In 1970 an Oregon man discovered a body with "clear signs of foul play".

NPR reports that "The identity of the young woman remained a mystery — until Thursday." State authorities identified the woman as Sandra Young, a teenager from Portland who went missing between 1968 and 1969. Her identity was discovered through advanced DNA technology, which has helped solve stubborn cold cases in recent years. The case's breakthrough came last year in January, when a person uploaded their DNA to the genealogy database GEDMatch and the tool immediately determined that the DNA donor was a distant family member of Young....

From there, a genetic genealogist working with local law enforcement helped track down other possible relatives and encouraged them to provide their DNA. That work eventually led to Young's sister and other family members, who confirmed that Young went missing around the same time.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Tony Isaac for sharing the news.

"The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which selects Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics, last week awarded Dr. Wu its Sjöberg Prize in honor of 'decisive contributions' to cancer research," reports CNN.

Their profile of the oncologist from Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute notes Dr. Wu's research "has laid the scientific foundation for the development of cancer vaccines tailored to the genetic makeup of an individual's tumor." It's a strategy looking increasingly promising for some hard-to-treat cancers such as melanoma and pancreatic cancer, according to the results of early-stage trials, and may ultimately be widely applicable to many of the 200 or so forms of cancer...

The most common treatments for cancer — radiation therapy and chemotherapy — are like sledgehammers, striking all cells and often damaging healthy tissue. Since the 1950s, cancer researchers have been seeking a way to dial up the body's immune system, which naturally tries to fight cancer but is outsmarted by it, to attack tumor cells. Progress on that front was middling until about 2011 with the arrival of a class of drugs called checkpoint inhibitors, which boost the anti-tumor activity of T cells, an important part of the immune system... These drugs have helped some people with cancer who would have been given months to live survive for decades, but they don't work for all cancer patients, and researchers continue to look for ways to turbocharge the body's immune system against cancer...

Wu's research focused on small mutations in cancer tumor cells. These mutations, which occur as the tumor grows, create proteins that are slightly different to those in healthy cells. The altered protein generates what's called a tumor neoantigen that can be recognized by the immune system's T cells as foreign, and therefore susceptible to attack. With thousands of potential neoantigen candidates, Wu used "tour de force lab work" to identify the neoantigens that are on the cell surface, making them a potential target for a vaccine, said Urban Lendahl, professor of genetics at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the secretary of the committee that awarded the prize. "If the immune system is to have a chance to attack the tumor, this difference must be manifested on the surface of the tumor cells. Otherwise, it's pretty pointless," Lendahl added...

By sequencing DNA from healthy and cancer cells, Wu and her team identified a cancer patient's unique tumor neoantigens. Synthetic copies of these unique neoantigens could be used as a personalized vaccine to activate the immune system to target the cancer cells... Once it had FDA approval, the team vaccinated six patients with advanced melanoma with a seven-shot course of patient-specific neoantigens vaccines. The breakthrough results were published in an 2017 article in Nature. For some patients, this treatment resulted in the immune system's cells being activated and targeting the tumor cells. The results, along with another paper published the same year led by the founders of mRNA vaccine company BioNTech, provided "proof of principle" that a vaccine can be targeted to a person's specific tumor, Lendahl said.

A follow-up by Wu's team four years after the patients received the vaccines published in 2021, showed that the immune responses were effective in keeping cancer cells under control... Since then, Wu's team, other groups of medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies, including Merck, Moderna and BioNTech, have further developed this field of research, with trials underway for vaccines that treat pancreatic and lung cancer as well as melanoma.
"All the trials underway are small-scale, typically involving a handful of patients with later-stage disease and a high tolerance for safety risks," adds CNN.

"To show that these type of cancer vaccines work, much larger randomized control trials are needed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: As the French startup ecosystem continues to boom -- think Mistral, Poolside, and Adaptive -- today the Paris-based Bioptimus, with a mission to build the first universal AI foundation model for biology, emerged from stealth following a seed funding round of $35 million. The new open science model will connect the different scales of biology with generative AI -- from molecules to cells, tissues and whole organisms. Bioptimus unites a team of Google DeepMind alumni and Owkin scientists (AI biotech startup Owkin is itself a French unicorn) who will take advantage of AWS compute and Owkin's data generation capabilities and access to multimodal patient data sourced from leading academic hospitals worldwide. According to a press release, "this all gives the power to create computational representations that establish a strong differentiation against models trained solely on public datasets and a single data modality that are not able to capture the full diversity of biology."

