse prevention and LAIs matter.]]>
Surf Therapy: A Powerful Low-Intensity Approach in Global Youth Mental Health Care
By Mai El Shoush, Partnerships Campaign Manager, Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Global Center for Child and Adolescent Mental Health at the Child Mind Institute
In Conversation with Waves for Change
The world’s oceans have long been profound forces that shape coastlines, cultures, and scientific discovery. And today, through targeted programs, they also serve as therapeutic environments transforming youth mental health worldwide.
As global health systems continue to explore solutions that minimize resource constraints while addressing child and adolescent mental health demands, innovative approaches like surf therapy are demonstrating remarkable effectiveness as low-intensity initiatives. From the beaches of California to the coastal communities of South Africa, Australia, Hawai’i, the United Kingdom, and Senegal, these programs are creating accessible entry points for young people.
Wave for Change (W4C) — a South Africa-based organization and valued implementation partner of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Global Center at the Child Mind Institute — has developed an evidence-based Surf Therapy program for youth in underserved communities. We spoke with their chief development officer Paula Yarrow and senior grant manager Jill Sloan about the award-winning program. As a highly regarded Cape Town‑based NGO that uses surfing as a therapeutic tool to support youth mental health, W4C offers safe spaces, evidence‑based emotional regulation tools, community mentorship, and a pathway to resilience for young people growing up in challenging environments.
The partnership includes the identification of workforce gaps and training needs for frontline workers such as NGOs, to further expand evidence-based support and brief interventions through culturally appropriate, low-intensity psychological therapy approaches. The context-specific training materials are expected to be piloted later in the year in South Africa and are intended to improve access to quality mental health care for young people.
W4C launched Surf Therapy in 2009, which has since helped more than 10,000 adolescents experiencing high-stress environments gain valuable coping skills across its hubs in the Western and Eastern Cape as well as Cape Town. Participants learn how to build positive social networks and develop self-regulation skills to support healthy emotional and behavioral responses to stress, with coaches themselves aged between 18-25. The program creates a fun, culturally relevant environment through the Take 5 model — a framework W4C has designed to be adapted for a range of sports, arts, and cultural initiatives. The model has been utilized by several leading global organizations, including UNICEF.
Waves for Change also played a key role in the founding of the International Surf Therapy Organization (ISTO), connecting practitioners, clinicians, and researchers to advance science research, raise awareness, and support surf therapy.
How does Waves for Change use evidence-based Surf Therapy and capacity building as a solution to fill the gap in youth mental health care?
Approximately 90 percent of the world’s adolescents live in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In the most underserved communities, adolescents may experience repeated exposure to violence, unmet basic needs, and limited access to safe spaces or trusted caregivers. Typically, there are very few mental health services that are accessible to such youth.
The more Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) a child or adolescent has whilst growing up, the more likely they are to develop toxic stress — an ongoing stress state without respite. This can often lead to mental health conditions such as anxiety, depression, substance misuse, and cognitive impairment. This can also result in the development of physical health conditions such as heart disease as they grow into adulthood.
The main problem we’ve identified is that there aren’t enough trained workforces (e.g., sports coaches, youth facilitators) that are able to deliver simple, fun, structured play-based sessions with consistency at scale. Our work provides a response to this issue within the adolescent mental health promotion and illness prevention arena. Additionally, our initiatives significantly increase the number of individuals — coaches, teachers, mentors or others — who are already in contact with young adolescents and can provide them with mental health support to foster their immediate and longer-term mental health.
How has Waves for Change adapted the organization’s Surf Therapy program to develop the Take 5 model?
Waves for Change’s Take 5 training model has been incubated, tested, and rigorously evaluated within W4C’s award-winning Surf Therapy program. Take 5 distils the key components of our Surf Therapy program, providing coaches with the essential skills they need to build and sustain caring relationships with children. And it uses a simple teaching routine that creates consistently engaging, fun, structured programs for children and adolescents that suit their language, culture, and context.
Take 5 is low intensity and cost-effective — tailored for high-stress environments and the unique mental wellness needs of adolescents living in multidimensional poverty, conflict, or crisis.
How has partnering with young people to research and co-develop programs made the work more impactful?
In research studies we’ve conducted, adolescent participants (ages 10-16) reported experiencing between 6-8 adverse events every year, including violence and abuse. When asked what sorts of spaces they wanted to see at Waves for Change, the adolescents identified core components such as access to a safe space where they could have fun, be heard, and learn skills to cope. These components now form the bedrock of our Surf Therapy program. We initially worked with 9-12-year-olds and have since developed the follow-on programme for adolescents up to age 16 who have graduated the Surf Therapy programme. This is called Surf Club and is available to all Surf Therapy graduates.
