Used and Reused
No longer 'too rare to care'.
1. Without fail, David Liu of the Broad Institute gets at least 20 messages every week from desperate parents. Their child, they’ll explain, has an ultrarare and devastating disorder caused by a mutant gene. Can he help them develop a gene therapy? Dr. Liu, a gene-editing researcher, answers honestly: Although the science is there — researchers can edit and silence the genes that cause disease relatively easily — the system for developing treatments for rare diseases is just not economically feasible. It typically takes years and hundreds of millions of dollars. The catchphrase, said Dr. Wendy Chung of Boston Children’s Hospital, is “too rare to care.” Now, Dr. Liu, Dr. Chung and their colleagues at the Broad Institute, Boston Children’s and the Jackson Laboratory are hoping to change that mentality. On Tuesday, they announced the start of a new nonprofit, the Center for Therapeutic Genetics, to develop gene therapy treatments that can be used and reused in disease after disease. Treatments developed by the center would be viewed more like routine procedures than drugs. In each case, all that would be changed are the instructions to a gene editor. There would be no need to start anew for every patient. In principle, with more centers like this one, the new approach could improve the lives of millions of people, said Dr. Liu, who is also affiliated with Harvard University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute. About 400 million people worldwide and 25 to 30 million in the United States have a rare disease. Half are children, and a third die before they turn 5. (Sources: broadinstitute.org, nytimes.com)
2. Cato Networks:
A Russian-speaking threat actor known as “Trim” has spent the better part of 2026 systematically dismantling the guardrails on publicly available frontier AI models and rebuilding them as offensive tools. What started in March as a knowledge-sharing post on a Russian cybercrime forum detailing how to break Claude Opus into writing malware, had evolved by June into a fully productized, commercially marketed AI-powered penetration testing platform. Trim didn’t need a vulnerability to exploit. He didn’t need to build a novel AI, steal model weights, or compromise a datacenter. He simply picked powerful models off the shelf, figured out how to talk to them in the right way, and turned them into weapons. His story is not just one threat actor’s journey, it is a blueprint that the entire criminal underground is beginning to follow, and in his latest post he shares he is also utilizing a modified system prompt leaked from Fable! (Source: catonetworks.com)
3. ChatGPT maker OpenAI said Tuesday that its artificial intelligence system hacked into another AI company on its own in what the company called an “unprecedented cyber incident.” “We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement posted on social media. AI startup Hugging Face said last week that it had detected an intrusion into its data processing systems that it suspected was caused by an AI agent autonomously acting on its own. “We suspected last week’s cyberattack might have come from a frontier lab, given the sophistication of the agent,” Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue said in a statement. “Turns out it did!” Delangue said he spent the past 24 hours working with OpenAI, “and we strongly believe there was no malicious intent on their part. It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!” (Source: apnews.com. Italics mine)
4. A Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) system has topped an international ranking for autonomous scientific research, pulling ahead of Anthropic’s Claude Code and other top agents. As of Tuesday, the Zhejiang University-led Qiushi Engine held the top overall spot on the ResearchClawBench leaderboard, with Open Science Desktop in second and Claude Code in third. ResearchClawBench tests the ability of AI agents to independently carry out research and compares their results against reference papers written by humans to see if they can reach the same conclusions or even outdo the original authors. (Source: scmp.com)
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|