In an interview with VentureBeat, Jean-Philippe Vert, co-founder and CEO of Bioptimus, chief R&D Officer of Owkin and former research lead at Google Brain, said as a smaller, independent company, Bioptimus can move faster than Google DeepMind to gain direct access to the data needed to train biology models. "We have the advantage of being able to more easily and securely collaborate with partners, and have established a level of trust in our work by sharing our AI expertise and making models available to them for research," he said. "This can be hard for big tech to do. Bioptimus will also leverage some of the strongest sovereignty controls in the market today."

Rodolphe Jenatton, a former research scientist at Google DeepMind, has also joined the Bioptimus team, telling VentureBeat the Bioptimus work will be released as open source/open science, at a similar level to Mistral's model releases. "Transparency and sharing and community will be key elements for us," he said. Currently, AI models are limited to specific aspects of biology, Vert explained. "For example, several companies are starting to build language models for protein sequences," he said, adding that there are also initiatives to build a foundation model for images of cells.

However, there is no holistic view of the totality of biology: "The good news is that the AI technology is converging very quickly, with some architectures that allow to have all the data contribute together to a unified model," he explained. "So this is what we want to do. As far as I know that it does not exist yet. But I'm certain that if we didn't do it, someone else would do it in the near future." The biggest bottleneck, he said, is access to data. "It's very different from training an LLM on text on the web," he said. And that access, he pointed out, is what Bioptimus has in spades, through its Owkin partnership.

High-capacity DNA data storage "is closer than you think," Slashdot wrote in 2019.

Now IEEE Spectrum brings an update on where we're at — and where we're headed — by a participant in the DNA storage collaboration between Microsoft and the Molecular Information Systems Lab of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. "Organizations around the world are already taking the first steps toward building a DNA drive that can both write and read DNA data," while "funding agencies in the United States, Europe, and Asia are investing in the technology stack required to field commercially relevant devices." The challenging part is learning how to get the information into, and back out of, the molecule in an economically viable way... For a DNA drive to compete with today's archival tape drives, it must be able to write about 2 gigabits per second, which at demonstrated DNA data storage densities is about 2 billion bases per second. To put that in context, I estimate that the total global market for synthetic DNA today is no more than about 10 terabases per year, which is the equivalent of about 300,000 bases per second over a year. The entire DNA synthesis industry would need to grow by approximately 4 orders of magnitude just to compete with a single tape drive. Keeping up with the total global demand for storage would require another 8 orders of magnitude of improvement by 2030. But humans have done this kind of scaling up before. Exponential growth in silicon-based technology is how we wound up producing so much data. Similar exponential growth will be fundamental in the transition to DNA storage...

Companies like DNA Script and Molecular Assemblies are commercializing automated systems that use enzymes to synthesize DNA. These techniques are replacing traditional chemical DNA synthesis for some applications in the biotechnology industry... [I]t won't be long before we can combine the two technologies into one functional device: a semiconductor chip that converts digital signals into chemical states (for example, changes in pH), and an enzymatic system that responds to those chemical states by adding specific, individual bases to build a strand of synthetic DNA. The University of Washington and Microsoft team, collaborating with the enzymatic synthesis company Ansa Biotechnologies, recently took the first step toward this device... The path is relatively clear; building a commercially relevant DNA drive is simply a matter of time and money...

At the same time, advances in DNA synthesis for DNA storage will increase access to DNA for other uses, notably in the biotechnology industry, and will thereby expand capabilities to reprogram life. Somewhere down the road, when a DNA drive achieves a throughput of 2 gigabases per second (or 120 gigabases per minute), this box could synthesize the equivalent of about 20 complete human genomes per minute. And when humans combine our improving knowledge of how to construct a genome with access to effectively free synthetic DNA, we will enter a very different world... We'll be able to design microbes to produce chemicals and drugs, as well as plants that can fend off pests or sequester minerals from the environment, such as arsenic, carbon, or gold. At 2 gigabases per second, constructing biological countermeasures against novel pathogens will take a matter of minutes. But so too will constructing the genomes of novel pathogens. Indeed, this flow of information back and forth between the digital and the biological will mean that every security concern from the world of IT will also be introduced into the world of biology...

The future will be built not from DNA as we find it, but from DNA as we will write it.
The article makes an interesting point — that biology labs around the world already order chemically-synthesized ssDNA, "delivered in lengths of up to several hundred bases," and sequence DNA molecules up to thousands of bases in length.

