Radically different
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Hiya. Today, we explore a gene therapy approach that’s drawing excitement but also skepticism, and see that Jennifer Doudna is moving into AI-designed gene editors that push beyond evolution.
Plus, our trusty podcasters unpack the buzzy prediction market Kalshi’s move into biotech.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Perimenopause used to be considered taboo, but not anymore. Thanks at least in part to TV doctors and social media influencers, conversations about the sometimes years-long period before menopause are now more open than ever. But the conversation is increasingly shaped by misinformation.
Despite what some marketers will claim, there is no test for perimenopause. That doesn’t mean women should have to put up with symptoms, but treatment suggestions often lack scientific evidence. And not all the symptoms women experience in midlife can be blamed on hormones.
Read the full story on the hype and misinformation surrounding perimenopause.
—Jessica Hamzelou
This article is from The Spark, our weekly climate tech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 China’s AI gap with the US may have just narrowed
A Chinese startup has released the world’s largest open AI model. (Reuters $)
+ It competes with some Anthropic and OpenAI models. (Gizmodo)
+ The model’s launch sent AI and semiconductor stocks sliding. (Bloomberg $)
+ Chinese Nvidia alternatives are also gaining traction. (SCMP)
+ Xi Jinping pitched China as an AI partner to the developing world. (CNBC)
+ The country is betting big on open-source. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Trump Media is selling instant access to “market-moving’ social posts
It’s developed a new way to monetize the president’s posts. (Quartz)
+ And Trump could profit directly from selling access to his statements. (BBC)
+ Kalshi says it caught Trump’s teleprompter operator insider trading. (Verge)
3 Astronomers have found an atmosphere on a nearby Earth-like planet
It’s the first potentially habitable world known to host an atmosphere. (NYT $)
+ Making it a top contender in the search for aliens. (404 Media)
+ But you need to know how to spot one. (MIT Technology Review)
4 A brain implant has restored feeling in a paralysed hand
The recipient can now feed himself and drink from a cup. (Guardian)
+ Movement continued when the stimulation was turned off. (New Scientist $)
+ China has approved a world-first brain chip. (MIT Technology Review)
5 The EU has told Google to share search data and open up AI on Android
It will be forced to share data with competing search providers. (Ars Technica)
+ And open Android phones to rivals’ AI bots. (WP $)
6 Period trackers are hiding privacy problems
New research uncovers how they’re sharing users’ health data. (BBC)
7 The Tesla driver in a fatal Texas crash overrode FSD, investigators say
He bypassed the tech by pressing the gas pedal to 100%. (Verge)
8 A new stealth drone spins so fast that it disappears
Though its creators admit it can still be easily heard. (New Scientist $)
9 A space-station study suggests why astronauts’ bodies waste away
Microgravity disrupts mitochondria, reducing protein production. (Nature)
10 “Adversarial clothing” that confuses facial recognition is all the rage
Privacy could be the next big trend. (Guardian)
Quote of the day
—George Chen, chair in digital practice at The Asia Group consultancy, gives Reuters his take on Xi Jinping’s speech at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai.
One More Thing
A new industrial facility in suburban Seattle is giving off a whiff of futuristic technology. It can safely treat fecal waste from people and livestock while recycling nutrients that are crucial for agriculture but in increasingly short supply across the nation’s farmlands.
It’s among a range of systems reframing feces, urine, and their ingredients as invaluable natural resources to reuse instead of waste products to burn or bury. Several companies are now showing how to safely scale up the transformation with energy-efficient technologies.
Find out how human waste is being transfomed into agricultural solutions.
—Bryn Nelson
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)
+ Soccer icons have received the Ghanaian movie poster treatment.
+ A captivating cosmic construction project is July’s Picture of the Month from the James Webb Space Telescope.
+ Sir David Attenborough recently turned 100. Here’s everything he’s ever worked on, all in one place.
+ “Desire paths” are the trails made by people walking contrary to defined routes. This video explains what they mean about psychology and design.
Circio Holding and Avenue Biosciences agreed to a research collaboration designed to combine their synergistic technologies to improve long-term expression of secreted proteins, relevant for treatment of a broad range of diseases.
