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Pauling.AI’s Javier Tordable on why aging biology outpaces the business model and how AI can reset the cost curve. We keep talking about longevity like it’s a moonshot science problem. It isn’t. The science is moving fast; what’s lagging is the economic machinery needed to turn that science into approved interventions at scale. Until we fix that, the most exciting biology in the world will stay trapped in papers, not prescriptions. The fundamental challenge of longevity research is not scientific but economic. The traditional pharmaceutical model requires clear disease endpoints, regulatory pathways, and billion-dollar market opportunities to justify investment. Longevity…

Credit: wildpixel / iStock / Getty Images Plus A research team at the University of Michigan has developed a machine-learning-based method to create digital twins of brain tumors that can estimate real-time metabolic activity and predict how individual gliomas will respond to specific treatments. The findings, published in Cell Metabolism, details the digital twins which integrate limited patient data with principles of biology, chemistry, and physics to simulate tumor metabolism, allowing clinicians to assess whether dietary interventions or metabolic drugs are likely to be effective before they are prescribed. “Typically, metabolic measurements during surgeries to remove tumors can’t provide a…

Basecamp Research collecting samples in Costa Rica [Coldhouse Collective] In collaboration with Nvidia, Basecamp Research has now leveraged AI to unlock programmable gene insertion, which places large therapeutic DNA sequences at precise locations in the human genome. The achievement expands upon CRISPR-based approaches that are restricted to small gene edits and address a limited number of disease indications.  The new family of evolutionary AI models, named EDEN, was trained on approximately 9.7 trillion biological tokens from BaseData, Basecamp’s proprietary genomics dataset. EDEN guides multi-modality therapeutic discovery by learning biological design principles from evolution. BaseData offers a 10-fold expansion of known protein diversity…

A new assay testing antibiotics’ ability to kill bacteria—not just inhibit their growth—may help researchers develop more effective antimicrobial drugs.Image credit:©iStock.com, RefluoAntimicrobial resistance is a serious public health problem, but it is not the only reason why some antibiotics don’t work. Some bacteria, such as tuberculosis-causing Mycobacterium tuberculosis, can withstand antibiotic treatment without developing resistance in a phenomenon called antibiotic tolerance. When antibiotics just block bacterial growth, the cells can lay low for months, dormant but alive. Existing tests for how well antibiotics work against infections typically focus on the evaluating the drugs’ ability to inhibit bacterial growth, not kill…

CDMO AGC Biologics signed a licensing agreement for Asimov’s off-the-shelf LV Edge Packaging cell line. AGC Biologics’ Cell and Gene Center of Excellence in Milan now offers a lentiviral packaging system that enables production from a single-plasmid transfection instead of the standard four-plasmid process, according to Alec Nielsen, co-founder and CEO at Asimov. ‍ Combining an engineered HEK293 cell line that contains inducible viral genes, software for transfer plasmid design, and ready-to-transfer processes, the LV Edge Packaging system minimizes GMP plasmid cost, process complexity, and supply chain risk, adds Nielsen. ‍ “By working with the experts at AGC Biologics, we’re…

Ahead Health lands $6m in seed funding to accelerate digital-first approach to early detection of disease. Swiss preventive health startup Ahead Health today announced it has raised $6 million to accelerate its mission to make preventive healthcare more accessible in Europe. The Zurich-based company is building an AI-powered platform that ingests data from full-body MRI scans, advanced blood testing and other diagnostic modalities into a single, “digital-first” experience designed to detect disease years before the onset of symptoms. Using AI to translate biomarkers from MRI and blood data into personalized insights, Ahead ultimately aims to become an “integration layer” between…

A number of neurological, genetic, and other factors dictate how prone one is to feeling motion sickness.Image credit:© iStock.com, djedzuraMost people who have taken road trips are familiar with the feeling of a lurching stomach and spinning head, counting the minutes until the car ride ends. While one passenger may be fighting the symptoms of motion sickness, the person next to them may be perfectly fine, nonchalantly scrolling on their phone or listening to music. About one-third of people are highly susceptible to motion sickness—which is triggered by discrepancies between anticipated and sensed motion—while others may experience it under extreme…

Credit: Md Ariful Islam / iStock / Getty Images Plus Serge Saxonov, PhD, sees biology one cell at a time. Since 2012, he has stood at the center of the single-cell revolution, helping drive a technological leap that fundamentally reshaped how biology is measured. Over the past decade, single-cell RNA sequencing publications have grown exponentially, propelled in large part by Saxonov’s work at 10x Genomics. By commercializing an end-to-end, user-friendly pipeline—from single-cell suspension to confident data interpretation—Saxonov and 10x Genomics eliminated steep technical barriers and democratized access to single-cell biology worldwide. But behind it all, Saxonov has had a vision…

Pangenomics, the study of many different genomes from one species, can provide a more holistic picture of the natural variation and mutations that occur within a species than using one singular reference genome. Although advances in NGS technologies have reduced the cost and increased the speed of sequencing, the data structures and analysis tools needed to study and graphically represent the relationships between millions of sequenced genomes remain a challenge. While graph-based data formats for pangenomes have become popular and widely adopted, they only represent the genetic variation in a collection of genomes, not their shared evolutionary and mutational histories.…

Wind howls and waves roar as storms rage over the open ocean. But even as gusts reach hurricane strength and swells rise as high as six-story buildings, the violent effects of these storms only reach about 500 meters beneath the surface.“The ocean’s four kilometers deep, so there’s a whole lot more going on,” said Bethany Kolody, a microbiologist at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). Beneath that half kilometer depth, the ocean is quiet. Winds and waves no longer dictate how the water moves; density does. Deep inside the ocean, there is a point at which the water density…