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Credit: Wirestock / iStock / Getty Images Plus Researchers at King’s College London have found that trigeminal nerve stimulation (TNS), a non-invasive brain stimulation treatment approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treating attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), does not reduce core symptoms in children and adolescents. The findings, published in Nature Medicine, were derived from a large, multi center, double-blind, randomized controlled trial that enrolled 150 participants and run counter to the evidence used to supported FDA clearance in 2019. TNS is designed as an alternative to drug treatments for ADHD. The method delivers a low electrical current…

Shaochen Chen, professor in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at UC San Diego, stands between an early laboratory prototype of a bioprinter developed in his research lab (right) and the commercial bioprinter later built by his startup (left). This photo demonstrates the evolution of Chen’s 3D bioprinting technology from a proof-of-concept instrument to a commercial system that will be used as part of the new ARPA-H-funded project. [David Baillot/UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering] Liver failure claims thousands of lives each year as patients in the United States wait for a donor organ.…

Aging is a fact of life, but growing older doesn’t necessarily need to come with the various degenerative diseases associated with it. Researchers and industry leaders at aging-focused biotech companies want to help people maintain their health while living longer.This week, scientists, investors, and biotech and pharma professionals descended on San Francisco for the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. Occurring in parallel, the 2026 Biotech Showcase drew those interested in aging to its session “Transforming Aging: Longevity and Healthspan Therapeutics” to discuss the aging-research field.The four companies that participated in the discussion—Gero, Fauna Bio, Cellino, and R3 Biotechnologies—each take a different…

Neurotech company targets non-surgical methods for connecting humans with ‘advanced AI’ and other technologies.   Sam Altman’s latest venture, brain-computer interface startup Merge Labs, has emerged from stealth, backed by seed funding from OpenAI. The company revealed it is exploring non-surgical approaches to the challenge of brain-computer communication – ultimately seeking to create safe, “high bandwidth” methods to allow users to “integrate with advanced AI.” While the companies did not officially disclose the size of the round, it has been widely reported to be around $250 million, led by OpenAI with participation from Bain Capital and others. Altman founded the…

Learning to read and write is the beginning of literacy, a progression now mirrored in modern genomics. Scientists first read the human genome, a three-billion-letter biological book, in April 2003. Since then, researchers have steadily advanced the ability to write DNA, moving far beyond single-gene construction. New technologies enable the synthesis of viral, bacterial, and yeast genomes. Now, cutting-edge projects are building the tools needed for large-scale chromosome engineering, with the long-term goal of constructing the first human genome from scratch. In the U.K., a Wellcome-funded five-year proof-of-concept project, Synthetic Human Genome (SynHG), is taking aim at developing the foundational…

As a research assistant at the Indian Institute of Science in the mid-2000s, Karthick Balasubramanian monitored the water quality of major South Indian rivers. As part of this work, he would travel to several places in the Western Ghats of India to collect water samples. “[During] some months, particularly during the winter months, I saw [that] all the stones were covered with brown biofilms,” recalled Balasubramanian. Curious, he brought the stones back to the lab to observe them under the microscope, expecting to find bacteria.To his surprise, instead of bacteria, he saw beautiful, colorful cells that were symmetric. He would…

Credit: ChatGPT Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have shown that it is possible to treat cancer with individualized combination therapies matched to each tumor’s unique molecular profile without compromising patient safety. The findings “provide a blueprint for the future of personalized or individualized precision medicine for patients with cancer,” said the study’s senior author Jason Sicklick, MD, professor of surgery and pharmacology at UC San Diego School of Medicine and surgical oncologist at UC San Diego Health. “When we started this trial, we didn’t even know if personalizing cancer treatment was feasible or safe,” Sicklick…

Credit: Shivendu Jauhari / iStock / Getty Images Plus Deciphering gene circuits can be tedious and immensely time consuming. Modifying, or designing gene circuits from previously identified pathways presents further challenges. “There are many possible designs for any given function, and finding the right one can be like looking for a needle in a haystack,” said Caleb Bashor, PhD, a scientist at Rice University and lead author of a new study that establishes a new technique aimed at finding useful gene circuits, or DNA designs, much more quickly than researchers have historically been able to. The study was published in…

One of society’s greatest medical challenges is to understand and develop effective treatments for disorders of intellectual disability (ID). Around 2–3 percent of the global population meet the criteria for ID.1 The condition is consistently more common in males. Recent U.S. data (2019–2021) indicate that 2.31 percent of boys and 1.37 percent of girls have been diagnosed with ID, a ratio of roughly 1.7:1.2ID is not a single disease but rather a final common outcome of hundreds of genetic, chromosomal, and environmental conditions. Any attempt to catalogue these causes will necessarily be incomplete. Broadly, about a quarter of cases arise…

Credit: wildpixel/Getty Images A study by researchers from Mass General Brigham has found how cancers become resistant to rezatapopt and other drugs designed to restore the tumor suppressor p53. The research, published in Cancer Discovery, showed that tumors evolve new mutations within the same TP53 gene in response to treatments which prevents it from reassuming its tumor suppressing role and uncovered ways to improve p53-targeted treatments using next-generation drugs or combination approaches. “Our findings establish a molecular basis for why patients treated with rezatapopt may experience therapeutic failure and provide the first clinical evidence that on-target secondary TP53 mutations can…