‘Ready-made’ T-cell gene therapy tackles ‘incurable’ T-cell leukemia

CRISPR
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

A new treatment using genome-edited immune cells, developed by scientists at UCL (University College London) and Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), has shown promising results in helping children and adults fight a rare and aggressive form of blood cancer called T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL).

The world-first gene therapy (BE-CAR7) uses base-edited immune cells to treat previously untreatable T-cell leukemia and help patients achieve remission, offering new hope for families facing this aggressive cancer. Base-editing is an advanced version of CRISPR technology, that can precisely change single letters of DNA code inside living cells.

In 2022, researchers from GOSH and UCL delivered the world’s first treatment made using “base-edi...

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Speech-to-reality system creates objects on demand using AI and robotics

Researchers 'speak objects into existence' using AI and robotics
A robotic arm builds a lattice-like stool after hearing the prompt “I want a simple stool,” demonstrating how the system translates speech into real-time fabrication. Credit: Alexander Kyaw and the researchers

Generative AI and robotics are moving us ever closer to the day when we can ask for an object and have it created within a few minutes. In fact, MIT researchers have developed a speech-to-reality system, an AI-driven workflow that allows them to provide input to a robotic arm and “speak objects into existence,” creating things like furniture in as little as five minutes.

With the speech-to-reality system, a robotic arm mounted on a table is able to receive spoken input from a human, such as “I want a simple stool,” and then construct the objects out of modular components...

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Cosmic knots may finally explain why the Universe exists

The model suggests a brief “knot-dominated era,” when these tangled energy fields outweighed everything else, a scenario that could be probed through gravitational-wave signals. (Courtesy of Muneto Nitta/Hiroshima University)

Knotted structures once imagined by Lord Kelvin may actually have shaped the universe’s earliest moments, according to new research showing how two powerful symmetries could have created stable “cosmic knots” after the Big Bang. These exotic objects may have briefly dominated the young cosmos, unraveled through quantum tunneling, and produced heavy right-handed neutrinos whose decays tipped the balance toward matter over antimatter.

In 1867, Lord Kelvin pictured atoms as tiny knots in an invisible medium called the ether...

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Gut bacteria’s hidden toxin acts as DNA glue, fueling colorectal cancer risk

Discovery of how a gut toxin damages DNA gives scientists new clues to fight colorectal cancer
Structure and specificity of the colibactin-DNA interstrand cross-link. Credit: Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.ady3571

Colibactin is a powerful toxin produced by Escherichia coli and other bacteria living in the human gut. This highly unstable bacterial product causes mutations in DNA that have been linked to colorectal cancer. Because it breaks down quickly, isolating and studying it has been difficult, but now scientists in the U.S. have discovered exactly how colibactin attacks DNA.

Using advanced tools such as mass spectrometry (MS) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, the team studied the toxin at the atomic level, as reported in a paper published in the journal Science...

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