A Roundup of Interesting Therapeutic Advances

We discuss some interesting advances in therapeutics this week as well as providing a quick tour of some interesting science from across the web.

There has been some fascinating progress in the field of inverse vaccine design, which seeks to suppress specific parts of the immune response induced in autoimmune diseases. The field is in an early state but holds out the promising glimmer of a general strategy to retrain the immune system to tolerate rejected substances. These approaches have found some early clinical validation, but are probably several years out from mainstream adoption at the earliest. See this review article for an overview.

The New York Times has a noteworthy story about a customized patient-specific CRISPR treatment for a newborn baby with CPS1 deficiency, a rare disease affecting one in 1.3 million babies (see additional commentary from Nature). The treatment combined a lipid nanoparticle delivery mechanism with CRISPR editing to treat baby KJ. Thankfully, KJ appears healthy and growing normally after three rounds of treatment, but longitudinal tracking will be required to see the efficacy and safety of the treatment over the long term.

• https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01498-x#ref-CR1: Interesting progress in using stem cells to grow an amniotic sac.

• https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01523-z: DeepMind’s AlphaEvolve shows some eye-catching results. There remains the important caveat that the system has not been openly released or subjected to peer review.

• https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01339-x: A fascinating overview of a recent advance in analytical general relativity relevant to improved gravitational wave detection. The full paper is available in open access form.

• https://physics.aps.org/articles/v18/99: A fascinating proof-of-concept of using interferometry to read millimeter sized text a kilometer away!

• https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/new-cell-therapy-resistant-hodkins-patients: Some promising progress on cell-based treatments for Hodgkin lymphoma.

• https://semianalysis.com/2025/05/16/ai-arrives-in-the-middle-east-us-strikes-a-deal-with-uae-and-ksa/: Analysis of recent AI deals in the Middle East.

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Author: Bharath Ramsundar, Ph.D.

Editor: Sandya Subramanian, Ph.D.