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Dr. Karen Knudsen — CEO, Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy — Turning All Cancers Curable
MBA, PhD, is the Chief Executive Officer of The Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI — https://www.parkerici.org/), a 501c3 nonprofit organization driving the next generation of cancer treatment by accelerating the development of breakthrough immune therapies to turn all cancers into curable diseases.
Dr. Knudsen most recently served as the Chief Executive Officer of the American Cancer Society (ACS) and ACS Cancer Action Network (ACS CAN), where she led both organizations through a period of transformative growth, significantly expanding research investments, advocacy reach, and direct patient support initiatives. Under her leadership, ACS evolved into a unified, high-performing enterprise, increasing revenue by more than 30 percent and broadening its impact to serve over 55 million lives annually. Moreover, Dr. Knudsen developed and scaled innovative programs that included joint ventures and an impact innovation arm to accelerate progress against cancer.
Prior to ACS, Dr. Knudsen served as Executive Vice President of Oncology Services at Jefferson Health and Enterprise Director of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, growing a multi-state oncology network and spearheading advancements in translational cancer research that increased early access to the most advanced cancer care.
A globally recognized expert in prostate cancer, Dr. Knudsen has authored over 200 scientific publications and generated practice-changing discoveries.
Dr. Knudsen held leadership roles with organizations including the National Cancer Institute Board of Scientific Advisors, the Association of American Cancer Institutes, and the American Association for Cancer Research. She currently serves on the boards of Exai Bio, Paradigm Health, and Research!America, and advises multiple biotech ventures including ArteraAI and Transcarent.
Dr. Knudsen holds numerous awards for her scientific and healthcare accomplishments, and this year will be honored with the Allen Lichter Visionary Leader Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), recognizing her lifetime achievement of outstanding contributions to the field of oncology.
Innovative transistor design offering advantages for controlling and reading quantum chips
The smaller electronic components become, the more complex their manufacture becomes. This has been a major problem for the chip industry for years. At TU Wien, researchers have now succeeded for the first time in manufacturing a silicon-germanium (SiGe) transistor using an alternative approach that will not only enable smaller dimensions in the future, but will also be faster, require less energy and function at extremely low temperatures, which is important for quantum chips.
The key trick lies in the oxide layer that insulates the semiconductor: it is doped and produces a long-range effect that extends into the semiconductor. The technology was developed by TU Wien (Vienna), JKU Linz and Bergakademie Freiberg. The results have now been published in the journal IEEE Electron Device Letters and selected as Editor’s Pick on the cover of the August issue.
OpenAI and NVIDIA Announce Strategic Partnership to Deploy 10 Gigawatts of NVIDIA Systems
OpenAI and NVIDIA today announced a letter of intent for a landmark strategic partnership to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems for OpenAI’s next-generation AI infrastructure to train and run its next generation of models on the path to deploying superintelligence. To support this deployment including data center and power capacity, NVIDIA intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the new NVIDIA systems are deployed. The first phase is targeted to come online in the second half of 2026 using the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform.
“NVIDIA and OpenAI have pushed each other for a decade, from the first DGX supercomputer to the breakthrough of ChatGPT,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “This investment and infrastructure partnership mark the next leap forward — deploying 10 gigawatts to power the next era of intelligence.”
“Everything starts with compute,” said Sam Altman, cofounder and CEO of OpenAI. “Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future, and we will utilize what we’re building with NVIDIA to both create new AI breakthroughs and empower people and businesses with them at scale.”
How a key enzyme shapes nucleus formation in cell division
Every time a eukaryotic cell divides, it faces a monumental challenge: It must carefully duplicate and divide its genetic material (chromosomes) equally, and then rebuild the nuclear envelope around the separated halves. If this process goes wrong, the resulting nuclei can be misshapen or disorganized—features often seen in cancer and aging-related diseases.
A new study from researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and Université Paris-Saclay reveals how a key enzyme called Aurora A helps cells pull off this feat. The findings are published in The EMBO Journal.
In dividing cells, structures called spindle poles (or centrosomes) grow in size to generate the microtubule ‘tracks’ that pull chromosomes apart. Once this job is done, the spindle poles must shrink and disassemble so that the nuclear envelope can reform around the separated chromosomes.
Sorry Mr. Yudkowsky, we’ll build it and everything will be fine
Review of “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All” (2025), by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, with very critical commentary.
Yudkowsky and Soares present a stark warning about the dangers of developing artificial superintelligence (ASI), defined as artificial intelligence (AI) that vastly exceeds human intelligence. The authors argue that creating such AI using current techniques would almost certainly lead to human extinction and emphasize that ASI poses an existential threat to humanity. They argue that the race to build smarter-than-human AI is not an arms race but a “suicide race,” driven by competition and optimism that ignores fundamental risks.
Blue Alchemist Promises Rocket Fuel From Moon Dust
Usually when an alchemist shows up promising to turn rocks into gold, you should run the other way. Sure, rocket fuel isn’t gold, but on the moon it’s worth more than its weight in the yellow stuff. So there would be reason to be skeptical if this “Blue Alchemist” was actually an alchemist, and not a chemical reactor under development by the Blue Origin corporation.
The chemistry in question is quite simple, really: take moon dust, which is rich in aluminum silicate minerals, and melt the stuff. Then it’s just a matter of electrolysis to split the elements, collecting the gaseous oxygen for use in your rockets. So: moon dust to air and metals, just add power. Lots and lots of power.
Melting rock takes a lot of temperature, and the molten rock doesn’t electrolyse quite as easily as the water we’re more familiar with splitting. Still, it’s very doable; this is how aluminum is produced on Earth, though notably not from the sorts of minerals you find in moon dust. Given the image accompanying the press release, perhaps on the moon the old expression will be modified to “make oxygen while the sun shines”