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A star scientist showed that better genetics lessons could reduce racism. It was the death knell for his career

Every year, the Genetics Society of America bestows the Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education, recognizing someone who has helped the public better understand the science of DNA. It’s understood to be a lifetime achievement award; past recipients tend toward retirement age with decades of work behind them and stacks of textbooks to their names. 

When this year’s winner, Brian Donovan, was announced at the end of February, many geneticists and science educators found it hard to celebrate the news. Not because he’s undeserving of the honor. Far from it. But because it seemed to confirm what many feared: that Donovan’s incandescent research career was over before it had barely begun. 

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STAT+: FDA backs proposals to entice pharma companies to test, make drugs domestically

WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration used the president’s budget to propose policies aimed at encouraging domestic development and manufacturing of drugs.  

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary has said the agency needs “giant, big ideas” to counter China’s dominance in early-stage clinical development of drugs. Among the FDA’s ideas are proposals to make it easier to run early-stage trials in the U.S. and to hand an advantage to U.S.-based generics manufacturers.

The Trump administration has been using a variety of policy levers to try and bring drug manufacturing to the U.S. For example, many of the brand drugmakers that struck deals to lower U.S. prices also promised to increase domestic manufacturing, under the threat of tariffs.

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…

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STAT+: Research revealing how the brain flushes waste named STAT Madness Editors’ Pick

For her new research on the brain’s plumbing system, neuroscientist Maiken Nedergaard had to hone many techniques. Among them — coaxing her lab mice into restful sleep, even as they lay on microscope beds with tiny fiberoptic wires threaded into their brains.  

“It was really hard to get the mice to sleep naturally,” said Nedergaard, who spent weeks cuddling the animals in her hands, so they’d learn to feel safe. “But then we said, ‘we really want to not have them disturbed.’”

The reason for this care? Nedergaard studies the glymphatic system, which removes waste from the brain during sleep, so ensuring her test subjects achieve a restorative snooze is central to her work. 

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…

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STAT+: University of Michigan wins 2026 STAT Madness for new insights into abdominal aortic aneurysms

An abdominal aortic aneurysm is a life-threatening vascular condition with limited treatment options. 

Now, researchers from the University of Michigan Frankel Cardiovascular Center have identified a driving force behind the condition, opening up a potential target for new therapies. Their paper uncovering the causal link between triglycerides and abdominal aortic aneurysms won the STAT Madness 2026 popular vote. 

Triglycerides have long been considered a biomarker for vascular disease. But using three different mouse models, the Michigan team demonstrated that the common type of fat plays a direct role in aneurysm development, and that lowering triglyceride levels with certain drugs can stop them from forming and rupturing. 

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…

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Microplastics in Human Bile Drive Mitochondrial Dysfunction and Senescence

Microplastics have become a defining environmental signature of modern life, turning up in oceans, soil, food, drinking water, and even the air. But their biological fate inside the human body remains far less understood. A new study suggests that these particles may be doing more than simply passing through. Instead, they may be accumulating in one of the body’s most overlooked fluids—bile—and leaving behind measurable cellular damage that could shape future thinking about environmentally driven biliary injury and long‑term health effects. As the authors noted in their abstract, “the long-term accumulation patterns and chronic toxic effects of microplastics within the human biliary system are largely unknown,” underscoring the need for deeper investigation into how these particles behave in the enterohepatic circulation.

Researchers from the Tenth Affiliated Hospital of Southern Medical University (Dongguan People’s Hospital), Sun Yat-sen University, Guilin Medical University, and collaborating institutions reported the findings in Environmental Science and Ecotechnology. Their study, “Microplastics accumulate in human bile and drive cholangiocyte senescence,” provides the first direct evidence that microplastics are not only present in bile but may also contribute to mitochondrial dysfunction and premature aging in cholangiocytes, the epithelial cells that line the bile ducts.