Secreting proteins from cells into surrounding tissue, or into circulation, opens new treatment opportunities beyond classical gene therapy for monogenic disease, say scientists from both companies. Circio maintains that its circVec platform drives higher and more durable protein expression, and a spokesperson from Avenue Biosciences explains that its protein engineering technology improves protein secretion from cells by screening thousands of signal peptide-protein combinations.
Circio and Avenue will jointly explore whether the two technologies in combination can act synergistically to improve the production and secretion of proteins, including antibodies, for the treatment of genetic and chronic diseases.
“Many gene therapies are limited by insufficient protein expression, driving high doses, manufacturing complexity, and cost. The secretory pathway—the cellular machinery that produces and exports proteins—is a largely underutilized engineering opportunity. By combining Circio’s durable circular RNA expression with our technology, we aim to increase protein output per dose and ultimately help more patients benefit from life-changing genetic medicines,” says Avenue Biosciences CEO Tero-Pekka Alastalo, MD, PhD.
In the collaboration, Avenue Biosciences will deploy its protein engineering platform to identify signal peptides that enable improved secretion of therapeutic proteins expressed by circVec. The initial screening will be performed by Avenue Biosciences, followed by further in vitro and in vivo testing by Circio.
“A significant proportion of therapeutically relevant payloads for circVec are secreted proteins,” adds Victor Levitsky, PhD, CSO of Circio. “With the Avenue platform, we will test how signal peptide optimization can enhance secretion of proteins and thereby open novel opportunities for the circVec platform in genetic and chronic disease. This collaboration is an important addition to our pre-clinical development strategy of testing circVec in multiple settings through R&D partnerships to broadly explore the range of therapeutic options available for our unique circular RNA expression technology.”
The post Gene Therapy Partners Aim to Enhance Protein Expression appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
Perimenopause has entered the chat. Perimenopause—and its better-known relative, menopause—used to be considered taboo. Not anymore, thanks at least in part to TV doctors and social media influencers. Perhaps it’s my age, but these days, both my algorithm and my conversations with friends increasingly swing toward perimenopause.
Menopause is defined as the life stage that occurs a year after a person has had their last period. Perimenopause is the sometimes years-long period before that point, which can also feature all the symptoms we’d typically associate with menopause.
Today, information about perimenopause is more prevalent and accessible than ever. If you’re a woman in your 40s and you’re not feeling 100%, chances are there’ll be someone online ready to tell you you’re in perimenopause. And that you might want to start spending your money on blood tests, apps, and supplements or demanding hormone replacement therapy. But as regular readers might have guessed by this point, it’s not that simple.
Perimenopause tends to start around the age of 46 or 47. It’s during this time that many women start to experience some symptoms like hot flashes, irregular or unusually heavy periods, or anxiety, for example. And it can be heavy going. “Often symptoms are at their worst in the perimenopause,” says Mary Ann Lumsden, former president of the International Menopause Society.
That’s because hormones can fluctuate wildly. Levels of estrogen, progesterone, luteinizing hormone, and follicle-stimulating hormone can roller-coaster before leveling off after menopause. And that’s why, despite what some marketers will claim, there is no test for perimenopause.
“You can’t interpret hormone [measures] because they change so much,” says Lumsden. “And that is quite normal.”
That doesn’t mean women should have to put up with symptoms. But exactly how those symptoms are treated is another topic that has been clouded by misinformation.
Last week, I told a friend about some unusually bad pelvic pain I’d experienced. Her immediate advice was to find out if I was perimenopausal and, if I was, to request hormone replacement therapy (HRT) as soon as possible. If my doctor wouldn’t prescribe it, she continued, I should simply find another doctor who would.
This line of thinking has been heavily promoted on social media platforms, says Paula Briggs, a former chair of the British Menopause Society who currently leads the menopause service at Liverpool Women’s Hospital. But it’s not helpful.
HRT is essentially designed to top up or replace hormones like estrogen and progesterone, which naturally decline around menopause. There are lots of different drugs that can be taken in lots of different ways and at various doses.
While it does come with some risks and won’t suit everyone, HRT can be immensely helpful for many menopausal women. Not only can it help with many of the common symptoms of menopause, but it can also help prevent osteoporosis and maintain muscle strength.
But these drugs were trialed in, and approved for, menopausal women, says Lumsden. They won’t have the same effects in perimenopausal women. “If you give standard HRT, it may well get swamped by [the woman’s] own hormone production,” she says.
