Biotech, in brief

Dengue has now been reported in all 64 districts of Bangladesh, and the capital, Dhaka, still has the largest share of cases. [1]

August was the worst month for dengue so far this year, and health experts warn September could be worse still. [1]

Kabirul Bashar, an insect scientist at Jahangirnagar University who models the outbreak, expects more than 30,000 people in hospital this month. [1]

He says the peak has not been reached, and the weather should keep the mosquitoes breeding into October. [1]

The same hospitals are already treating a measles outbreak that has killed nearly 1,000 children in Bangladesh this year. [1]

Zahid Hasan took his four-year-old son to three government hospitals and could not find a bed for him. [1]

The boy was admitted to a private hospital, needed seven bags of blood and plasma, and is recovering slowly. [1]

Dengue turns dangerous after the fever drops, when fluid leaks out of the blood vessels and blood pressure falls. [1]

Prime Minister Tarique Rahman has ordered nationwide clean-up campaigns and asked people to get rid of standing water. [1]

Bashar says fogging cannot control dengue while the places the mosquitoes actually breed are left untouched. [1]

Why it matters. Watch whether the clean-up campaign reaches the water sitting in yards, gutters and containers: fogging can cut adult mosquito numbers for a few days without touching where the next generation is growing. [1]

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that country's main public health agency, said on 4 September that 3,134 measles cases have been confirmed in the United States this year. [2] It is the highest annual total in more than 35 years. About 94% of the cases were in people who were unvaccinated or whose vaccination status was unknown, and 248 people have been admitted to hospital. [2] The agency has recorded 38 separate outbreaks this year, against 48 in the whole of 2025. [2]

Why it matters. Measles only spreads where enough people are unprotected, so the count is really a measure of how many children have missed the vaccine. The agency still does not include two deaths reported by the US state of Pennsylvania in its total. [2]

Researchers at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences, Imperial College London and the UCL Genetics Institute built a cell-by-cell map of breast tumours and published it in the journal Genome Medicine. [3] They found separate regions inside one tumour: some packed with cancer cells dividing fast, others with cells that have gone quiet. [3] The quiet cells were usually ringed by immune cells and connective tissue cells that appear to shield them. [3] Chemotherapy is aimed at cells that divide, so the sleeping ones survive it. [3]

Why it matters. It offers an explanation for why breast cancer can return years after a patient is told it has gone. The authors argue that future treatments have to reach the dormant cells and the neighbourhoods protecting them, not only the fast-growing part. [3]

Glioblastoma is the most lethal common brain tumour, and it survives both radiation and chemotherapy. [4] Researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center found that its cells switch off an enzyme called PP2A, which normally acts as a brake on growth. [4] A protein called SET is what holds that brake down. [4] Blocking SET stopped tumours forming in laboratory and animal tests, and interfering with related proteins made the cancer cells easier to kill with radiation. [4] Nobody has tried it in a person. [4]

Why it matters. This is not a replacement for radiation but a way of making the radiation land, in a cancer where treatment has barely changed in decades. Everything so far is preclinical, so no patient has been helped by it yet. [4]

Pfizer, one of the world's biggest drugmakers, has sold the rights to a cancer drug it shelved to Medicus Pharma, a far smaller company, for $12 million up front. [5] Medicus owes another $15 million in a year, and Pfizer could earn more than $1 billion in later payments if the drug ever reaches the market. [5] The drug is an antibody that carries a poison to cells showing a protein called CD228, common in melanoma. [5] Pfizer began a first human trial in 2025 and then stopped it. [5]

Why it matters. The same molecule and the same data were not worth Pfizer's bench time and are now the centre of a small company's plan. Pfizer also put in $2 million to get Medicus started and keeps the right to review its budgets. [5]

Ultragenyx said it will consider significant cost cuts after its drug for Angelman syndrome missed in a late-stage trial. [30] Angelman is a genetic condition that damages the brain and body; many people with it cannot walk, most cannot speak, and they need care all their lives. [30] An analyst at Leerink Partners wrote that the company's own wording left very little room for an optimistic reading. [30] Shares in Ionis Pharmaceuticals, which is building a drug that works the same way, fell 4% the next morning. [30]

Why it matters. One result has now set one company's budget and another company's share price in the same week. Families living with Angelman syndrome still have no approved treatment of any kind. [30]