"In other words, we already convert digital information to and from DNA, but generally using only sequences that make sense in terms of biology."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the San Francisco Chronicle: San Francisco's leaders have spent the past few years desperately trying to figure out how to deal with a glut of empty offices, shuttered retail and public safety concerns plaguing the city's once vibrant downtown. Now, a California lawmaker wants to try a sweeping plan to revive the city's core by exempting most new real estate projects from environmental review, potentially quickening development by months or even years. State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, introduced SB1227 on Friday as a proposal to exempt downtown projects from the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, for a decade. The 1970 landmark law requires studies of a project's expected impact on air, water, noise and other areas, but Wiener said it has been abused to slow down or kill infill development near public transit.

"Downtown San Francisco matters to our city's future, and it's struggling -- to bring people back, we need to make big changes and have open minds," Wiener said in a statement. "That starts with remodeling, converting, or even replacing buildings that may have become outdated and that simply aren't going to succeed going forward." Eligible projects would include academic institutions, sports facilities, mixed-use projects including housing, biotech labs, offices, public works and even smaller changes such as modifying an existing building's exterior. The city's existing zoning and permit requirements would remain intact. "We're not taking away any local control," Wiener said in an interview with the Chronicle on Friday.

California Sen. Scott Wiener is proposing a bill that, he said, would make it easier for San Francisco's downtown area to recover from the pandemic. However, it's not clear how much of an impact the bill would have if it's eventually passed since other factors are at play. New construction has been nearly frozen in San Francisco since the pandemic, amid consistently high labor costs, elevated interest rates and weakening demand for both apartments and commercial space.Major developers have reiterated that they have no plans to start work on significant new projects any time soon. Last week, Kilroy Realty, which has approval for a massive 2.3 million-square-foot redevelopment ofSouth of Market's Flower Mart, said no groundbreakings are planned this year -- anywhere.

"Something revolutionary is on the horizon..." claims the company's web site. "Wearable neurotechnology that augments sleep, attention, and ultimately the human experience."

Or, as Fierce Biotech put it, "A startup emerged from stealth this week with grand plans to pioneer a new form of neurotech dubbed 'electric medicine.'" Elemind's approach centers on artificial intelligence-powered algorithms that are trained to continuously analyze neurological activity collected by a noninvasive wearable device, then to deliver through the wearable bursts of neurostimulation that are uniquely tailored to those real-time brain wave readings. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company claims that its approach — which is based on research from its founders, a group of high-profile scientists hailing from the likes of MIT, Stanford and Harvard — offers a more "natural" treatment option than pharmaceuticals for neurological conditions like insomnia, essential tremor and memory loss.

"Chemical drugs affect the entire body, often leading to unwanted side effects. Elemind offers a nonchemical, direct and on-demand solution that learns and dynamically adjusts to each person," Meredith Perry, a co-founder of Elemind and its CEO, said in the company's debut announcement. "We're the first and only company able to precisely guide and redirect brainwaves in real time."
"Elemind's first product is a general wellness device and will not be subject to FDA regulation," notes an announcement from the company. But they've thoroughly researched the product's potential: To date, Elemind's technology is supported by five clinical trials and several publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Clinical trials show Elemind's technology is effective at inducing sleep up to 74% faster, suppressing essential tremor with a significant decrease after only 30 seconds of stimulation, and boosting memory. Clinical trials also demonstrate Elemind is effective at increasing pain thresholds and enhancing sedation; this study is currently in peer review....

"You can think about it like noise cancellation for the mind," said Dr. David Wang, CTO and co-founder of Elemind. "Our technology uses phase-locking auditory stimuli to align precisely with the user's brainwaves and steer them to a different frequency associated with a different state."
The company plans to announce its first product within a few months, reports the Boston Globe, noting that the company's $12 million in seed funding came from "a consortium that includes Village Global, an early-stage venture fund backed by high-tech billionaires Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates., Reid Hoffman, and Ann Wojcicki..."

More info from VentureBeat.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki said the company was considering splitting its consumer and therapeutics businesses in an effort to boost its stock price and maintain its listing. From a report: Bloomberg noted that the stock has lost more than 90% of its value since the company went public in 2021 through a SPAC merger. Bloomberg said the therapeutics business could be an attractive asset for a larger healthcare company. The business currently has two drug candidates in clinical trials and just received approval to commence testing for a third. The company's DNA database of more than 14 million customers is one of the world's largest. Currently, 23andMe derives most of its revenue from its consumer business, Bloomberg added.

