A new type of cancer therapy is shrinking deadly brain tumors with just one treatment

A new type of cancer therapy is shrinking deadly brain tumors with just one treatment

MRI scans after a new kind of immunotherapy for brain cancer show remarkable progress in one patient just days after the first treatment.

Mass General Hospital

Few cancers are deadlier than glioblastomas—aggressive and lethal tumors that originate in the brain or spinal cord. Five years after diagnosis, less than five percent of glioblastoma patients are still alive—and more often, glioblastoma patients live just 14 months on average after receiving a diagnosis.

But an ongoing clinical trial at Mass General Cancer Center is giving new hope to glioblastoma patients and their families. The trial, called INCIPIENT, is meant to evaluate the effects of a special type of immune cell, called CAR-T cells, on patients with recurrent glioblastoma.

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Sarah Watts

Sarah Watts is a health and science writer based in Chicago.

Scientists are working on eye transplants for vision loss. Who will sign up?

Often called the window to the soul, the eyes are more sacred than other body parts, at least for some.

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Awash in a fluid finely calibrated to keep it alive, a human eye rests inside a transparent cubic device. This ECaBox, or Eyes in a Care Box, is a one-of-a-kind system built by scientists at Barcelona’s Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG). Their goal is to preserve human eyes for transplantation and related research.

In recent years, scientists have learned to transplant delicate organs such as the liver, lungs or pancreas, but eyes are another story. Even when preserved at the average transplant temperature of 4 Centigrade, they last for 48 hours max. That's one explanation for why transplanting the whole eye isn’t possible—only the cornea, the dome-shaped, outer layer of the eye, can withstand the procedure. The retina, the layer at the back of the eyeball that turns light into electrical signals, which the brain converts into images, is extremely difficult to transplant because it's packed with nerve tissue and blood vessels.

These challenges also make it tough to research transplantation. “This greatly limits their use for experiments, particularly when it comes to the effectiveness of new drugs and treatments,” said Maria Pia Cosma, a biologist at Barcelona’s Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), whose team is working on the ECaBox.

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Stav Dimitropoulos
Stav Dimitropoulos's features have appeared in major outlets such as the BBC, National Geographic, Scientific American, Nature, Popular Mechanics, Science, Runner’s World, and more. Follow her on Facebook or Twitter @TheyCallMeStav.
As Our AI Systems Get Better, So Must We

In order to build the future we want, we must also become ever better humans, explains the futurist Jamie Metzl in this opinion essay.

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As the power and capability of our AI systems increase by the day, the essential question we now face is what constitutes peak human. If we stay where we are while the AI systems we are unleashing continually get better, they will meet and then exceed our capabilities in an ever-growing number of domains. But while some technology visionaries like Elon Musk call for us to slow down the development of AI systems to buy time, this approach alone will simply not work in our hyper-competitive world, particularly when the potential benefits of AI are so great and our frameworks for global governance are so weak. In order to build the future we want, we must also become ever better humans.

The list of activities we once saw as uniquely human where AIs have now surpassed us is long and growing. First, AI systems could beat our best chess players, then our best Go players, then our best champions of multi-player poker. They can see patterns far better than we can, generate medical and other hypotheses most human specialists miss, predict and map out new cellular structures, and even generate beautiful, and, yes, creative, art.

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Jamie Metzl
Jamie Metzl is a leading futurist and the Founder and Chair of OneShared.World, https://www.oneshared.world/. His book, The Great Biohack: Recasting Life in an Age of Revolutionary Technology, will be published in May 2024 by Timber/Hachette. www.jamiemetzl.com.