Researchers at the University of Hong Kong and the University of Georgia looked at blood levels of two amino acids, phenylalanine and tyrosine, in more than 270,000 people. [6] Higher tyrosine was tied to a shorter life in men by close to a year, with no clear effect in women. [6] They used both ordinary observation and a genetic method that helps separate cause from coincidence. [6] Tyrosine occurs naturally in protein-rich food and is also sold as a supplement for concentration. [6]

Why it matters. This is a pattern found in data, not the result of giving anyone tyrosine and watching what happened. It puts a widely sold supplement into a question nobody had been asking. [6]

Scientists from Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Stanford University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences fed old mice supplements containing plasmalogens. [7] These are fat molecules that form part of the membrane around every cell, and they are abundant in sea squirts, small sea animals eaten in Korea and Japan. [7] The treated mice did better at memory and learning tasks, had stronger connections between brain cells, less inflammation, and thicker, darker hair. [7]

Why it matters. Reversing a sign of ageing in a mouse is a long way from doing it in a person, and most things that work in mice never work in people. What is interesting is the target: the fats that hold nerve-cell membranes together. [7]

Researchers at the German Institute of Human Nutrition in Potsdam and the Charite hospital in Berlin asked people to breathe slowly with a long breath out, then watched their hearts and brains while they made choices. [8] The long exhale raised heart rate variability, which is the small differences in timing between beats, and made the brain respond more strongly to rewards. [8] Those people then made bolder choices. [8] The work was published in the journal Neuron. [8]

Why it matters. It puts a physical control on something usually described as personality or nerve. How large the effect is outside a laboratory is not known. [8]

Scientists at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge mapped all 124 million connections between nerve cells in a male fruit fly's brain. [9] They had done the same for a female fly two years ago, so the two can now be compared in full for the first time. [9] The differences they found line up with male behaviours: aggression, courtship, and the song males make with their wings. [9] The team says the work does not explain differences between men and women. [9]

Why it matters. A complete wiring diagram lets researchers ask which circuits a particular gene changes, which is the question behind conditions such as autism and schizophrenia. [9]

A project involving more than 1,000 scientists tracked nutrition in children aged 5 to 19 across 200 countries and published its latest results in the journal Nature in May. [10] It found that the centre of childhood obesity has moved to low and middle-income countries, which still have high rates of undernourishment at the same time. [10] Obesity among boys rose fastest in Peru, reaching 19% in 2023-2024 from under 8% in 2010. [10] In Indonesia, rates among boys and girls rose by more than half a percentage point in one year. [10]

Why it matters. These are the countries least able to pay for the illnesses that follow, and their health services were built for the opposite problem. Reuters followed Intan Permatasari, an Indonesian girl who left school at 12 after years of bullying. [10]

About 8,000 people in the United Kingdom live with Huntington's disease, an inherited condition caused by one faulty gene that slowly damages movement, thinking and mood. [11] Symptoms usually start between the ages of 30 and 50, and there is no cure. [11] Researchers report in the journal eLife that an advanced kind of MRI scan can pick up cell-level damage in living patients that until now was only visible in brain tissue examined after death. [11]

Why it matters. Gene and cell therapies for Huntington's are now being tested, and watching the damage inside a living person is how anyone will tell whether they are working. [11]

In multiple sclerosis the immune system attacks the brain and spinal cord, and nerve cells die. [12] Researchers writing in Nature read the genes switched on in individual nerve cells in the eyes of people who had multiple sclerosis and people who did not. [12] The cells that survived were the ones making a protein called complement factor H inside themselves. [12] The protein sits where inflammation damages the cell's own fats, and it limits that damage. [12]

Why it matters. Almost every multiple sclerosis drug works by calming the immune attack from outside. This points instead at making the nerve cell itself harder to kill. [12]

Some breast cancer treatments weaken the heart, and survivors are usually told to take heart-failure medicines for the rest of their lives. [13] A trial funded by the British Heart Foundation ran at four UK hospitals, led by Charlotte Manisty of University College London. [13] It took 90 women in their 40s and 50s whose heart function had recovered, and stopped their drugs. [13] After a year, 98% of those who stopped had no change in heart function, and one woman developed a problem with her heart's pumping. [13] They also reported a better quality of life. [13]

