Lifeboat Foundation

A new gene therapy for a rare blood disorder will sell for €1.6 million ($1.8 million) in Europe, according to the maker of the recently approved treatment, whose sticker price is the latest indication that already high drug costs are continuing to climb.

After it goes on sale, the Zynteglo gene therapy from Bluebird Bio Inc. will be the second-most expensive drug in the world after Novartis’s $2.1 million Zolgensma gene therapy, which was recently approved for sale in the U.S.

The collaboration, its architects say, was designed to carefully address questions familiar to partnerships involving academic and industry scientists.

You may be familiar with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease. Did you know there’s a lesser-known—but similar—illness that affects deer, moose, and elk? It’s called chronic wasting disease, and like mad cow, it is also a brain disease, thought to be caused by a malformed, twisted protein called a prion. CWD leads to unusual behavior, and often results in the animals becoming gruesomely thin before they die. First discovered in 1967, CWD now has been detected in at least 26 states, three Canadian provinces, Norway, Sweden, and South Korea.

Rae Ellen Bichell, a reporter with the Mountain West News Bureau and KUNC, explored chronic wasting disease in a multipart series titled “ Bent Out Of Shape.” She joins Ira to talk about the disease, research into its origin and spread, and what’s known about the possible effects of human exposure to CWD.

Check out the full series.

Sheila Gujrathi has worked as a doctor, a McKinsey consultant, and at an up-and-coming biotech. Each role prepared her to be CEO in different ways.

New LulzBot bioprinting hardware coming 2019 with long term goal of printing real functional tissues.

Researchers combine deep learning and symbolic reasoning for a more flexible way of teaching computers to program.

That’s not all. Imagine charging your smartwatch while you wear it.

The experimental Ebola vaccine being used to try to contain the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is protective 97.5% of the time.

To date, more than 110,000 users have run more than 7 million experiments on the public IBM Q Experience devices, publishing more than 145 third-party research papers based on experiments run on the devices. The IBM Q Network has grown to 45 organizations all over the world, including Fortune 500 companies, research labs, academic institutions, and startups. This goal of helping industries and individuals get “quantum ready” with real quantum hardware is what makes IBM Q stand out.

SF: What are the main technological hurdles that still need to be resolved before quantum computing goes mainstream?

JW: Today’s approximate or noisy quantum computers have a coherence time of about 100 microseconds. That’s the time in which an experiment can be run on a quantum processor before errors take over. Error mitigation and error correction will need to be resolved before we have a fault-tolerant quantum computer.