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Category: biotech/medical

Genetically modified hookworms produce and deliver therapeutics

Hookworms, intestinal parasites that infect hundreds of millions of people in under-resourced tropical regions around the globe, have evolved to survive inside the human gut for years, secreting molecules that enable coexistence with their hosts. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have harnessed that biological mechanism for potential human benefit, engineering a hookworm to produce and deliver a drug within a living host.

In a new study, the team reports the first successful genetic modification of the human hookworm. It was designed to produce an antibody that neutralizes tetrodotoxin, a deadly neurotoxin produced by pufferfish and other marine animals. After colonizing an animal host with the modified hookworms, the parasites produced the antitoxin and secreted it into the bloodstream, partially inactivating the toxin. The findings are published in Nature Communications.

The work demonstrates that this drug production and delivery approach could be a long-term solution to any number of medical needs, from chronic conditions requiring continuous drug treatment to exposure to toxins in remote locations without medical care available.

Chip-scale ‘acoustic atom’ controls sound waves to imitate atomic energy levels and advance computing

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. What goes up must come down. Physical laws like these govern all of the natural world—except for the tiny internal components of today’s microprocessors, which operate according to the unique and complicated rules of quantum physics.

As the microprocessors that power computers, medical equipment, sensors, and more continue to shrink in size, engineers face challenges controlling quantum-scale systems. But in a step forward for the technology, researchers at Virginia Tech have developed an “acoustic atom”—a chip-scale device that traps and controls sound waves in ways that mimic the behavior of real atoms. Long term, these advances could influence technologies connected to quantum artificial intelligence (AI), telecommunication, medical imaging, GPS, and more.

The research is published in Physical Review Letters by Linbo Shao, assistant professor in Virginia Tech’s Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, along with colleagues at the university’s Center for Power Electronic Systems, Department of Physics, and Center for Quantum Information Science and Engineering and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Ultrafast laser shrinks to chip scale, potentially lowering costs for diagnostics and atomic clocks

Ultrafast lasers emit pulses lasting only a few hundred femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second). These flashes of light power applications from precision micromachining to eye surgery to optical frequency combs, the Nobel Prize-winning technology behind today’s most precise optical atomic clocks. Yet despite more than two decades of effort, ultrafast lasers have largely remained bulky, expensive systems confined to optical tables.

Now a team led by Professor Tobias J. Kippenberg at EPFL has brought them onto a photonic chip. Publishing in Nature, the researchers report the first integrated ultrafast laser to rival tabletop femtosecond lasers, delivering 1.05 nanojoules in pulses as short as 147 femtoseconds.

Photonic chips guide and process light in microscopic channels called waveguides patterned on a wafer, similar to how electronic microchips route electricity. Already widely used in telecommunications, photonic chips have miniaturized complex functions that once required much larger systems.

Temperature gaps help sneeze clouds stay denser and travel farther, experiments show

When a person coughs or sneezes, they expel a cloud of microscopic particles capable of carrying viruses and bacteria that act as vectors for respiratory diseases such as flu, COVID-19 or tuberculosis. Understanding how these aerosols disperse in the air is crucial for minimizing the transmission of pathogens in indoor spaces, but their dynamics are complex and depend on many factors: the force of the exhalation, the morphology of the respiratory system, the characteristics of the space, etc. Now, a new study led by researchers from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili has shown that temperature also plays an important role.

Their findings, published in Physics of Fluids, indicate that the difference between the temperature of exhaled air and that of the ambient air causes the cloud of particles to remain more concentrated and travel farther. The greater this difference, the more noticeable the effects are.

The research continues a line of work initiated by the URV’s ECoMMFiT research group, which developed a simulator capable of reproducing coughs and sneezes to study how respiratory aerosols disperse. As a result of that study, the team demonstrated that the nasal cavity significantly alters the trajectory of expelled particles. Now, the researchers have incorporated a new factor into the analysis: temperature.

Open-source software unlocks rapid DNA structure generation and analysis in one workflow

Computational chemists at the University of Amsterdam’s Van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences have developed a comprehensive software suite to create accurate models of DNA in biomolecular assemblies. Called MDNA, the user-friendly molecular modeling toolkit helps biochemists, molecular biologists, bioinformaticians, and biophysicists to visualize and analyze DNA structures and perform accurate simulations.

