Radically different
Nature Medicine, Published online: 28 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04359-w
Reti-Pioneer, a retinal imaging artificial intelligence framework, identified diverse systemic diseases and demonstrated feasibility in a primary care silent trial, offering a pathway toward scalable clinical evaluation.
The ventral tegmental area (VTA) is a key node within the limbic circuitry. Through dense dopaminergic, glutamatergic, and GABAergic projections, the VTA forms reciprocal loops with prefrontal and limbic cortices that are consistently implicated in major depressive disorder (MDD) and obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) (1,2). Decades of animal research have established the VTA as a central hub for motivational drive and reward prediction error signaling (3,4). Despite its presumed critical role in mental disorders, direct electrophysiological recordings from the human VTA have so far remained absent.
The Biological Psychiatry family of Journals (Biological Psychiatry (BPS); Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging (BP:CNNI); Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science (BP:GOS) is pleased to announce a new program that, beginning this year, will both recognize and reward our most productive reviewers. This reward system was developed in collaboration with the leaders of the Society of Biological Psychiatry (SOBP) and is underwritten by the Society. We are initiating this program with no changes to publication fees for authors who publish in our Journals and without increasing the cost of SOBP membership.
Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 28 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02231-1
Related memories are sometimes encoded in overlapping neurons. The authors show that the prefrontal cortex controls this type of memory organization in the hippocampus through direct projections to the medial entorhinal cortex.
Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 28 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02253-9
The authors investigate the transcriptomic and connectivity organization of the basal ganglia and parafascicular nucleus. The analyses suggest that combinatorial gene expression underlies the modular and cell-type-specific basal ganglia input–output networks.
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Good morning. The other night I watched a shocking episode of “The Vampire Diaries.” A series of cursed, ghost-like hallucinations attempt to convince a teen vampire to end her own life using some disturbingly coercive, cogent arguments. Ultimately, the character is saved. And while this episode aired more than a decade ago, I was surprised by how many parallels there were to current debates about the risks of AI chatbots and people in mental health crises.
Eli Lilly struck a deal Tuesday to develop new forms of gene editors potentially capable of inserting entire genes into patients.
The collaboration, with artificial intelligence-focused biotech Profluent, is sparse on details, including the number of programs the two companies would work on, the types of diseases they’ll pursue, or how much Lilly was paying upfront. But if every one of its efforts works out, Lilly would pay Profluent $2.25 billion in milestones payments.
The deal is part of a larger push by Lilly into gene editing. The big pharma, flush with record revenues from its obesity and diabetes drugs, has opened a new genetic medicine center in Boston and bought up a series of gene editing or gene therapy companies over the last few years.
Governments, industry, and philanthropies are investing in neuroscience at an unprecedented scale, and the ambition behind this impetus is a noble one: to reduce the growing burden of brain diseases and extend healthy cognitive life. We fully support this movement’s push for “brain health” to mirror successful frameworks established for cancer and heart health that prioritize early screening and aggressive preventive treatments, making it possible to act before irreversible damage sets in.
Even as this agenda gains momentum, however, a critical blind spot is emerging. As governments refocus their policies to tackle conditions like Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders, mental illness is often being sidelined as a secondary concern rather than as a primary component of brain health. This artificial divide is a scientific and a strategic error.
WASHINGTON — Democrats and Republicans are at odds over a consequential health care policy embedded in last year’s tax cut law.
Democrats say the law’s Medicaid work requirements will create red tape that leads to people losing their coverage. Republicans say the measure encourages work.
But because the law doesn’t require states to report on the implementation of this massive change to Medicaid, we may never get a detailed account of how the policy is working.
As Google faces pressure to take greater accountability for the mental health impacts of its artificial intelligence products, the company’s clinical director Megan Jones Bell welcomed the challenge of making artificial intelligence helpful to people who come to its Gemini chatbot with a mental health crisis.
“It can seem sometimes like shutting something down is a way of preventing harm,” Jones Bell told STAT. “We believe that making our product experience safer and more helpful and strengthening that bridge to support it is the more effective path to support mental health for the most people.”
Google recently made updates to its Gemini app so that it more prominently features connections to crisis hotlines when it detects a person may be at risk of self harm. In conversations about mental health, the AI will frequently point people to outside resources — but the bot doesn’t disengage, reminding a user, for example, that “I’m here to listen.”