23andMe's stock has been trading below $1 since December, hurt by revelations that hackers were able to access the personal information of around 50% of its subscribers. The company is also facing mounting litigation over the incident. The company is expected to release its Q4 earnings report after market close on Wednesday.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Biotechnology company Biogen is abandoning Aduhelm, its questionable Alzheimer's drug that has floundered on the market since its scandal-plagued regulatory approval in 2021 and brow-raising pricing. On Wednesday, the company announced it had terminated its license for Aduhelm (aducanumab) and will stop all development and commercialization activities. The rights to Aduhelm will revert back to the Neurimmune, the Swiss biopharmaceutical company that discovered it.

Biogen will also end the Phase 4 clinical trial, ENVISION, that was required by the Food and Drug Administration to prove Biogen's claims that Aduhelm is effective at slowing progression of Alzheimer's in its early stages -- something two Phase 3 trials failed to do with certainty. In the announcement, Biogen noted it took a financial hit of $60 million in the fourth quarter of 2023 to close out its work on Aduhelm, which the company at one point reportedly estimated would bring in as much as $18 billion in revenue per year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The first lab-grown freshwater eel meat has been produced, potentially solving a diner's dilemma. Rampant overfishing has caused eel populations to plummet and prices to soar, but the cultivated eel could provide the delicacy guilt-free. The eel meat was produced by Forsea Foods in Israel from embryonic cells of a freshwater eel. The company collaborated with a Japanese chef to create unagi kabayaki, marinated grilled eel over rice, and unagi nigiri, a type of sushi.

The company aims to scale up its operation and have the cultivated eel on sale in about two years. Japan's prime minister, Fumio Kishida, last year backed the development of a cultivated meat industry. The restaurant price in Japan is about $250 a kilogram, and Forsea Foods expects the price of the cultivated eel to match that of the wild-caught eel. [...] Forsea Foods' strategy is to target species at risk of extinction in the wild that also command high prices in restaurants and shops, with eel meeting both criteria. The very complex life cycle of eels, involving long migrations from rivers to the ocean and several distinct life stages, means it is not possible to farm them like some fish.

The cultivated eel was produced using organoids, tiny bundles of tissue originally developed for use in medical research. The organoids are made of embryonic stem cells taken from fertilized eel eggs. These cells can develop into any kind of tissue and, as they grow, they self-organize into the structure of real meat. The final product also contains some plant-based ingredients. Other approaches to cultivated meat require greater use of expensive growth factor chemicals and scaffolds for cells to grow on [...]. The technique is particularly suited to fish and seafood, whose meat is fairly uniform unlike, for example, marbled beef, he said. Like other cultivated meat, the product is not produced using antibiotics or hormones. Forsea Foods is the only company known to be producing cultivated meat using this technology. The company has raised $5.2 million in investment, with more expected to be announced soon.

According to Neuralink founder Elon Musk, the first human received an implant from the brain-chip startup on Sunday and is recovering well. "Initial results show promising neuron spike detection," Musk added. Reuters reports: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration had given the company clearance last year to conduct its first trial to test its implant on humans. The startup's PRIME Study is a trial for its wireless brain-computer interface to evaluate the safety of the implant and surgical robot. The study will assess the functionality of the interface which enables people with quadriplegia, or paralysis of all four limbs, to control devices with their thoughts, according to the company's website.

Slashdot reader quonset writes: After decades of study and testing, a potential vaccine for cancer may be on the horizon. Dr. Thomas Wagner, founder of Orbis Health Solutions, is using the body's own immune system to fight the disease, with each shot personalized to the patient, according to ABC News.
From the article: Typically, cancer cells evade a person's immune system because it is recognized as that person's cells. Wagner developed a tumor lysate particle only (TLPO) vaccine that uses a person's tumor cells to identify particular parts that are then presented back in the body using the vaccine in a way that can stimulate their immune system to gain the ability to detect these cancer cells like an infection, allowing the immune system to fight the cancer itself.

"People used to ask me the question, 'When will there be a cure for cancer?' And I've been doing this for 60 years and I could never answer that question," Wagner said. "Until recently, until the last three or four or five years." Wagner believes this type of cancer treatment could be a key to finding the long-awaited cure for cancer, all cancers, if paired with early detection.

