Introducing OptiPrime.
And a market acutely reliant on flightier investors.
“News Items is the first thing I read every morning.” — Annie Lamont, co-founder of Oak HC/FT, a leading venture capital firm.
1. Broad Institute:
When scientists use prime editing to develop new gene-editing medicines or for research, the prime editing guide RNA, or pegRNA, they use can greatly impact editing performance. The pegRNA is an important component of the prime editing system — it instructs the prime editor both where to edit and what edit to make at the target site. But there are often hundreds or thousands of possible pegRNA configurations to choose from for any given edit.
Evaluating them all in the lab can be cost-prohibitive, so researchers at the Broad Institute have come up with a better solution using AI. Members of the David Liu lab have developed OptiPrime, a machine learning model that can predict the performance of pegRNAs based on their sequence and prioritize those predicted to work best, saving the costly and time-consuming step of generating and testing hundreds of pegRNAs in the lab.
The scientists demonstrated that OptiPrime could identify pegRNAs that improved prime editing efficiency, and used it to rapidly design a prime editor that precisely corrected a pathogenic mutation in mice. Described in Nature Biotechnology and available free for non-commercial use online, OptiPrime allows researchers to more effectively use prime editing in their work. (Sources: broadinstitute.org, nature.com)
2. The Economist:
One peptide has recently transformed medicine. Drugs based on glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), a hormone released by the gut after a meal, began as treatments for diabetes before proving remarkably good at helping people shed weight. They have since shown benefits in the fields of heart disease, kidney disease, sleep apnoea and other ailments. Drugmakers are now betting that two other peptides, the orexins, could follow a similar path for a variety of brain-related ailments.
Orexins are a pair of neurotransmitters—chemicals that carry messages between neurons. One of the main jobs of these particular neurotransmitters is to regulate wakefulness. And a new generation of drugs designed to mimic their effects is approaching the market. (Source: economist.com)
3. The US has paid the highest borrowing costs to sell 30-year bonds since 2001, as investors fret over the country’s mounting debt pile under Donald Trump’s administration as well as inflation that remains stubbornly high. A $25 billion Treasury auction of 30-year bonds on Thursday drew yields as high as 5.22 per cent, according to the US Treasury department. It marked the highest yield since the 5.52 per cent paid in August 2001, after which 30-year auctions were suspended for almost five years. The yield on Thursday’s auction compares with 5.06 per cent at the previous 30-year sale in July, and 4.91 per cent just before Trump’s second term began in January 2025. (Source: ft.com)
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