HRT can also cause abnormal bleeding in perimenopausal women, says Briggs.
She’s concerned about the messaging on perimenopause that is being promoted on social media. Particularly worrisome, she says, is the way younger women are being encouraged to assume they are perimenopausal and seek out HRT treatment.
“It’s almost cult-like, this idea that everybody must have HRT,” she says.
And then there are the supplements. There’s been an explosion in marketing for vitamins and supplements specifically targeted to middle-aged and menopausal women. But the evidence for these, too, is either limited or nonexistent. “I can’t see a mechanism for a lot of them,” says Lumsden.
Women who take these supplements don’t always know what they’re getting. Some of Lumsden’s patients have told her they take testosterone supplements to manage their symptoms. But blood tests revealed no increase in testosterone levels. “Whatever they’re getting, it’s not testosterone,” she says.
At any rate, not all the symptoms women experience in midlife can be blamed on hormones. The lengthy lists of perimenopause symptoms shared on social media include fatigue, brain fog, aches and pains, digestive issues, and more. “These do not link closely to the obvious menstrual cycle changes and hormone changes … across menopause,” says Nanette Santoro, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Colorado Anschutz who studies menopause.
If you’re experiencing any symptoms, it’s worth getting them checked out to make sure they’re not being caused by something else. My own pelvic pain, for example, is almost definitely the result of endometriosis—a condition that can be made worse by HRT, Lumsden tells me.
At any rate, by the time women reach their 40s, many are already juggling care for children and aging parents, often while holding down a job (and dealing with pressures from societies that don’t appear to value older women). It’s an exhausting time—and not all of that exhaustion can be blamed on hormones.
As Santoro puts it: “Attributing everything unpleasant that happens to a woman over 35 to perimenopause is not based on any scientific evidence.”
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
For the last year, a small California startup has been making extraordinary claims about the ability of its technology to potentially treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy — and maybe a slew of other genetic diseases, too.
The company, Sonothera, does not yet have clinical data. But it’s presented data in animals so stunning that other experts can’t quite wrap their minds around it.
“I find it hard to believe,” said Eric Olson, molecular biology chair at UT-Southwestern Medical Center. “It seems a bit too good to be true,” said Jeffrey Chamberlain, a longtime Duchenne gene therapy expert at the University of Washington.
It’s easy to understand how power tools make joint replacements easier for orthopedic surgeons, but how do you quantify the improvement of such an innovation with hard evidence? When Johnson & Johnson MedTech’s DePuy Synthes launched its Kincise Surgical Automated System for total hip arthroplasty (THA) in 2020, it used surface electromyography (sEMG) to measure…
The post Sensors on surgeons helped J&J’s DePuy Synthes sell a new tool appeared first on Medical Design and Outsourcing.
Cancer drugs that can find and kill tumor cells with molecular precision have reshaped oncology—but their power fades when tumors evolve, diversify, or simply stop presenting the right molecular targets. Now, researchers at Washington University (WashU) School of Medicine in St. Louis have unveiled a modular “click‑to‑assemble” strategy that supercharges these therapies inside the body, allowing them to hit multiple tumor targets at once and reverse drug resistance in mice.
The study, published in Nature, is titled “Modular in vivo antibody–ADC click to reverse drug resistance in tumors,” and introduces a bioorthogonal ligation strategy that forms a dual‑targeting antibody–drug conjugate (ADC) with improved tumor uptake and therapeutic efficacy. In pancreatic, gastric, and breast cancer models, the approach slowed or halted tumor progression—even in tumors with low, ultralow, or heterogeneous HER2 expression, where conventional HER2‑directed ADCs typically fail.
“We’ve shown that when two cancer‑targeting antibodies bind together inside the body, they accumulate at the tumor more effectively and improve treatment response,” said senior author Patrícia M. Ribeiro Pereira, PhD, assistant professor of radiology at WashU Medicine’s Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology. “There is a lot of excitement here because we have shown that it isn’t necessary to create a whole new drug platform for each therapeutic target. We can repurpose antibodies that already exist to improve treatments.”