Wagner's TLPO cancer vaccine has been tested in hundreds of patients with advanced forms of melanoma in Phase 2 clinical trials. The most recent data presented at an academic conference showed nearly 95% of people given only the vaccine were still alive three years after starting treatment and 64% were still disease-free. Among the most advanced forms of melanoma, disease-free survival after three years for people with stage III disease was 60% in the vaccine-only group, compared to about 39% in the placebo group. Disease-free survival for those with stage IV disease was about 68% in the vaccine-only group, and zero in the placebo group.

The most common side effects were redness or pain at the injection site, fever and fatigue after the injection – similar to other vaccines that stimulate an immune response.

Based on this data and other studies, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has greenlit Wagner's vaccine to start a Phase 3 clinical trial. It will be a three-year endeavor with a goal to enroll 500 people and is planned to launch sometime this year, Riley Polk, president of Orbis Health Solutions, told WLOS, an ABC News affiliate in Asheville, North Carolina.
Polk's own father was told there were no treatment options left for his lung cancer, according to the article. That was more than 10 years ago, and "His father opted to try Wagner's cancer vaccine and lived 10 more years before dying from something unrelated to cancer." Polk gives ABC News this quote.

"You can tell me a lot of things, but you can't tell me [the vaccine] doesn't work."

"This year has been a major turning point in American health care," reports USA Today, "and patients can anticipate several major developments in the new year," including the beginning of a CRISPR "revolution" and "a new reckoning with drug prices that could change the landscape of the U.S. health care system for decades to come." Health care officials expect 2024 to bring a wave of innovation and change in medicine, treatment and public health... Many think 2024 could be the year more people have the tools to follow through on New Year's resolutions about weight loss. If they can afford them and manage to stick with them, people can turn to a new generation of remarkably effective weight-loss drugs, also called GLP-1s, which offer the potential for substantial weight loss...

In 2023, mental health issues became among the nation's most deadly, costly and pervasive health crises... The dearth of remedies has also paved the way for an unsuspecting class of drugs: psychedelics. MDMA, a party drug commonly known as "ecstasy," could win approval for legal distribution in 2024, as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Another psychedelic, a ketamine derivative eskatemine, sold as Spravato, was approved in 2019 to treat depression, but it is being treated like a conventional therapy that must be dosed regularly, not like a psychedelic that provides a long-lasting learning experience, said Matthew Johnson, an expert in psychedelics at Johns Hopkins University. MDMA (midomafetamine capsules) would be different, as the first true psychedelic to win FDA approval.

In a late-stage trial of patients with moderate or severe post-traumatic stress disorder, close to 90% showed clinically significant improvements four months after three treatments with MDMA and more than 70% no longer met the criteria for having the disorder, which represented "really impressive results," according to Matthew Johnson, an expert in psychedelics at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Psilocybin, known colloquially as "magic mushrooms," is also working its way through the federal approval process, but it likely won't come up before officials for another year, Johnson said. Psychedelics are something to keep an eye on in the future, as they're being used to treat an array of mental health issues: eskatimine for depression, MDMA for PTSD and psilocybin for addiction. Johnson said his research suggests that psychedelics will probably have a generalizable benefit across many mental health challenges in the years to come.
2024 will also be the first year America's drug-makers face new limits on how much they can increase prices for drugs covered by the federal health insurance program Medicare.

There's already a powerful immunotherapy that "involves engineering a patient's T cells so they recognize and attack cancer cells," writes one of America's top cancer hospitals. The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center notes that CAR T cell therapy has already begun to revolutionize cancer treatment," with these "chimeric" T cells "multiplied in a lab and given back to the patient to be a continual fighting force against the cancer."

But now "New research from the lab of physician-scientist Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD, shows that disrupting a single gene in the CAR T cells can make them more potent and able to fight tumors longer." In a paper published in Cancer Discovery, the team demonstrated that disrupting the gene SUV39H1 causes a ripple effect: It restores the expression of multiple genes that help sustain the T cells' longevity. The researchers showed that this approach improved CAR T cell effectiveness against multiple cancers in mice...

The researchers used the gene-editing tool CRISPR/Cas9 to alter SUV39H1 in human CAR T cells. They placed these modified CAR T cells into mice that had been implanted with either human leukemia cells or prostate cancer cells. For both cancers, the CAR T cells were able to sustain their function without becoming exhausted, leading to tumor elimination. By contrast, mice with unedited CAR T cells did not survive the cancer. "The edited CAR T cells can maintain their anti-cancer effects, even when we challenged them repeatedly by exposing them to new tumors over time," Dr. Zhao says. "These results suggest that SUV39H1-edited CAR T cells may reduce tumor relapse in patients."

