“It’s the first thing I read every morning.“ — Rob Manfred, Commissioner, MLB.
1. A powerful gene-editing technique has been used to edit DNA directly in a person’s body — the first known instance of such a treatment. The milestone treatment is part of a clinical trial of prime editing, a technique that can alter DNA with more precision than standard CRISPR–Cas9 methods can. In this case, prime editing was used to treat a condition called Wilson disease by rewriting DNA in liver cells, to erase a mutation that prevents them from eliminating excess copper. Prime Medicine, a biotechnology company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced that it had treated the first person in its trial earlier this month. It expects to announce the first results from the study next year. (Sources: nature.com, primemedicine.com)
2. A groundbreaking vaccine reduced the risk of death or recurrence of melanoma by almost half, an encouraging signal for a treatment seeking federal approval that has boosted the fortunes of drugmakers Moderna and Merck and could usher in a new wave of cancer treatments. The drug, intismeran autogene, which uses messenger RNA (mRNA) to deliver a vaccine tailored to the genetic profile of a patient’s cancer tumor, reduced the risk of recurrence or death from melanoma by 42 percent compared to a standard treatment in a Phase 3 clinical trial, Moderna and Merck announced Thursday. “These results reinforce our conviction that mRNA has the potential to fundamentally change how we treat cancer,” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in a statement. (Source: washingtonpost.com)
3. Reuters:
Global firms and governments rushed on Thursday to patch critical flaws in the PHP programming language that underpins much of the internet, as cloud firms reported a surge of hacking attempts after the vulnerabilities were disclosed.
The push came after governments in Europe and elsewhere took websites offline as a precaution on Wednesday while website operators scrambled to secure systems running the software.
The emergency shutdowns of banking, airline, rail, tax and government services from Tokyo to Helsinki mark one of the most dramatic tests of the decades-old programming tools that keep the web running, exposing how deeply governments and companies depend on code that few people understand.
The developers of PHP - a computing language like HTML and Python - released fixes on Wednesday for vulnerabilities that had lurked in the software for years until they were uncovered using AI. They urged users to “update immediately”.
Madeline Lawrence, co-founder of Belgian cybersecurity firm Aikido Security, said that details of the flaws had become public before fixes were ready, with attacks reported since.
“Companies are racing to update against attackers who can use AI to exploit them. That’s the whole race,” she said.
As companies and governments deployed patches and suspended websites as a precaution, hacking attempts surged into the millions, according to cloud services firm Cloudflare.
“In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in a post on X late on Wednesday. “That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.” (Source: reuters.com, Italics mine.)
