DISCOVERIES

One of the many shock waves created in COVID-19’s wake is a flood of companies employing artificial intelligence (AI) to quickly develop a safe and effective vaccine. AI is a broad term that encompasses many technologies. The AI subfield that holds the most promise for vaccine development is machine learning (ML). ML is an AI … Read more

Engineering biological systems to solve problems is becoming almost commonplace. Ideas range from finding environmentally sustainable ways to mimic natural resources to building new kinds of medical treatments for deadly diseases. The enormous promise of such work is rapidly intercepting with actual results.  When physicist David Ross thinks of these things, he thinks a lot … Read more

One can think of the rapid growth of genome sequencing as producing a special kind of exhaust in the form immunologically relevant data that has accumulated in large quantities in databases around the world. Those databases can be mined. Immunoinformatics is emerging as an important tool at the intersection of experimental immunology and various computational … Read more

In June, a U.S. Army laboratory, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR), a subordinate command of the Army Futures Command’s Medical Research and Development Command (USAMRDC), announced the selection of a lead COVID-19 vaccine candidate as well as two backup vaccine candidates that will advance to the next stage of research. “USAMRDC is … Read more

A team of scientists at University of Vermont has repurposed living cells—scraped from frog embryos—and assembled them into entirely new life-forms. These millimeter-wide “xenobots” can move toward a target, perhaps pick up a payload (like a medicine that needs to be carried to a specific place inside a patient)—and heal themselves after being cut. “These … Read more

In December, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved olaparib (Lynparza) for the maintenance treatment of adult patients with germline BRCA-mutated metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma whose disease has not progressed on at least 16 weeks of a first-line platinum-based chemotherapy regimen, according to AstraZeneca and Merck. The agent is now the only PARP inhibitor approved for … Read more

Yeast is used to make foods like beer and bread. Now, synthetic biology turns yeast into medical diagnoses. Using only baker’s yeast, filter paper and a 3-D printed holder, researchers at Columbia University designed an inexpensive, on-the-spot test to detect major fungal pathogens. Diagnosing fungal infections, which kill 2 million people each year and cost … Read more