There did not appear to be serious side effects in the mice, although researchers will need to confirm the safety of this approach in humans. The biotechnology company Mnemo Therapeutics is exploring the possibility of conducting clinical trials based on this research.

Cells have a protein receptor that will cause that cell to die — in theory. Unfortunately, "Previous efforts to target this receptor have been unsuccessful," says Jogender Tushir-Singh, an associate professor in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California, Davis.

But he's now led a team of researchers at the university's Comprehensive Cancer Center that's identified a receptor-activating protein section. And more importantly, "now that we've identified this epitope, there could be a therapeutic path forward" for targeting that receptor... in tumors. The findings were published Oct. 14 in the Nature journal Cell Death & Differentiation... Death receptors do precisely what their name implies — when targeted, they trigger programmed cell death of tumor cells. They offer a potential workaround that could simultaneously kill tumor cells and pave the way for more effective immunotherapies and CAR T-cell therapy...

Tushir-Singh and his colleagues knew they might be able to target cancer cells selectively if they found the right epitope. Having identified this specific epitope, he and other researchers can now design a new class of antibodies to selectively bind to and activate Fas to potentially destroy tumor cells specifically.
Singh says their research "sets the stage" to develop antibodies that selectively kill tumor cells.

"Software that controls your body should always respect your freedom," warns the program manager of the Free Software Foundation: In July, users of the proprietary software app LibreLink, who live in the UK and use Apple devices, found that the app they depend on to monitor their blood sugar was not working anymore after the developer Abbott pushed an update for the app... Despite what its name may suggest, there is nothing libre about the LibreLink app. It's proprietary software, which means users must depend on the company to keep it running and to distribute it. With free software, [a user] would have had the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve the software himself, or he could have leaned on a community of developers and users to share and fix the software, and the old version of the software would have been available to revert the update...

Two months later, with Apple's update to iOS 17, users of the FreeStyle LibreLink and Libre 2 apps had reason again to fear that the software they rely on wouldn't work after updating their iPhones. This time, users all over the world were affected. In September, Abbott warned Apple users: "As part of the upcoming iOS 17 release, Apple is introducing StandBy Mode and Assistive Access Mode ... this release may impact your experience with the FreeStyle Libre 2 app, the FreeStyle LibreLink app, or the FreeStyle LibreLinkUp app. We recommend that you disable automatic operating system updates on the smartphone using the mentioned apps." This warning was made because StandBy Mode would sometimes prohibit time-sensitive notifications such as glucose alarms, and the Assistive Access Mode would impact sensor activation and alarm setting modification in the app...

And a scenario where a company abandons service or updates to its users is not merely theoretical. This is the bitter reality faced by users of eye implants produced by Second Sight Medical Products since the company decided to abandon the technology in 2020 when facing the prospect of bankruptcy. [">According to IEEE Spectrum], Terry Byland, whose sight has been dependent on the first-generation Argus implant since 2004, says of his experience, "As long as nothing goes wrong, I'm fine. But if something does go wrong with it, well, I'm screwed. Because there's no way of getting it fixed." That's what also happened to Barbara Campbell, whose retinal implant suddenly stopped working when she was on a subway...

It's up to us advocates of free software to inform the people around us of the issues with proprietary software in medical aids. Let's encourage our friends, parents, and grandparents to ask their doctor about the software in their medical devices and to choose and insist upon free software over proprietary software.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: GSK will pay 23andMe $20 million for access to the genetic-testing company's vast trove of consumer DNA data, extending a five-year collaboration that's allowed the drugmaker to mine genetic data as it researches new medications. Under the new agreement, 23andMe will provide GSK with one year of access to anonymized DNA data from the approximately 80% of gene-testing customers who have agreed to share their information for research, 23andMe said in a statement Monday. The genetic-testing company will also provide data-analysis services to GSK.

23andMe is best known for its DNA-testing kits that give customers ancestry and health information. But the DNA it collects is also valuable, including for scientific research. With information from more than 14 million customers, the only data sets that rival the size of the 23andMe library belong to Ancestry.com and the Chinese government. The idea for drugmakers is to comb the data for hints about genetic pathways that might be at the root of disease, which could significantly speed up the long, slow process of drug development. GSK and 23andMe have already taken one potential medication to clinical trials: a cancer drug that works to block CD96, a protein that helps modulate the body's immune responses. It entered that testing phase in four years, compared to an industry average of about seven years. Overall, the partnership between GSK and 23andMe has produced more than 50 new drug targets, according to the statement.