The team collected bile from 14 surgical patients (five without gallstones and nine with gallstones) and used a multimodal analytical approach—pyrolysis–gas chromatography–mass spectrometry, laser direct infrared spectroscopy, and scanning electron microscopy—to characterize the particles. According to the paper, “we show the universal presence of microplastics in human bile,” identifying six polymer types dominated by polyethylene terephthalate and polyethylene, with most particles measuring 20–50 μm. Patients with gallstones carried substantially higher microplastic burdens, raising questions about whether biliary stasis or altered bile composition may influence microplastic retention.

bile and microplastics study
This schematic summarizes the study workflow and main findings. Human exposure to microplastics may occur through multiple routes, including industrial pollution, airborne exposure, food packaging, drinking-related plastics, and consumer products. Bile samples collected from individuals with and without gallstones were analyzed using Py-GC/MS, LDIR, and SEM, which confirmed the presence, polymer composition, particle size, and morphology of microplastics in human bile. Mechanistic experiments further showed that nanoplastic exposure induced cholangiocyte senescence by triggering mitochondrial dysfunction, including increased mitochondrial reactive oxygen species, enhanced Drp1-mediated fission, reduced mitochondrial membrane potential, and decreased ATP production, while melatonin partially alleviated these toxic effects. [Environmental Science and Ecotechnology]

To probe biological effects, the researchers exposed cultured human cholangiocytes to low-dose polystyrene nanoplastics for seven days, simulating chronic exposure. The cells exhibited mitochondrial dysfunction, elevated reactive oxygen species, reduced ATP, Drp1‑mediated mitochondrial fission, and G1 cell‑cycle arrest—hallmarks of senescence. As the authors wrote, chronic exposure “induces mitochondrial dysfunction-associated senescence in cholangiocytes,” suggesting a mechanistic link between environmental microplastics and biliary aging.

One of the most intriguing findings is that melatonin, a widely used antioxidant, partially reversed the mitochondrial and inflammatory damage. While far from a therapeutic recommendation, the result hints at a potential intervention point and gives the study translational relevance.

The work reframes the biliary system as something far more active than a simple transit channel. The data indicate that bile can serve as a reservoir for microplastics and that prolonged exposure may age cholangiocytes by driving mitochondrial dysfunction. The partial rescue with melatonin adds a mechanistic foothold for future intervention, even as the authors caution that broader human studies are essential.

For biotech, the implications are broad. The work highlights bile as a clinically accessible matrix for exposure assessment, opening the door to new diagnostics for environmental toxicology. The mitochondrial stress signature aligns with pathways already being targeted by companies developing senolytics, mitoprotective agents, and anti‑inflammatory therapeutics. The authors wrote that the research provides “a mechanistic foundation for assessing the health risks of plastic pollution and developing therapeutic interventions for environmentally driven biliary disorders.”

The post Microplastics in Human Bile Drive Mitochondrial Dysfunction and Senescence appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.

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The Most Effective OCD Treatment Reaches Almost No One: Here’s What We Can Do About It

– Rebecca Deusser, MS, MBA and Sanjaya Saxena, MD

“It took me years to find out that what I was dealing with was OCD!”

This is a phrase all too often repeated by people living with obsessive compulsive disorder. Currently, individuals live with OCD for an average of 7 years (Dell’Osso et al, 2019) before they even receive a diagnosis, all while symptoms may intensify and daily life often becomes increasingly constrained. 

Clinicians, researchers, and advocates have long raised this concern. What has been missing is clear data behind how many people with OCD in the U.S. are missed in clinical settings or are not receiving the most effective treatment.

When the International OCD Foundation undertook this analysis, the scale of the problem became unmistakable. Millions of people in America are currently struggling with OCD without the most effective treatment.

The challenges we detail in our new white paper, America’s OCD Care Crisis: National Findings on the Failure of Effective OCD Treatment to Reach Patients, are significant, but fixable. They are symptoms of structural oversights that can be changed. Effective, evidence-based treatment for OCD exists, and through intentional action, we can dramatically change these unacceptable outcomes for people with OCD.

Where People With OCD Fall Through the Cracks

Well established prevalence rates for OCD indicate that nearly 10 million people in America — roughly 3% (Ruscio et al, 2010; Stein et al,2025; Ringeisen et al, 2025) — will have OCD at some point in their lives. Yet our findings suggest that 75% of them are never even identified, and up to 95% aren’t receiving the most effective treatment for the disorder.

In our analysis, we discovered significant systemic breakdowns at several key points of a patient’s journey: screening, diagnosis, referral, and treatment.

