“Most mornings I learn more from New Items than I do from all of the traditional papers I read combined.” — Michael Blair, former presiding partner, Debevoise & Plimpton.
1. New Scientist:
Stephen Huff was about to get married when he had a scan to investigate why he had been feeling short of breath. He was a fit 29-year-old who had played professional baseball and never smoked, so he wasn’t expecting the diagnosis: stage 4 lung cancer. “I had multiple spots all in my lungs, my neck, my spine, my liver, my brain – just everywhere,” he says. “I put on a brave front, but deep down I was terrified. I didn’t know if I’d be here in six months.”
Luckily for Huff, his mother, a cancer researcher, encouraged him to get a new kind of test that is quietly revolutionizing treatment. Rather than focusing on the place in the body where the cancer originated – for example, the lungs, bowel or skin – the new approach focuses on genes. The aim is to pinpoint the exact mutation driving the tumor, so it can be switched off with targeted drugs that act like guided missiles.
Through this fresh approach, Huff “hit the lottery” – as his oncologist told him – because it meant he could be treated with a recently approved drug that specifically targeted the genetic alteration driving his cancer. Within weeks, Huff began to feel better. “My first scan showed that basically every tumour site had either shrunk or gone away completely,” he says.
Now, thanks to this precision oncology method, more and more people like Huff are surviving cancers that were once considered a death sentence, like lung, pancreatic and brain cancer. “Being able to identify exactly what makes a cancer tick is having an incredible impact,” says David Thomas, a pioneer of precision oncology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. But surprisingly, it has received little fanfare outside of the medical community so far. (Source: newscientist.com)
2. MIT engineers have developed a new way to program natural killer (NK) immune cells to target cancerous T cells or T cells that have become autoreactive, leading to diseases such as lymphoma and autoimmune hepatitis. Using their new technique, the researchers can reprogram NK cells to target diseased T cells without ever removing the NK cells from the patient’s body. Instead, they use lipid nanoparticles to deliver messenger RNA directly to NK cells. These mRNA molecules encode proteins that allow the NK cells to seek and destroy the dysfunctional T cells. Known as CAR NK cells, these cells could be deployed against a variety of diseases. The MIT team’s new approach could bypass one of the major obstacles to using these cells, which is the time and expense of manufacturing them outside the body. (Source: news.mit.edu)
3. Geoffrey Hinton:
“People have a very bad model of what people are, and that’s why they fail to understand how these AI models are very like us. Most people don’t understand what consciousness is. They don’t understand what subjective experience is, and they’re very confident that even though they don’t understand it, they’re sure AI doesn’t have it……It’s obvious that these AI models understand what they’re saying. You couldn’t possibly answer all the questions without understanding the question. It’s ridiculous to say they don’t understand.”