The new agreement changes some components of the collaboration. Any discoveries GSK makes with the 23andMe data will now be solely owned by the British pharmaceutical giant, while the genetic-testing company will be eligible for royalties on some projects. In the past, the two companies pursued new drug targets jointly. GSK's new deal with 23andMe is also non-exclusive, leaving the genetic-testing company free to license its database to other drugmakers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Egbert Edelbroek was acting as a sperm donor when he first wondered whether it's possible to have babies in space. Curious about the various ways that donated sperm can be used, Edelbroek, a Dutch entrepreneur, began to speculate on whether in vitro fertilization technology was possible beyond Earth -- or could even be improved by the conditions found there. Could the weightlessness of space be better than a flat laboratory petri dish? Now Edelbroek is CEO of SpaceBorn United, a biotech startup seeking to pioneer the study of human reproduction away from Earth. Next year, he plans to send a mini lab on a rocket into low Earth orbit, where in vitro fertilization, or IVF, will take place. If it succeeds, Edelbroek hopes his work could pave the way for future space settlements.

"Humanity needs a backup plan," he says. "If you want to be a sustainable species, you want to be a multiplanetary species." Beyond future space colonies, there is also a more pressing need to understand the effects of space on the human reproductive system. No one has ever become pregnant in space -- yet. But with the rise of space tourism, it's likely that it will eventually happen one day. Edelbroek thinks we should be prepared. Despite the burgeoning interest in deep space exploration and settlement, prompted in part by billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, we still know very little about what happens to our reproductive biology when we're in orbit. A report released in September by the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine points out that almost no research has been done on human reproduction in space, adding that our understanding of how space affects reproduction is "vital to long-term space exploration, but largely unexplored to date."

Some studies on animals have suggested that the various stages of reproduction -- from mating and fertilization to embryo development, implantation, pregnancy, and birth -- can function normally in space. For example, in the very first such experiment, eight Japanese medaka fish developed from egg to hatchling aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 1994. All eight survived the return to Earth and seemed to behave normally.Yet other studies have found evidence that points to potential problems. Pregnant rats that spent much of their third trimester -- a total of five days -- on a Soviet satellite in 1983 experienced complications during labor and delivery. Like all astronauts returning to Earth, the rats were exhausted and weak. Their deliveries lasted longer than usual, likely because of atrophied uterine muscles. All the pups in one of the litters died during delivery, the result of an obstruction thought to be due in part to the mother's weakened state.

To Edelbroek, these inconclusive results point to a need to systematically isolate each step in the reproductive process in order to better understand how it is affected by conditions like lower gravity and higher radiation exposure. The mini lab his company developed is designed to do exactly that. It is about the size of a shoebox and uses microfluidics to connect a chamber containing sperm to a chamber containing an egg. It can also rotate at different speeds to replicate the gravitational environment of Earth, the moon, or Mars. It is small enough to fit inside a capsule that can be housed on top of a rocket and launched into space.After the egg has been fertilized in the device, it splits into two cells, each of which divides again to form four cells and so on. After five to six days, the embryo reaches a stage known as a blastocyst, which looks like a hollow ball. At this point, the embryos in the mini lab will be cryogenically frozen for their return to Earth.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: A world-first trial of a gene therapy to cure a form of deafness has begun, potentially heralding a revolution in the treatment of hearing loss. Up to 18 children from the UK, Spain and the US are being recruited to the study, which aims to transform treatment of auditory neuropathy, a condition caused by the disruption of nerve impulses traveling from the inner ear to the brain. Participants will be monitored for five years to gauge whether their hearing improves, with initial results expected to be published next February.

Auditory neuropathy can be due to a variation in a single gene -- known as the OTOF gene -- which produces a protein called otoferlin. This protein typically allows the inner hair cells in the ear to communicate with the hearing nerve. Mutations in the OTOF gene can be identified by genetic testing. However, [Professor Manohar Bance, an ear surgeon at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust who is leading the trial in the UK] said it was a condition often missed when newborn babies were screened for potential hearing problems. "This is one of the few conditions where everything works except the transmission between the hair cells and the nerve. So everything else looks fine when you test it, but they can't hear anything. So these poor kids' [difficulties] end up being missed," Bance added.