  • Screening and Diagnosis: Receiving a clinical diagnosis is an important step toward recovery as it promotes understanding and opens paths to effective treatment. Yet our findings suggest that this crucial initial step is missing for many millions of people. Of the 10.4 million patient records reviewed in our analysis, only 0.51% received a formal OCD diagnosis, far below the 3% expected prevalence rate. 
  • Referral to appropriate care: After a diagnosis is obtained, a handoff to appropriate care is needed to keep the patient from falling out of the treatment pathway. Here, too, we found an alarming gap within our sample: more than 72% of patients identified as having OCD did not receive a referral for cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), the most effective treatment for OCD.
  • Effective Treatment: Decades of research has established Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) therapy, a specific form of CBT, as the most effective, first-line therapy for OCD. Yet, an astounding 95-98% of people with OCD had not received ERP treatment. Even when people seek help — and even when they are diagnosed — the vast majority never reach the treatment most likely to help them recover.

What We Can Do About It

The breakdowns seen in each step of the care pathway reinforce the focus of IOCDF’s Vision 2030, our five-year strategy to address the systemic barriers that keep effective OCD treatment out of reach.

While the findings are stark, they illuminate many opportunities for change:

  • Identify symptoms earlier by implementing routine OCD screening in primary healthcare and mental health settings.
  • Support clinicians in better understanding and treating OCD by expanding training in assessment, diagnosis, and evidence-based treatment modalities.
  • Help people receive care that works by strengthening adherence to existing professional treatment guidelines.
  • Increase the number of people with OCD who receive effective treatment  by supporting affordable access to ERP and other evidence-based therapies.
  • Let people know they’re not alone by raising accurate public awareness of what OCD really is — and that it is treatable.

Vision 2030 outlines how the IOCDF is committing its resources, partnerships, and expertise toward advancing these priorities — by increasing awareness and community, expanding access to effective treatment, and advancing research. Together, these efforts are designed to work in concert, improving clinical training, implementing screening for early identification, strengthening pathways from diagnosis to care, and increasing the likelihood that people receive evidence-based treatment.

At the same time, the scale of the problem revealed in this report makes clear that progress depends on collective action across the field. Clinicians, health systems, educators, researchers, policymakers, advocates, and people with lived experience all have a role to play. Together, these efforts can help ensure that people with OCD reach effective treatment sooner, reducing years of unnecessary confusion and distress. 

How You Can Help

Join us in building better access to effective treatment for people with OCD:

The current state of treatment for OCD in the U.S. is sobering, but it is not the end of the story. OCD is treatable, recovery is possible, and change can happen as awareness grows and access expands. With continued effort, the gap between how many are struggling and how many receive effective care can begin to close. A brighter future is possible — and we can build it together.

References

  1. Dell’Osso, B., Benatti, B., Grancini, B., Vismara, M., De Carlo, V., Cirnigliaro, G., Albert, U., & Viganò, C. (2019). Investigating duration of illness and duration of untreated illness in obsessive compulsive disorder reveals patients remain at length pharmacologically untreated. International Journal of Psychiatry in Clinical Practice, 23(4), 311–313. https://doi.org/10.1080/13651501.2019.1621348
  2. Ruscio, A. M., Stein, D. J., Chiu, W. T., & Kessler, R. C. (2010). The epidemiology of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. Molecular Psychiatry, 15(1), 53-63. https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2008.94
  3. Stein, D. J., Ruscio, A. M., Altwaijri, Y., Chiu, W. T., Sampson, N. A., Aguilar-Gaxiola, S., Al-Hamzawi, A., Alonso, J., Chardoul, S., Gureje, O., Hu, C., Karam, E. G., McGrath, J. J., Navarro-Mateu, F., Scott, K. M., Stagnaro, J. C., Torres, Y., Vladescu, C., Wciórka, J., Xavier, M., … Kessler, R. C. (2025). Obsessive-compulsive disorder in the World Mental Health surveys. Research Square, rs.3.rs-6090427. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-6090427/v1
  4. Ringeisen, H., Edlund, M., Guyer, H., Dever, J., Carpenter, L., Olfson, M., First, M., Geiger, P., Liao, D., Peytchev, A., Carr, C., Chwastiak, L., Dixon, L. B., Monroe-Devita, M., Scott Stroup, T., Swanson, J., Swartz, M., Gibbons, R., Stambaugh, L., Bareis, N., … Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders Prevalence Study Consortium (2025). Prevalence of past-year mental and substance use disorders, 2021-2022. Psychiatric Services (Washington, D.C.), 76(8), 720–728. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.20240329

IOCDF Training & Resources for Clinicians

When clinicians have easier access to best practices in OCD diagnosis and treatment, more people can receive effective care. The IOCDF’s Training Institute offers evidence-based programs for clinicians at every stage of practice, including:

  • A robust, on-demand webinar catalog (CE-eligible!) covering fundamentals, modalities, related disorders, and comorbidities. The catalog includes access to the free webinar, OCD Basics. 
  • IOCDF’s Training Institute offers intensive workshops and events, consultation groups, and more for clinicians of every level.
  • Professional Members at the IOCDF join a nationwide network of committed professionals, are eligible for listing on our Resource Directory, and have access to special pricing for Training Institute offerings.