Waves for Change also conducts pre- and post-intervention surveys with participants to monitor the impact of our work. Our coaches (ages 18-25) are at the frontline of delivering our services. A key role they play is to listen with care and respect to the adolescents’ concerns, and to share them with our Child Protection team for review and follow-up when needed.
What makes your partnership with the SNF Global Center at the Child Mind Institute unique?
Working with the Child Mind Institute allows Waves for Change to collaborate with and learn from colleagues doing similar work in the adolescent mental health space across South Africa, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. The partnership offers an opportunity to learn about approaches that have been successful in other health systems. It has also allowed Waves for Change to share detailed information about the training and supervision protocol used to develop key competencies in the coach workforce that leads Surf Therapy in South Africa. This has helped the Child Mind Institute to develop a comprehensive guide for other similar workforces.
Can you expand on the importance of partnerships in strengthening youth mental health care and community empowerment?
Partnerships allow for the consolidation of skills and resources so that a greater impact can be achieved. For example, at Waves for Change, we work with over 70 referral partners every year to identify young adolescents who can benefit from our Surf Therapy program. We are also partnering with the Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport to use our Take 5 model to train MOD and YearBeyond coaches and mentors, who are already reaching large numbers of children and young adolescents through their work. And we’re contributing to building the broader ecosystem of mental health support for adolescents and children by training large national NGOs, government agencies, and humanitarian organizations with our Take 5 model.
How can non-profits further help foster strong peer networks and inclusive safe spaces?
Some of the key lessons we have learnt are the following:
- In the field of youth mental health, make youth the leaders on program implementation
- Provide youth with skills, opportunities, supervision, and support so that they can grow and develop further
- Maintain a strong culture of protection, respect, and communication so that all participants feel safe, welcome, accepted, and heard
Read more about W4C’s Surf Therapy from Youth Liaison Officer, Azola Sibanda and Training Manager Jamie-Lee Davids
The post Surf Therapy: A Powerful Low-Intensity Approach in Global Youth Mental Health Care appeared first on Child Mind Institute.
<![CDATA[Oral zervimesine blocks toxic amyloid and alpha-synuclein oligomers, as Cognition maps FDA strategy for Lewy body trials.]]>
Implementing advanced AI technologies in finance
In finance departments that have long been defined by precision and control, AI has arrived less as a neatly managed upgrade than as a quiet insurgency. Employees are already using it while leadership races to impose structure, governance, and strategy after the fact. The result is a paradox: one of the most tightly regulated functions in the enterprise is now among the most experimentally transformed.
What’s emerging is a layered shift in how work gets done. From variance commentary and fraud detection to contract review and close narrative drafting, AI is embedding itself across workflows, particularly where unstructured data once slowed down everything. Yet, as Glenn Hopper, head of AI and managing director at VAi Consulting, puts it, “the proliferation of AI happened kind of before governance and before a real plan came about.” That bottom-up adoption is forcing a recalibration at the top, where executives must now reconcile productivity gains with oversight, risk, and accountability.
Just as critical is reframing AI’s role. “AI as a means to an end, as opposed to AI being the end,” says Ranga Bodla, VP of industry and field marketing at Oracle NetSuite, underscores a growing consensus: the technology is most effective when it disappears into existing processes rather than outright replaces them. Embedded systems, seamless integrations, and tools like model context protocol (MCP) are accelerating this shift, making AI an ambient capability. Notably, ease of integration, not cost savings or new features, has become the strongest driver of adoption.
Still, the real constraint may be neither data nor technology, but people. “Talent is the actual root cause,” Hopper argues, pointing to a widening gap between domain expertise and AI fluency. Even as concerns about data security and model opacity persist, the more pressing risk may be misunderstanding the tools altogether or restricting them so tightly that employees look for workarounds beyond leadership control. “The auditability of it, I think, is critical,” Bodla notes.
Looking ahead, the trajectory is clear but variable. AI agents capable of executing complex, multi-step tasks are beginning to materialize, while expanding context windows and interoperable systems promise deeper, more persistent intelligence. But the real transformation may be a gradual shift toward systems that bolster judgement, automate routines, and allow finance teams to spend less time reconciling the past and more time shaping what comes next.
This webcast is produced in partnership with Oracle NetSuite.
Register to watch the webcast.
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.