Biotechnology and life-science inventions
Beijing researchers have made an injectable gel that flows through an endoscope, sets in about 30 seconds at body temperature and sticks only on the side facing tissue. It closed stomach fistulas in rats and pigs, but has not been tested in people.
A Fraunhofer team in Potsdam is building a robot platform that produces enzyme variants without living cells, then trains AI on the results. The bottleneck it attacks is real, but the platform is early and the spin-off does not exist yet.
Three people with drug-resistant epilepsy had seizures fall by an average of 92.6% after a virus made their neurons sensitive to a pill. One patient stopped taking the pill, and the seizures came back.
A Chinese team has turned a translation error that happens mostly in tumour cells into an on switch for a self-destruct gene. It cleared tumours in mice, spared healthy tissue and already has a patent application pending.
Cornell researchers repurposed the Arc gene to make immune-cell vesicles that suppressed melanoma in mice. The platform is inventive, but human safety, dosing and manufacturing remain wide open.
A USTC imaging laboratory has released structRFM, an open RNA model trained to learn how the molecule folds, not only the order of its letters.
