Biotech, in brief

Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) showed that one brain implant let two paralysed men speak and gesture at the same time. [3][4]

The words appeared on a screen and the gestures were acted out by an avatar, a moving on-screen figure made to look like each man. [1][4]

The study was published in Nature Neuroscience, a scientific journal, on 14 September, and was paid for by the US National Institutes of Health. [4][5]

One man was paralysed by a stroke in his brainstem, the part of the brain that joins it to the spinal cord. [3] The other has ALS, a disease that kills the nerves that move the muscles. [1]

Both had lost almost all movement in their arms and legs, and neither could speak more than unclear sounds. [1]

The implant is a sheet of 253 electrodes laid on the surface of the brain, over the strip that controls speech and body movement. [3]

The men tried to say set phrases such as hello and to wave, nod or clap, and computer programs learned which brain signals went with each attempt. [1]

For the man who had the stroke, the programs read his intended gestures correctly 88% of the time and his phrases 84% of the time. [1]

For the man with ALS the figures were 66% and 70%, against about 9% for pure guessing. [1]

Speaking and gesturing together made brain signals that were not simply the two added up. [4] Programs trained on both at once decoded them better. [4][5]

Henri Lorach, a researcher at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, called the work robust but said the set of phrases and gestures is small and daily use needs higher accuracy. [1]

The UCSF system is wired to computers outside the head. [4] Edward Chang, the UCSF brain surgeon who led it, said a fully implanted wireless version will be tried soon. [4]

Separately, the company Paradromics said a 68-year-old Michigan woman who lost most of her speech held conversations through its wireless implant, including phone calls with her grandchildren. [2]

Its Connexus implant carries more than 400 electrodes and was put in during June at University of Michigan Health. [2] The company says it also produced speech when she only imagined the words. [2]

Paradromics' result came from the company's own announcement, and its trial is planned to include 10 patients with stroke, ALS and similar conditions. [2]

For people paralysed like this, the usual tool today is typing with eye-tracking, which the NIH calls slow, limited and tiring. [4]

Why it matters. The next thing to watch is whether UCSF's wireless version and the rest of Paradromics' 10-patient trial work for more people, outside a lab and for longer. [4][2]

The committee that advises the European Medicines Agency, the EU's drug regulator, recommended approval of glepaglutide on 18 September, its maker Zealand Pharma said. [6] It is for adults with short bowel syndrome, a rare illness in which so much gut is lost or damaged that people must be fed through a vein. [6] The drug copies GLP-2, a gut hormone, to help the remaining intestine absorb more. [6] In a trial of 106 patients it cut weekly vein feeding by 5.13 litres, against 2.85 litres on a dummy drug. [6]

Why it matters. Feeding through a vein can cause blood infections, clots and liver damage, so each litre less matters to the people on it. [6] The European Commission is expected to decide within about 67 days, and the US still needs another trial, EASE-5, which is recruiting. [6]

The drug company Xenon stopped taking new patients into two late-stage trials of azetukalner for depression and bipolar depression, it told investors on 17 September. [7] A small share of patients had confusion, trouble finding words or unsteadiness. [7] A very small number had psychosis, a break from reality. [7] The drug opens a potassium channel in nerve cells, and Xenon has just asked the US regulator to approve it for epilepsy. [7] It plans to change the dose before starting again. [7]

Why it matters. Xenon's shares fell 26% before trading opened on Friday. [7] A week earlier Biohaven paused new enrolment in epilepsy trials of a drug that works on the same channel, and Xenon and analysts at William Blair said nothing links the two. [7]

The US Food and Drug Administration held a public meeting on testosterone for women past menopause, Reuters reported on 17 September. [8] No testosterone product is approved for women in the US, while the UK, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa have approved or licensed one. [8] US doctors often give women small parts of doses made for men, such as AbbVie's AndroGel. [8] The FDA has refused it before, citing too little long-term safety data and worries about heart disease and breast cancer. [8]

Why it matters. Rajita Patil, who runs UCLA's menopause programme, said the evidence is strong only for low sexual desire after menopause, not for mood, memory or energy. [8] Public comments close on 19 October. [8]

Bristol Myers Squibb, one of the biggest US drugmakers, stopped developing ORM-6151 after reviewing early trial data, its original developer Orum revealed in a financial filing. [9] The drug is an antibody that carries a protein-destroying chemical to cells flagged with CD33, a marker found on many acute myeloid leukaemia cells. [9] BMS bought it in 2023 and started a first human trial in 2024. [9] Orum loses the chance to earn up to $80m. [9]

Why it matters. AbbVie stopped a similar CD33 drug of its own last year. [9] BMS has cut many projects agreed before Christopher Boerner became its chief executive in 2023. [9]

Scientists described IMP-2380 in Nature Chemical Biology, a chemical that blocks NorA, a pump that Staphylococcus aureus bacteria use to throw antibiotics back out. [10] With the pump jammed, ciprofloxacin, an old antibiotic, worked again against MRSA, the drug-resistant form of the germ. [10] It worked in lab dishes and in an animal infection. [10] Detailed images showed the chemical jams the pump while it is open to the outside of the cell. [10]

Why it matters. Drug-resistant infections killed 1.27 million people in 2019, the authors note, and few truly new antibiotics are coming. [10] A helper of this kind, clavulanic acid, is already used to protect antibiotics from bacteria, but IMP-2380 has not been tried in people. [10]

A team writing in Cell built LongevityBench, 17 tasks that check whether AI programs can read data on how the body ages, such as chemical marks on DNA. [11] They tried 18 leading AI systems from six developers, and none was best at everything. [11] Guessing a person's age from their molecular data was the hardest task for every model. [11] Five small models trained on ageing data matched or beat far larger general ones. [11]

