This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.  In the world of brain-computer interfaces, it can seem as if one company sucks up all the oxygen in the room. Last month, Neuralink posted a video to X showing the first human subject to receive its brain implant, which will be named Telepathy. The recipient, a 29-year-old man who is paralyzed from the shoulders down, played computer chess, moving the cursor around with his mind. Learning ..read more

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.  CAR-T therapies, created by engineering a patient’s own cells to fight cancer, are typically reserved for people who have exhausted other treatment options. But last week, the FDA approved Carvykti, a CAR-T product for multiple myeloma, as a second-line therapy. That means people are eligible to receive Carvykti after their first relapse. While this means some multiple myeloma patients in ..read more

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.  A dairy worker in Texas tested positive for avian influenza this week. This new human case of bird flu—the second ever reported in the United States—isn’t cause for panic. The individual’s illness was mild—an eye infection—and they are already recovering. There’s still no evidence that the virus is spreading person to person. The person who became infected in Texas likely picked the virus up from infect ..read more

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. Justin Graves was managing a scuba dive shop in Louisville, Kentucky, when he first had a seizure. He was talking to someone and suddenly the words coming out of his mouth weren’t his. Then he passed out. Half a year later he was diagnosed with temporal-lobe epilepsy. Justin Graves JUSTIN GRAVES Graves’s passion was swimming. He’d been on the high school team and had just gotten certified in open-water divin ..read more

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. This week I have a mystery for you. It’s the story of how a team of researchers traced a covid variant in Wisconsin from a wastewater plant to six toilets at a single company. But it’s also a story about privacy concerns that arise when you use sewers to track rare viruses back to their source.  That virus likely came from a single employee who happened to be shedding an enormous quantity of a very weird ..read more

The world is grappling with dengue epidemics, with 100 to 400 million cases worldwide every year,  an eightfold increase since 20 years ago, according to the World Health Organization. Much of this is driven by the warming climate, which allows mosquitos to thrive in more areas.  A startup in São Paulo,  Brazil, one of the countries being hit the hardest by dengue outbreaks, has a possible solution: drones that release sterile male mosquitoes.  Birdview has previously used drones in agriculture—releasing pest-fighting insects to make it easier to get to every corner of crop ..read more

There is a new most expensive drug ever—a gene therapy that costs as much as a Brooklyn brownstone or a Miami mansion, and more than the average person will earn in a lifetime. Lenmeldy is a gene treatment for metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD) and was approved in the U.S. on Monday. Its maker, Orchard Therapeutics, said today the $4.25 million wholesale cost reflects the value the treatment has for patients and families. No doubt, MLD is awful. The nerve disorder strikes toddlers, quickly robbing them of their ability to speak and walk. Around half die, the others live on in a vegetative stat ..read more

Alex Zhavoronkov has been messing around with artificial intelligence for more than a decade. In 2016, the programmer and physicist was using AI to rank people by looks and sort through pictures of cats. Now he says his company, Insilico Medicine, has created the first “true AI drug” that’s advanced to a test of whether it can cure a fatal lung condition in humans. Zhavoronkov says his drug is special because AI software not only helped decide what target inside a cell to interact with, but also what the drug’s chemical structure should be. Popular forms of AI can draw pictures and answer ques ..read more

On a bright chilly day last December, a crowd of doctors and scientists gathered at a research institute atop a hill in Novato, California. It was the first time this particular group of healthy longevity specialists had met in person, and they had a lot to share. The group’s goal is to help people add years to their lifespans, and to live those extra years in good health. But the meeting’s participants had another goal as well: to be recognized as a credible medical field. For too long, modern medicine has focused on treating disease rather than preventing it, they say. They believe that it’s ..read more

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. As dengue cases continue to rise in Brazil, the country is facing a massive public health crisis. The viral disease, spread by mosquitoes, has sickened more than a million Brazilians in 2024 alone, overwhelming hospitals. The dengue crisis is the result of the collision of two key factors. This year has brought an abundance of wet, warm weather, boosting populations of Aedes aegypti, the mosquitoes that ..read more