Section
4 articles
Melanoma is hard to treat because it grows, spreads and learns to ignore chemotherapy. A team in China built a dissolving microneedle patch for mice: tiny needles carrying doxorubicin and a CRISPR/Cas9 complex aimed at the YB-1 gene. The question was whether pressing such a patch onto skin could deliver both agents close enough to the tumor to change its behavior.
Blood pressure is usually checked with a cuff that squeezes the arm and gives a single number. But the pulse itself carries more information: its shape changes as it travels through arteries, and those changes can hint at how blood moves in the body. A new passive wrist patch tries to turn that hidden detail into something an ordinary phone camera can see. The device has no battery or wires. It uses a stretch-sensitive film whose color shifts when the artery beneath it beats.
Biologists testing thousands of genes often face an expensive question: which untested genes should go into the next batch? A new machine-learning approach combines a general-purpose language model with a specialized policy that learns from past gene hits, screen descriptions, and round-by-round lab feedback. The goal is to turn noisy experimental results into better guesses about what to test next, while keeping choices grounded in known biology.
Choosing a blood test, scan, or lab value is often a judgment call. A patient may have several possible explanations for the same symptoms, and each test can point in a different direction. New work asks whether a language model can help by imagining what each result might show before the sample is drawn.