Why it matters. It is the first evidence that these medicines can be stopped rather than taken forever, as long as the patient is watched closely. Lucy Shepherd, diagnosed shortly after her 33rd birthday, said coming off them improved her life. [13]

Invivyd, a US biotech company that makes antibodies against infectious diseases, has given its chairman, Marc Elia, the chief executive's job as well. [14] He has been on the board since 2022 and helped set the company's strategy. [14] The company is waiting for the main result from a late-stage trial of VYD2311, an antibody meant to stop adults and teenagers developing COVID symptoms, due in the third quarter of this year. [14] Elia said he had struggled with the effects of long COVID. [14]

Why it matters. A company usually changes its leader either just before or just after the one event that sets its value. Invivyd has done it just before. [14]

About 75% of American adults told an AARP survey in 2024 that they hoped to stay in their own homes as they got older, and only 29% saw a traditional retirement community as a likely choice. [15] Continuing care retirement communities in the United States are now selling a version of their service to people who never move in. [15] Members get support at home and can move into the community later if they need to, with the future cost capped. [15]

Why it matters. Long-term care is one of the biggest bills a household can meet and nobody knows in advance whether it will arrive. This sells the protection without the building. [15]

Since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became US health secretary, the US government has rewritten its food guidance to stress protein, pushed back on highly processed food, and started changing meals in schools, hospitals and on military bases. [16] Several of its plans, including nutrition coaching inside ordinary doctors' surgeries, need dietitians. [16] STAT reports that the profession is shrinking. A master's degree costs about $10,000 on top of an undergraduate degree, then an 18-month internship, for hospital work paying around $55,000 a year in the US state of Louisiana. [16]

Why it matters. A policy delivered through one profession can only move as fast as that profession grows. Dietitians say the movement built on diet has done nothing about their pay or their training costs. [16]

Presten Mooney, 17, has chronic myeloid leukaemia, a cancer of the blood-forming cells. [17] He had not been seen by his hospital's cancer team for more than a year while his mother, Dayna Mooney, treated him with alternative remedies at home in the US state of Oklahoma. [17] In October 2025 a judge ordered him into emergency custody and a caseworker drove him to Oklahoma Children's OU Health. [17] His mother recorded the doctors telling her she could not take him home. [17]

Why it matters. It is a fight over who decides a child's treatment when a parent and a hospital disagree, and a court settled it by taking the child into custody. The New York Times interviewed more than 20 family members, politicians and others over six months. [17]

Tau is a brain protein that turns faulty in Alzheimer's disease and related conditions, and it exists in many slightly different versions. [18] Researchers writing in Nature Methods built a technique that reads millions to billions of single protein molecules, probing each one over and over with glowing antibodies. [18] Using 12 antibodies on tau, they found 130 distinct groups of tau versions, some carrying as many as six chemical tags. [18] The method can spot a version present at one part in a thousand. [18]

Why it matters. Until now the different versions of tau were measured as one average across a sample, which hides which version is doing the damage. [18]

The outer layer of the human brain grows enormously before birth. [19] Researchers publishing in Nature mapped how DNA physically loops inside glial cells, the support cells of the brain, while that growth happens. [19] A loop brings a distant switch into contact with the gene it controls, and which loops form helps decide what a cell becomes. [19] The same team had already done this for nerve cells and the cells they grow from. [19]

Why it matters. Many gene variants linked to psychiatric conditions sit in stretches of DNA that do no work themselves and only control other genes. A map like this says which cell they act in. [19]

Enhancers are stretches of DNA that switch genes on from far away along the chromosome, and they are often described as working no matter how far away they sit. [20] A review in Nature Genetics sets out that this is not true: the further an enhancer is from its gene, the weaker and less precise its effect. [20] The authors gather the mechanisms cells use to keep long-range control working anyway. [20]

Why it matters. How far a switch can reach decides which genes can be turned on together, and that shapes how a body is built. [20]

Researchers writing in Nature Communications traced a chain of three brain regions that antidepressant effects run through in mice. [21] Switching on one region at the front of the brain produced fast antidepressant-like effects and strengthened the physical connections between cells in the hippocampus, the brain's memory area. [21] A small relay in the middle of the brain, the nucleus reuniens, turned out to be necessary: blocking it removed the effect, and removed ketamine's effect too. [21]

Why it matters. Ketamine lifts depression within hours where older drugs take weeks, and nobody could say through what. This names one relay that has to be intact. [21]

