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Legend scientific founder returns to ASCO with new ambition for high-yield, non-gene-editing CAR-T platform

Nine years after wowing the audience at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting with a CAR-T candidate that would become Carvykti—now the world’s most successful cell therapy—Legend Biotech’s scientific founder, Frank Fan, M.D., Ph.D., is returning to the spotlight with an entirely new playbook.

This time, Fan isn’t showcasing an autologous product engineered with each individual patient’s cells. Instead, with his new venture, Wondercel Therapeutics, Fan hopes an off-the-shelf universal CAR-T platform can tackle two bottlenecks of the cell therapy industry: massive production scalability and the pitfalls associated with gene editing.

“If this approach proves successful, the critical thing is that we can achieve linear scalability in CAR-T production capacity that can match traditional biologics,” Fan said in an interview with Fierce.

Quantum light gives a 20-fold boost to ultrafast laser processes

Nonlinear interactions between light and matter are at the heart of some of the most powerful tools in modern optics, but pushing these processes to their limits has long been hampered by a fundamental constraint: the stronger you make the laser, the more likely it is to destroy whatever it illuminates.

Through new experiments detailed in Nature, Jian Wu and colleagues at East China Normal University in Shanghai have found a way around this problem, by exploiting the quantum nature of light itself.

3D silicon circuits bring denser computer chips closer to reality

Through new research published in Nature, Qing Cao and colleagues at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a new approach that sidesteps these problems, bringing high-performance 3D chips a step closer to reality.

Overheated stacks of transistors

Modern computer chips are built on thin wafers of silicon, with transistors (the tiny switches that process information) arranged in a single flat layer. If multiple layers of transistors could instead be stacked on top of each other on the same chip, it would dramatically increase their density without enlarging the chip’s footprint. However, this 3D design would cause the chip to overheat, which could destroy the circuitry already laid down beneath it.

Lab-grown brain-spinal cord model shows ‘irreversible’ nerve damage may be reversed

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have provided the first-ever proof that human nerve regeneration after an injury can be reversed and reactivated. Using stem cell-derived brain and spinal cord organoids, scientists discovered a specific genetic network that acts like a “switch,” shutting down axon growth as neurons mature. Remarkably, by blocking key regulators within this network using an already available human drug called lynestrenol, they successfully retriggered the growth of nerve fibers. While lynestrenol itself is not an immediate cure for spinal cord injuries, this monumental discovery proves that the physiological barrier preventing nerve regeneration can be overcome — opening up incredible new possibilities for reversing paralysis and treating severe neurodegenerative diseases in the future!

Cambridge scientists have grown miniature circuits in the lab that mimic how the brain and spinal cord connect up, which underlies our movements. They used this model to show how damage to these connections previously considered ‘irreversible’ could, in fact, be reversible.

Our sophisticated organoid models help bridge the knowledge gap from animal models to what we see in patients.

When Vera Rubin measured the spin of galaxies

Beginning with the Andromeda galaxy in the late 1960s, the astronomer Vera Rubin and her colleague Kent Ford measured how fast stars and gas clouds orbit at different distances from a galaxy’s centre. They expected the outer material to move slowly. It did not. In Andromeda, and then in galaxy after galaxy, the orbital speed stayed high all the way to the edge of what they could measure. The visible stars, gas and dust could not supply enough gravity to hold matter moving that fast in place.

Rubin and Ford published their Andromeda result in 1970, in a paper in the Astrophysical Journal. Over the following decade they extended the work, and by 1980 had measured the same pattern across twenty-one spiral galaxies. The consistency was the point. One odd galaxy could be explained away. Twenty-one could not.

Human organoids reveal how to reverse “irreversible” nerve damage

Because the brain and spinal cord are separate but connected structures in the body, the team kept the organoids physically apart in the lab. They then observed axons from the brain tissue growing across the gap and connecting with the spinal cord tissue. The resulting neural circuit was functional enough to trigger contractions in tiny clusters of muscle cells.

Nerve Regrowth Declines During Development

The scientists maintained these miniature systems in the lab for more than a year. They discovered that until about day 150 of development, roughly corresponding to the middle stage of pregnancy, damaged axons could still regrow. After that point, the neurons showed a major decline in their ability to regenerate.

A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits

In 1937, a young graduate student named Claude Shannon submitted a master’s thesis with an unassuming title: “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits.”

A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits is the title of a master’s thesis written by computer science pioneer Claude E. Shannon while attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1937, [ 1 ] [ 2 ] and then published in 1938. In his thesis, Shannon, a dual degree graduate of the University of Michigan, proved that Boolean algebra [ 3 ] could be used to simplify the arrangement of the relays that were the building blocks of the electromechanical automatic telephone exchanges of the day. He went on to prove that it should also be possible to use arrangements of relays to solve Boolean algebra problems. His thesis laid the foundations for all digital computing and digital circuits. [ 4 ] [ 5 ]

The utilization of the binary properties of electrical switches to perform logic functions is the basic concept that underlies all electronic digital computer designs. Shannon’s thesis became the foundation of practical digital circuit design when it became widely known among the electrical engineering community during and after World War II. At the time, the methods employed to design logic circuits (for example, contemporary Konrad Zuse’s Z1) were ad hoc in nature and lacked the theoretical discipline that Shannon’s paper supplied to later projects.

Shannon’s work also differed significantly in its approach and theoretical framework compared to the work of Akira Nakashima. Whereas Shannon’s approach and framework was abstract and based on mathematics, Nakashima tried to extend the existent circuit theory of the time to deal with relay circuits, and was reluctant to accept the mathematical and abstract model, favoring a grounded approach. [ 6 ] Shannon’s ideas broke new ground, with his abstract and modern approach dominating modern-day electrical engineering. [ 6 ].

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