Immune therapy shows promise for asthma, heart disease—and even ageing
Making treatment quick and affordable will be the challenge
IN 2010 AN American girl called Emily Whitehead developed a form of leukaemia that is usually terminal. She was five years old. Two years later, she became the first paediatric patient to be offered a form of treatment called CAR-T, in which the body’s immune system is reprogrammed to attack cancerous cells. The treatment worked. A documentary film about her journey, released in 2022, was called “Of Medicine and Miracles”.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “When T-cells attack”
From the September 28th 2024 edition
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AI researchers receive the Nobel prize for physics
The award, to Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, stretches the definition of the field
A Nobel prize for the discovery of micro-RNA
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AI offers an intriguing new way to diagnose mental-health conditions
Models look for sound patterns undetectable by the human ear
Why it’s so hard to tell which climate policies actually work
Better tools are needed to analyse their effects
Isolated communities are more at risk of rare genetic diseases
The isolation can be geographic or cultural
An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped—human brains could follow
For now, it is the most sophisticated connectome ever made