Urnov and Kassim propose regulatory frameworks to help disseminate personalized CRISPR treatments to rare disease patients who need them. Without better regulations, every guide RNA nucleotide change necessitates a long (~4 year) process to obtain approval. Many rare diseases can progress quickly, so this time period is often deadly for patients.
A fresh approach to trialling treatments for rare genetic diseases could make their production an economically viable prospect at last.
2026 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine honored Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for their work developing optogenetics – a technique that allows researchers to control the activity of neurons with light.
The Conversation Weekly podcast talked to Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, about his journey developing optogenetics and its potential to treat a wide range of neuropsychiatric conditions. What follows is an edited transcript of the podcast.
Take us back to the early 1990s. You’re training to be a doctor and you start a rotation working with psychiatric patients. What questions about the brain did that raise for you?
Mathematics may hold unexpected clues to understanding Alzheimer’s disease. Scientists have developed a model showing how common metals like copper and zinc may influence the buildup of proteins associated with the disease, while also exploring possible ways to stop the process. The findings could help researchers identify promising strategies for preventing harmful plaque formation.
A recent study on heart transplants could change donor eligibility and offer hope to patients waiting for organs.
Scientists found that immune cells contributing to Alzheimer’s-related brain damage may be activated in lymph nodes outside the brain before traveling into the nervous system. Blocking this pathway in mice dramatically reduced neurodegeneration and preserved cognitive abilities, pointing to a potentially more accessible treatment target.
Proteases are naturally occurring enzymes that break down proteins into peptides and even single amino acids. They are useful in medicine and industrial processes, where they clean tissue, digest waste and help in the manufacture of everyday products. Now scientists have used artificial intelligence to design new versions from scratch.
AI tools have already successfully generated new protein shapes and structures, but using AI to create functional proteases is a significant leap forward. That’s because the resulting enzyme has to both recognize a chosen protein sequence and cut it efficiently.
To see if it could be done, David Baker at the University of Washington and his colleagues combined several advanced artificial intelligence tools to create both cysteine and zinc proteases.
Quantum computers represent a next step in the fast-paced evolution of technology. Using quantum bits (qubits), they have the potential to run certain calculations exponentially faster than conventional computers. However, developing and fine-tuning quantum computers requires an enormous number of repetitive tests. To accelerate quantum technology development, we need a method that can read quantum states at ultrafast speeds.
A research team from Tohoku University and the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) has developed a method that enables ultrasensitive, high-speed charge detection in 2D-material-based quantum devices necessary to accelerate this development. It brings us one step closer to the realization of next-generation quantum computers, which could eventually revolutionize industries like medicine, logistics and cybersecurity.
For patients battling neurodegenerative diseases like ALS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other dementias, delivering disease-fighting antibody drugs directly to the brain has proven to be a difficult task. Our bodies set up tight walls to prevent infections from spreading to the brain, where they often become fatal.
Unfortunately, this protective feature also prevents us from getting drugs into the brain. Approximately 1 in 10,000 antibodies injected into patients actually makes it to the brain, with these cellular fighters trapped in the blood rather than escaping through cracks in the blood vessels into the brain.
Now, researchers have mapped out a new transit process to enable drugs to reach the brain using extracellular vesicles—tiny bubbles naturally produced by cells in our bodies.
Researchers have found the trigger behind a powerful bacterial defense against viruses.
Viruses that prey on bacteria could become an increasingly important tool for treating bacterial infections, particularly as antibiotic resistance makes some infections harder to control. These viruses, known as bacteriophages (phages), can infect and destroy harmful bacteria without damaging human cells.
Using phages as treatments, however, comes with a major challenge. Bacteria are not defenseless against viruses. They possess their own immune systems, and understanding those defenses could help scientists design phage therapies that are better able to overcome them.
Attackers repeatedly changed the files that AOMEI Backupper fetches from the vendor’s own update servers, in windows of five to ten minutes at a time between May and July 2026, so that any copy of the Windows backup program that checked for an update during one of those windows would download and run a backdoor.
Google Threat Intelligence Group, Mandiant, and ManageEngine’s Threat Analysis Lab, which disclosed the campaign this week, say AOMEI has reported fixing its servers, but that fix does not remove the backdoor from machines that were already hit.
AOMEI Backupper is Windows backup and disk-cloning software made by AOMEI Technology, a vendor registered in Hong Kong. Like the company’s remote-desktop tool AnyViewer, it runs background services that regularly check AOMEI’s servers over HTTPS for software updates and promotional pop-ups.
