Biotech

For Gastón Paladini, pork is a family affair. In 1923, his great-grandfather Don Juan Paladini moved from Italy to Santa Fe, Argentina, where he started putting a South American twist on classic Italian sausage recipes. Eventually, Don Juan’s company became one of Argentina’s largest meat producers. It still bears the family name: Paladini.But in 2020, Gastón started having the kind of heretical thoughts that would have made his ancestors blush. What if you could capture the essence of pork—that meaty, umami sweetness—and…

It’s been hard recently to think about anything other than the wars and humanitarian crises raging around the world. Climate change has left its mark in what was almost certainly the hottest year in human history—there were unprecedented heat waves, intensified forest fires, torrential rain, and floods like those in Libya that caused devastation after two dams burst.But this has not stopped scientists, innovators, and decisionmakers from working on solutions to our biggest societal challenges—with success. Here is a…

In September, Elon Musk’s brain-implant company Neuralink announced the much-anticipated news that it would start recruiting volunteers for a clinical trial to test its device. Known as a brain-computer interface, or BCI, it collects electrical activity from neurons and interprets those signals into commands to control an external device. While Musk has said he ultimately wants to merge humans with artificial intelligence, Neuralink’s initial aim is to enable paralyzed people to control a cursor or keyboard with just…

2023 was the year that CRISPR gene-editing sliced its way out of the lab and into the public consciousness—and American medical system. The Food and Drug Administration recently approved the first gene-editing CRISPR therapy, Casgevy (or exa-cel), a treatment from CRISPR Therapeutics and partner Vertex for patients with sickle cell disease. This comes on the heels of a similar green light by U.K. regulators in a historic moment for a gene-editing technology whose foundations were laid back in the 1980s, eventually…

2023 was an important year for patients with sickle cell disease. Prior to CRISPR, the only cure for the life-long ailment was a bone marrow transplant, which is notoriously dangerous and costly. This month, the FDA approved Vertex’s “Casgevy,” a CRISPR-based therapy for the treatment of sickle cell disease in patients 12 and older. The landmark approval made the therapeutic the first genetically edited therapy to reach the general market.Casgevy, which also received the greenlight from regulators in the UK for another…

So far, only nine centers across the US are currently offering Casgevy, which may limit who gets access to it. Vertex says the number of participating sites will grow in the coming weeks and months.And despite the promise of a pain-free future, the grueling process of getting Casgevy may be a deterrent for some.Collecting stem cells from the blood can take hours, and multiple sessions may be needed to get enough cells to edit. After that is a harsh conditioning regimen. Patients must undergo chemotherapy to kill any…

Our B cells help prevent us from getting sick. Their job is to make antibodies, immune system proteins that fight off viruses and other foreign invaders. And they make a lot of antibodies—thousands of them every second. What if these antibody factories could be harnessed to make other things the body needs?That’s the idea behind a trial launched by Seattle-based biotech company Immusoft. The company announced today that its scientists have genetically programmed a patient’s B cells and put them back in his body in an…

Casgevy uses the Nobel Prize-winning technology Crispr to modify patients’ cells so that they produce healthy hemoglobin instead. The Crispr system has two parts: a protein that cuts genetic material and a guide molecule that tells it where in the genome to make the cut.To do this, a patient’s stem cells are taken out of their bone marrow and edited in a laboratory. Scientists make a single cut in a different gene, called BCL11A, to turn on the production of a fetal form of hemoglobin that typically shuts off shortly…

Digital health company Celero Systems is developing an electronic pill that can measure heart rate, breathing rate, and core temperature—from inside the human stomach. As a first step, the company envisions people with ongoing conditions using the digital capsule to monitor their vital signs at home. But in the future, they hope to use it as a kind of internal alarm system for drug-related overdoses.In a small clinical trial published in November, the company tested the device on people with sleep apnea, a disorder in…

DNA is nature’s original storage system. The molecule is made up of the chemical bases adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine—shortened to A, C, G, and T—which pair off to form a double helix. The order of these bases determines the genetic blueprint of every living organism.To store data in DNA, a file is converted from its binary code of 0s and 1s into a series of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts. On Biomemory’s website, a user can type the text message they want to store into an interface that looks something like Google Translate,…