The team’s strategy—called antibody–ADC click—relies on the rapid ligation between trans‑cyclooctene (TCO) and tetrazine moieties. In the study, one antibody (such as panitumumab, targeting EGFR) was modified with TCO, while a second antibody or ADC (such as trastuzumab‑deruxtecan, T‑DXd) carried tetrazine. When administered sequentially, the two components “clicked” together, forming a higher‑order complex that internalized more efficiently and delivered more cytotoxic payload.
The paper described the problem bluntly: “ADC efficacy remains constrained by its dependence on a single target antigen, which limits tumor targeting and promotes resistance in heterogeneous tumors with variable and low antigen expression.” The click strategy, the authors wrote, “provides a modular and translatable approach for enhanced targeted drug delivery in heterogeneous tumors.”
In mice bearing tumors with mismatched HER2 and EGFR expression, the clicked ADCs accumulated at levels up to 3.2‑fold higher than standard ADCs.
The modularity is the point. “The approach is flexible enough to be adapted to new cancer targets as we learn more about what drives treatment resistance,” Ribeiro Pereira added.
Next steps include further development and optimization of the click-enabled ADC platform prior to future clinical translation, along with expanding the platform to notoriously hard‑to‑treat cancers. “We’re trying to optimize this tool to help antibodies reach tumors that are normally very difficult to treat, such as brain tumors,” Ribeiro Pereira said.
The post Modular Antibody–ADC Click Chemistry Overcomes Tumor Drug Resistance in Mice appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
On this week’s episode of “The Readout LOUD”: The Kalshi prediction markets are coming for biotech, plus the controversy over an experimental Alzheimer’s disease treatment from Biogen.
Kalshi, the maker of prediction markets, announced this week that it is expanding into biotech. Soon, you’ll be able to make bets on the outcomes of clinical trials and FDA drug reviews. Is that a good thing? We’ll discuss the issues with Jonathan Kimmelman, a bioethicist at McGill University who has researched prediction in clinical trials.
A new paper published in Science describes using artificial intelligence (AI) to design functional synthetic RNA-guided nucleases whose activity matches or exceeds that of natural enzymes. In the paper, titled “Structure and evolution-guided design of minimal RNA-guided nucleases,” the scientists wrote that the results “establish a strategy for creating non-natural RNA-guided nucleases and conformationally active nucleic acid binders, enlarging the designable protein space.”
The team includes scientists from Innovative Genomics Institute and the California Institute for Quantitative Bioscience, both at the University of California, Berkeley, and collaborators at other institutions.The findings highlight AI’s ability to expand the CRISPR toolbox to include RNA-guided nucleases with novel properties beyond those found in nature. It is a task that has been challenging for protein design methods because of the complexity of multi-domain proteins, “whose activity depends on coordinated RNA and DNA recognition, activation, and cleavage by distinct conformational states,” the scientists wrote. As such, seemingly small changes can disrupt enzyme activity.
Sequence-based biological language models have been used to successfully design new nucleases by inferring sequence-function relationships, but they often produce versions of these proteins that closely resemble the reference sequences used to train them. Meanwhile, structure-guided rational design approaches, which “offer a robust strategy to sample highly divergent protein sequences” as well as “structures not found in nature” have been used to generate things like dynamic switches and DNA binders. However, designing complex proteins like RNA-guided nucleases with multiple functional domains and conformations has remained challenging for these methods.
In the Science paper, the scientists present an alternate strategy for generating novel functional proteins that combines the ESM Inverse Folding (ESM-IF1) model with evolution-informed residue constraints. As a test case, they used it to generate new variants for TnpB, a family of CRISPR-cas12-like nucleases that mediate RNA-guided DNA cleavage and regulate transcription among other tasks. Members of this enzyme family are “an attractive target for protein design because they couple programmable DNA targeting and a variety of natural functions to a minimal architecture,” the scientists explained in the paper.
The results showed that compared to sequence-based biological language models which generated proteins with binding domains with over 99% identity to natural homology, their approach created “DNA- and RNA-interacting lobes with AI-generated contacts that had 83% and 72% identity to their closest counterparts in nature.”
As part of the study, the scientists screened the activity of the designed proteins, dubbed SynTnpBs, first in the bacterial cells and then selected the most active ones for further testing in plant and human cells. They also used cryo-electron microscopy to determine the structures of the most divergent variants. Their analysis showed that many AI-designed nucleases either retained or surpassed the activity of natural TnpB in multiple cell types. Microscopy studies further revealed that the engineered proteins formed new electrostatic and hydrogen-bonding networks that stabilize interactions at the RNA-DNA interface across different conformations.