The new gene therapy aims to deliver a working copy of the faulty OTOF gene using a modified, non-pathogenic virus. It will be delivered via an injection into the cochlea under general anaesthetic. Bance estimates that about 20,000 people across the US and five European countries -- the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy -- have auditory neuropathy due to OTOF mutations, underlining the potential significance of a successful treatment.[...] "If it works, it's 'one and done'" but the cost to health systems "is something that worries me," he added, noting that gene therapies could be priced in "the million dollar range" per patient. However, he hoped that "economies of scale" as the technology developed further would ultimately allow them to be provided more cheaply.

Kiley Price writes via Inside Climate News: In a new initiative announced on Tuesday, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is working with the nonprofit Revive & Restore and other partners to create a "genetic library" of the country's endangered species -- before it's too late. Through a process called biobanking, FWS field staff are gathering biological samples such as blood, tissues and reproductive cells from animals to be cryogenically preserved at extremely low temperatures (at least -256 degrees Fahrenheit) and stored at a USDA facility in Colorado. The samples will also be genetically sequenced and this information will be uploaded to a publicly available database called GenBank, where researchers can study them and compare their genomes to other members of their species.

In 2020 Serbian scientists were gifted China's "Fire-Eye" labs, remembers the Washington Post. The sophisticated portable labs "excelled not only at cracking the genetic code for viruses, but also for humans, with machines that can decipher genetic instructions contained within the cells of every person on Earth, according to its Chinese inventors."

Although some of them were temporary, "scores" of the portable labs "were donated or sold to foreign countries during the pandemic," reports the Washington Post. But it adds that now those same labs "are attracting the attention of Western intelligence agencies amid growing unease about China's intentions." Some analysts perceive China's largesse as part of a global attempt to tap into new sources of highly valuable human DNA data in countries around the world. That collection effort, underway for more than a decade, has included the acquisition of U.S. genetics companies as well as sophisticated hacking operations, U.S. and Western intelligence officials say. But more recently, it received an unexpected boost from the coronavirus pandemic, which created opportunities for Chinese companies and institutes to distribute gene-sequencing machines and build partnerships for genetic research in places where Beijing previously had little or no access, the officials said. Amid the pandemic, Fire-Eye labs would proliferate quickly, spreading to four continents and more than 20 countries, from Canada and Latvia to Saudi Arabia, and from Ethiopia and South Africa to Australia. Several, like the one in Belgrade, now function as permanent genetic-testing centers...

BGI Group, the Shenzhen-based company that makes Fire-Eye labs, said it has no access to genetic information collected by the lab it helped create in Serbia. But U.S. officials note that BGI was picked by Beijing to build and operate the China National GeneBank, a vast and growing government-owned repository that now includes genetic data drawn from millions of people around the world. The Pentagon last year officially listed BGI as one of several "Chinese military companies" operating in the United States, and a 2021 U.S. intelligence assessment linked the company to the Beijing-directed global effort to obtain even more human DNA, including from the United States. The U.S. government also has blacklisted Chinese subsidiaries of BGI for allegedly helping analyze genetic material gathered inside China to assist government crackdowns on the country's ethnic and religious minorities...

Beijing's drive to sweep up DNA from across the planet has occasionally stirred controversy, particularly after a 2021 Reuters series about aspects of the project. Chinese academics and military scientists have also attracted attention by debating the feasibility of creating biological weapons that might someday target populations based on their genes. Genetic-based weapons are regarded by experts as a distant prospect, at best, and some of the discussion appears to have been prompted by official paranoia about whether the United States and other countries are exploring such weapons.

U.S. intelligence officials believe China's global effort is mostly about beating the West economically, not militarily. There is no public evidence that Chinese companies have used foreign DNA for reasons other than scientific research. China has announced plans to become the world's leader in biotechnology by 2035, and it regards genetic information — sometimes called "the new gold" — as a crucial ingredient in a scientific revolution that could produce thousands of new drugs and cures...

U.S. intelligence officials said in interviews that they have limited insight into how BGI handles DNA information acquired overseas, including whether genetic data from the Fire-Eye labs ultimately end up in the computers of China's military or intelligence services... Chinese law makes clear that any information collected using BGI's machines can be accessed by the Chinese government. A national intelligence law enacted in 2017 stipulates that Chinese firms and citizens are legally bound to share proprietary information acquired in foreign countries whenever requested.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article