The development of the MDNA suite, led by associate professor Jocelyne Vreede, has been presented in a paper in Nucleic Acids Research.

The software is open-source and publicly available through Figshare and Github. It is easily accessible, providing inspiration to any scientist with an interest in DNA. It has been thoroughly tested by students in mathematics, chemistry and biology, some of whom had hardly any programming experience.

New CAR T treatment opens door for patients in need of kidney transplant

A pioneering clinical trial has successfully enabled two patients with end-stage kidney disease to receive previously improbable kidney transplants. These individuals were considered among the most difficult in the nation to match with a compatible donor kidney due to harmful antibodies they had developed (“sensitized”).

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) used chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy, originally developed at Penn for treatment of blood cancer, to significantly reduce the level of harmful immune antibodies in these two highly sensitized patients, making kidney transplantation possible after years of waiting. The study’s findings appear in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“This is the first demonstration that CAR T cells can be used not only to treat cancer, but also to help patients who previously had no opportunity to receive a compatible donor kidney,” said Ali Naji, MD, Ph.D., the Jonathan E. Rhoads Professor of Surgery and principal investigator of the study. “For patients who have spent years on the kidney transplant waiting list, this approach could be transformative.”

Beyond the brain: Organs help shape the nervous systems that control them

A new Yale study reveals that major organ systems in the body aren’t just passive structures operating on directions from command central—the brain—but instead are active participants in controlling their own functions.

Writing in the journal Nature, a team of researchers led by Yale’s Rui Chang demonstrates how organs develop and maintain their own neural circuitry, which in turn communicates with the brain in a sort of two-way conversation.

The findings provide a new understanding of how the body and brain communicate via networks of neurons embedded inside organs that constitute a mini-nervous system, called “organ intrinsic nervous systems,” which help control critical functions such as digestion, heart rhythm, breathing, insulin secretion, and immune responses, the researchers say.

AI misses cancer drug target, revealing why lab validation still matters

Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have identified a previously hidden druggable site in a cancer-related protein that could open the door toward the development of a new generation of more precise cancer drugs. The finding also reveals important limitations in today’s artificial intelligence tools for drug discovery.

The study, published in the June 2 online issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, focused on PKMYT1, a type of protein known as a kinase that helps control how cells grow and divide. Because this process can go wrong in cancer, PKMYT1 has emerged as a promising target for new cancer drugs.

Most experimental drugs designed to block kinases work by targeting a region called the ATP-binding site—the part of the protein that uses the cell’s energy supply to function. But many kinases share nearly identical ATP-binding sites, making it difficult for drugs to distinguish between the desired target and other kinases, which can lead to unwanted side effects.

Novel prostate cancer treatment can reduce risk of disease progression by half, clinical trial shows

A Phase III clinical trial led by Neeraj Agarwal, MD, FASCO, senior director of clinical research at Huntsman Cancer Institute and professor of internal medicine at the University of Utah (the U), has found that a combination prostate cancer treatment could prevent the disease from progressing into a harder-to-treat form of cancer in select patients.

The study, TALAPRO-3 (NCT04821622), evaluated a combination of two drugs—talazoparib and enzalutamide—in patients with metastatic castration-sensitive prostate cancer. This is a form of the disease that has spread beyond the prostate but remains susceptible to standard hormone therapy treatment.

The patients involved also had prostate cancer affected by certain gene mutations, including but not limited to BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations, that often signal more aggressive disease.

Life-changing benefits of hydroxyurea for sickle cell anemia affirmed by 10-year study

Fewer serious complications. Fewer hospitalizations and blood transfusions. Better growth and development. And a markedly lower risk of death from the complications of sickle cell anemia.

These are the benefits documented from 10 years of continuous hydroxyurea treatment provided in the NOHARM trial to a group of young children in Uganda, which has one of the world’s largest number of people living with the painful disorder known for causing sickle-shaped red blood cells. These improved outcomes were highlighted May 27, 2026, in a report published by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Russell Ware, MD, Ph.D., director of the Division of Hematology and the Global Health Center at Cincinnati Children’s, was the lead author of the report. He has been working for years with researchers and clinicians across sub-Saharan Africa to demonstrate the safety and effectiveness of low-cost hydroxyurea treatments.

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