The post AI-Designed Synthetic CRISPR-Like Nucleases Show Activity in Cells appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
OpenAI has built an LLM super-hacker called GPT-Red that it uses as a sparring partner to help its other models boost their defenses against cyberattacks.
It automates a type of safety evaluation for software systems known as red-teaming, which is typically done by a team of human testers. The aim is to find as many different ways to break or hijack a system as possible.
OpenAI gave MIT Technology Review an exclusive peek into the system. Find out how it could keep the company ahead of human attackers.
—Will Douglas Heaven
—Casey Crownhart
It feels as if it should be illegal to even think about heating appliances during the height of summer, but we need to talk about heat pumps.
The appliances use electricity for heating, they’re incredibly efficient, and they’re on the rise. In the US, their sales have doubled over the past 15 years, according to a new report. They’re also winning the heating race against fossil fuels, outpacing natural-gas furnaces by 32% during the first quarter of 2026.
These stats are especially striking at this moment, because a key tax credit for heat pumps just ended. So why are heat pumps still so hot? Read the full story for the answer.
This article is from The Spark, our weekly climate tech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Elon Musk discreetly bought a $1 billion gas turbine firm to power Grok
He acquired fossil fuel company APR Energy in May. (Electrek)
+ The most likely application will be powering AI data centers. (Engadget)
+ The deal was revealed through an FTC filing. (Gizmodo)
+ What will power AI’s growth? (MIT Technology Review)
2 A hack shows the Suno AI music generator scraped YouTube, Deezer
It scraped decades’ worth of music to train its models. (404 Media)
+ The hacked is a unique look into the black boxes powering GenAI. (CNET)
+ AI is coming for music, too. (MIT Technology Review)
3 Thinking Machines has launched an open-weight AI model
Inkling offers a US alternative to China’s open-source models. (Reuters $)
+ It’s the first AI model built by Thinking Machines. (WSJ $)
+ The startup was founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. (Axios)
4 Europe is narrowing its ambitions for tech independence
Manufacturing and research show promise, but funding is a problem. (NYT $)
+ Earnings are strong, but an AI gap persists. (Reuters $)
+ India is also scrambling for AI independence. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Earth is absorbing energy at a rate that’s alarming climate scientists
The planet is taking in more heat than models predicted. (Economist $)
+ The legal case for climate justice is growing. (MIT Technology Review)
6 The AI backlash has tech executives fearing for their lives
Violent threats against AI firms are spilling into the real world. (WSJ $)
+ An anti-AI movement is growing globally. (MIT Technology Review)
7 A Moroccan intelligence insider exposed widespread Pegasus use
Including to target journalists, activists, and foreign politicians. (Guardian)
8 AI is powering citizen-led disaster relief from afar for Venezuela
It’s helping to locate missing people and coordinate relief. (Rest of World)
9 Thermodynamic computers could turn noise into useful calculations
They may offer a cooler, more efficient way to process information. (Quanta)
10 An engineer has explained every ’90s computer in Jurassic Park
Fans have debated the technology in the film for decades. (Ars Technica)
Quote of the day
—New York Gov. Kathy Hochul responds on X to President Donald Trump’s criticism of her state’s new data center moratorium.
One More Thing
Robotics firm Prosper is developing a humanoid called Alfie to perform tasks in homes, hospitals, and hotels. The company’s founder, Shariq Hashme, has identified trustworthiness as the top design priority—and first hurdle to clear before humanoids can live up to their hype.
Hashme believes one essential tactic to get people to put their trust in Alfie is to build a detailed character from the ground up—something humanlike but not too human. But the robot’s reliance on remote human operators raises broader questions about privacy, labour, and whether society will truly accept humanoids in our private spaces.
Read the full story on the humanoid trust dilemma.
—James O’Donnell
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)
+ Meet the man behind the world’s most beautiful books.
+ 3D printing has revived Roman Britain’s most popular board game.
+ “Lucha Libro” is an imaginative idea to boost literacy: staging live wrestling matches in US libraries.
+ Over 100 years after the death of legendary explorer Ernest Shackleton, the wreck of his final ship has been photographed for the first time.