Why it matters. The team has released the tasks and models free, so other ageing researchers can check their own tools against them. [11] It also shows a lab without giant computers can build a useful model for this work. [11]

Livers kept on machines after donation appear to become younger at a molecular level, MIT Technology Review reported on 15 September. [12] Most donated organs are flushed, bagged and kept on ice, where they begin to break down and must reach a patient within hours. [12] The machines instead pump the organ with nutrients and remove its waste, as a body would. [12]

Why it matters. The finding may explain why organs kept on these machines tend to do better after transplant. [12] It could also lead to ways of checking or repairing livers that would otherwise be thrown away. [12]

Scientists reported in Science on 17 September a bacterial defence called VIPR, built around a protein older than the Cas proteins that CRISPR gene editing uses. [13] Like CRISPR, it uses a guide made of RNA to find a virus's DNA. [13] But it reads the DNA with gaps, skipping every third letter, and silences the virus's genes. [13] The authors say CRISPR-like defences may have begun in fights between rival viruses. [13]

Why it matters. CRISPR came from studying how bacteria fight viruses, and VIPR offers scientists a new way to switch chosen genes off. [13]

A program called Delphy, described in Nature, builds the family trees that show how an outbreak virus spread and changed. [14] It matches the most careful existing method for accuracy while running up to 100 to 1,000 times faster. [14] It repeated key analyses of past Ebola, Zika, COVID-19 and mpox outbreaks, and handled a made-up set of 100,000 virus genomes within a day. [14] It runs as a web app on the user's own computer. [14]

Why it matters. The careful method needed specialist groups and heavy computing, so most public health bodies have used rougher shortcuts during outbreaks. [14]

Artelo Biosciences said on 16 September that its pill ART27.13 cut body weight by about 20% in four weeks in obese mice, similar to semaglutide, the drug in Ozempic. [15] Mice given both lost about 40%. [15] Lean mice given the pill did not lose weight. [15] It acts on cannabinoid receptors, which THC in cannabis also acts on, but is designed to stay out of the brain. [15]

Why it matters. AstraZeneca first made the drug for pain and dropped it. [15] Artelo is testing it in people with cancer-related wasting, and these weight results are the company's own and only in mice. [15]

A study in Bone Marrow Transplantation looked back at azacitidine, a drug given after a stem-cell transplant for high-risk acute myeloid leukaemia to keep the cancer away. [16] It compared 29 patients at one hospital who got it with 21 who did not. [16] After two years, survival and the time free of cancer were no different. [16] Almost one in three treated patients relapsed. [16]

Why it matters. It agrees with an earlier randomised trial that found no survival gain. [16] The authors say the drug was safe to give, and that a small study looking back at records can miss a real effect. [16]

Researchers searched cobra venom proteins for fragments that might kill bacteria, using computer programs to pick 14 candidates, in npj Drug Discovery. [17] Most showed limited activity. [17] The best, called CTX-p5, killed bacteria by breaking their outer skin. [17] Trimming or changing it did not make it stronger. [17]

Why it matters. The authors say the computer tools that picked the candidates need to get more accurate before this way of finding drug leads pays off. [17]

Torbay Hospital in south-west England said Stephen Dwyer-Lapthorne is the first man in its area to get SABR, a high-precision radiotherapy, for prostate cancer. [18] SABR gives the treatment in five sessions instead of the usual 20. [18] NHS England announced a national rollout in June. [18] About 17,500 of the 55,000 men found to have prostate cancer in the UK each year are at the low or intermediate risk it is meant for. [18]

Why it matters. Fewer sessions means fewer trips to hospital, which the hospital said lets patients be treated closer to home. [18]

Researchers argued in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, a Nature journal, that group outbreaks of symptoms after vaccination with no physical cause should be counted as real vaccine reactions. [19] These outbreaks are called mass psychogenic illness. [19] The paper looks mostly at HPV vaccine programmes, which usually vaccinate girls around puberty. [19] The authors say calling them imaginary leaves sufferers dismissed and untreated. [19]

Why it matters. They argue that taking these reactions seriously could protect trust in vaccines. [19] Measles is rising where vaccination has fallen, including in Bangladesh. [19]

A Cameroonian microbiologist described in Nature Africa how her team tracks the bacteria that infect newborns in Cameroon's hospitals. [20] They find babies already carrying dangerous bacteria at birth, many of them resistant to several drugs. [20] The germs spread partly from health workers and hospital surroundings. [20] With the Wellcome Sanger Institute they are building genetic tracking that reports in three to four days, at about $10 a sample. [20] In 2024 about 2.3 million babies worldwide died in their first 28 days. [20]

Why it matters. Resistance is closing off cheap first-choice antibiotics for babies and pregnant women, so knowing the germ decides which drug a sick child gets. [20]

A new book on sickle cell disease, Curved Air by Kevin Davies, is published this month by Harvard University Press, GEN reported. [21] The disease comes from one faulty letter in the gene for adult haemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in blood. [21] It was first described in 1910. [21] Casgevy, a CRISPR treatment approved in December 2023, does not fix the fault; it switches the baby form of haemoglobin back on. [21]

Why it matters. About 100,000 people in the US have the disease, and Casgevy costs $2.2 million. [21] Before gene editing the only effective drug was hydroxyurea, an old chemotherapy. [21]

A study in Nature Communications followed the proteins inside human cells as they became senescent, the state in which old cells stop dividing but do not die. [22] Proteins were lost from the material that packs DNA, and the cell's protein-making machinery shrank. [22] The systems that clear away damaged proteins also weakened. [22]

Why it matters. Senescent cells build up with age and feed inflammation, and drugs are being sought to remove them. [22] This map gives those efforts a list of changes to aim at. [22]