Andrew Cassy had spent his working life in a telecommunications research department until a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease in 2010 pushed him into early retirement. Curious about his illness, which he came to think of as an engineering problem, he decided to volunteer for clinical trials. In 2024, he was accepted into a radical trial. That October, surgeons in Lund, Sweden, placed neurons that were derived from human embryonic stem (ES) cells into his brain. The hope is that they will eventually replace some of his damaged tissue. The study is one of more than 100 clinical trials exploring the potential of stem cells to replace or supplement tissues in debilitating or life-threatening diseases, including cancer, diabetes, epilepsy, heart failure and some eye diseases. It's a different approach from the unapproved therapies peddled by many shady clinics, which use types of stem cell that do not turn into new tissue. All the trials are small and focus mainly on safety. And there are still substantial challenges, including defining which cells will be most fit for which purposes and working out how to bypass the need for immunosuppressant drugs that stop the body from rejecting the cells but increase the risk of infections....

Regina Barzilay, the School of Engineering Distinguished Professor for AI and Health within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT, received the IEEE Frances E. Allen Medal for 'innovative machine learning algorithms that have led to advances in human language technology and demonstrated impact on the field of medicine.' Barzilay focuses on machine learning algorithms for modeling molecular properties in the context of drug design, with the goal of elucidating disease biochemistry and accelerating the development of new therapeutics. In the field of clinical AI, she focuses on algorithms for early cancer diagnostics. She is also the AI faculty lead within the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health and an affiliate of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Barzilay is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has earned the MacArthur Fellowship, MIT's Jamieson Award for excellence in teaching, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's $1 million Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity. Barzilay is a fellow of AAAI, ACL, and AIMBE....

The startup, called Stem AI, is currently in stealth. But public documents show it was incorporated in June 2023, and filed for a trademark in August 2023. Shear is listed as CEO on an incorporation document filed with the California Secretary of State earlier this year. According to the trademark application, Stem AI is developing software to create AI that 'understands, cooperates with, and aligns with human behavior, human preferences, human biology, human morality, and human ethics.' The startup landed Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) as an investor in August, according to Pitchbook. One of the co-founders of Stem AI is Adam Goldstein, best known for founding travel search and booking site Hipmunk. After selling Hipmunk to Concur in 2016, Goldstein became a visiting partner at Y Combinator, and founded an incubator, Astonishing Labs, to back bio research. Goldstein also worked at Tufts University's Levin Labs for a year as a visiting scientist, where he '[developed] new models for biological systems with a focus on cancer,' according to his LinkedIn page....

A fresh wave of gene-editing therapies is surging to the fore ' even as the field wrestles with the challenge of getting the first generation of expensive and complex CRISPR treatments to the people who need them....