Some drugs damage the kidney, and the cells used to test for that in the laboratory behave poorly. [22] Researchers writing in Experimental & Molecular Medicine grew kidney tubule cells from human stem cells. [22] Two added ingredients made them form proper barriers and move substances the way real kidney cells do. [22] Grown on a chip, they picked up kidney damage more sensitively than the cells normally used. [22] The team also used CRISPR gene editing to build a version carrying the fault behind Fabry disease. [22]

Why it matters. Kidney harm is a common reason a drug is abandoned late and expensively, so a more sensitive test moves that discovery earlier. [22]

Pancreatic tumours are full of macrophages, immune cells that are supposed to eat threats but instead end up helping the tumour hide. [23] Most laboratory models of the tumour leave them out. [23] Researchers writing in npj Precision Oncology grew tumour tissue taken from patients together with macrophages inside a synthetic gel. [23] Inside the model, the macrophages shifted into the same tumour-protecting state they take in a real patient. [23]

Why it matters. Pancreatic cancer resists the drugs that release the immune system against other tumours. A model that reproduces the protection is where you would test a way past it. [23]

T cells are the immune cells that kill infected and cancerous cells, and they stop working in two different ways. [24] A review in Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy separates them. Exhaustion comes from being held switched on too long against a constant target, and can be partly reversed. [24] Senescence comes from age and from having divided too many times: the cell stops dividing for good and starts leaking inflammatory signals. [24]

Why it matters. Cancer immunotherapy is built on waking T cells up. Which of the two states a patient's cells have reached decides whether waking them is possible at all. [24]

Solute carriers are the proteins that move nutrients, salts and signalling chemicals in and out of cells. [25] A few are already the target of the most widely used brain medicines, including the antidepressants that block serotonin from being reabsorbed. [25] A review in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery argues that many more of these carriers behave abnormally in the brain, and have been linked to epilepsy, brain-wasting diseases and autism. [25] New chemical methods can now raise or lower how much of a carrier a cell has. [25]

Why it matters. The family is large and mostly unstudied, so it is one of the few places left where a genuinely new class of brain medicine could come from. [25]

Neuromodulation means deliberately changing brain activity, usually with electricity or magnets, to improve how the brain works. [26] A paper in Nature Neuroscience splits the field in two. One aim is to push activity back towards what a healthy brain does. [26] The other is to strengthen whatever the brain has started using instead, even when that is not the original wiring. [26] The authors set out four conditions under which the second approach can work. [26]

Why it matters. The two aims need opposite settings on the same machine, so saying which one a treatment is chasing changes where it is aimed. [26]

IGF2BP2 is a protein made in excess by many cancers and linked to worse outcomes. [27] Researchers writing in Cell Death Discovery traced what it does to a cell's chemistry, using labelled carbon to follow the traffic inside the cell. [27] It changes which carrier proteins sit on the mitochondria, the parts of the cell that release energy, including the one that carries pyruvate in. [27] Removing the protein from bowel cancer cells changed that traffic, and a substance that bypasses the blocked carrier reversed the change. [27]

Why it matters. A tumour cell that runs its energy differently from a healthy cell is a target that could spare healthy tissue, if the difference can be used. [27]

Doctors sometimes start labour artificially when a baby is smaller than expected for its stage. [28] Researchers at Fujian Maternity and Child Health Hospital in China looked back at 507 such births between 2017 and 2022, of which 134, or 26.4%, ended in a caesarean. [28] They built a scoring tool from four things known at the time: the mother's age, her weight on admission, which method was used to start labour, and how ready the cervix was afterwards. [28] It was then tested on a held-back part of the same group. [28]

Why it matters. It gives a number instead of a hunch at the moment the decision has to be made. It has only been checked against records from the one hospital that produced it. [28]

Annie Fields, 37, from Manchester in England, was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer at 32 and given the all-clear after chemotherapy, surgery and radiotherapy. [29] In 2024, 35 weeks into a pregnancy, she was told the cancer had returned and had reached stage four. [29] Her son was delivered by emergency caesarean and she had surgery to remove a brain tumour. [29] After immunotherapy she went into remission, was diagnosed again last year, and has now had a clear full-body scan. [29]

Why it matters. She had frozen her eggs before her first round of treatment, after being told it might end her fertility. Her son is now two. [29]