The post The Most Effective OCD Treatment Reaches Almost No One: Here’s What We Can Do About It appeared first on International OCD Foundation.

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Evaluation of GPT-5 in Periodontitis Staging and Grading: Retrospective Observational Study

Background: Periodontitis is a chronic gum disease affecting approximately 42% of adults aged 30 years and older in the United States. Training dental students to accurately diagnose and manage periodontitis is a critical component of dental education and clinical care. Recent advances in large language models offer new opportunities to support both domains, yet their performance in periodontal diagnosis remains largely unexplored, particularly for newer models such as GPT-5. Objective: This study conducted an exploratory evaluation of GPT-5’s ability to stage and grade periodontitis. Methods: A total of 25 publicly available clinical cases explicitly reporting periodontitis stage and grade were identified through Google and PubMed searches. Each case description was entered into GPT-5 using a zero-shot prompting approach to assess guideline-based reasoning without exemplar conditioning. The model’s predictions were compared with the published reference diagnoses. Performance was measured using accuracy, 95% CI, unweighted Cohen κ, and weighted Cohen κ. Results: Across these cases, GPT-5 showed marked class-dependent performance and a tendency to overestimate disease severity. Grading performance was notably imbalanced, with high recall for grade C but substantially lower discrimination for grade B. GPT-5 achieved a staging accuracy of 68% (95% CI 48.4%-82.8%) and a grading accuracy of 77.3% (95% CI 56.6%-89.9%), with corresponding Cohen κ values of 0.454 (95% CI 11.0%-75.6%) and 0.179 (95% CI −15.8% to 63.8%), respectively. While staging performance showed fair agreement beyond chance, the low κ for grading indicates poor agreement and limited reliability in distinguishing periodontal disease severity. Conclusions: These findings suggest that although GPT-5 demonstrates potential for guideline-based periodontitis staging and grading, its current diagnostic performance, particularly for periodontitis grading, limits its use in clinical assessment and educational training. Meaningful application in periodontal diagnosis and training will require substantial improvements in reliability and rigorous validation in larger, more diverse, and prospectively collected datasets.
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Performance of DeepSeek V3, DeepSeek R1, ChatGPT 4o, and ChatGPT o1 on the National Health Professional and Technical Qualification Examination (Intermediate Level) in China: Comparative Analysis

<strong>Background:</strong> In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have undergone swift cycles of refinement and iteration. However, in the realm of clinical medicine, different LLMs’ capability of logical reasoning and disease diagnosis needs further investigation. <strong>Objective:</strong> The aim of our study was to evaluate the performance of 4 different LLMs in the National Health Professional and Technical Qualification Examination in China. <strong>Methods:</strong> A total of 398 multiple-choice questions of 5 different question types were integrated within the examination with respect to the diagnosis or care of cases. These questions were categorized into different cardiology subspecialties and different clinical disciplines. DeepSeek V3 and R1 were accessed through an application programming interface, while ChatGPT 4o and o1 were queried via its public chat-based interface. We offered the same prompts instructing LLMs to assume the role of a physician and provide answers with explanations at the beginning of each conversation. We assessed different LLMs’ performance by the accuracy in the responses to the multiple-choice questions. For the first 3 examination sections, McNemar test was used to compare the accuracy among the models, with post hoc pairwise comparisons performed using partitions of chi-square method and Bonferroni correction (significance set at <i>P</i>&lt;.008). For the fourth section involving partially credit scoring, one-way ANOVA was performed to compare the mean scores among the models, with statistical significance set at <i>P</i>&lt;.05. <strong>Results:</strong> Both DeepSeek V3 and R1 showed superior performance in the first 3 sections of the Chinese National Health Professional and Technical Qualification Examination, achieving an overall performance of 93% and 93.6%, respectively. ChatGPT 4o and o1 achieved accuracies of 73.3% and 69%, respectively (all <i>P</i>&lt;.001 compared with DeepSeek V3). For the fourth section, the performance of all 4 LLMs markedly declined compared to their results in the preceding sections. Particularly, in the section of gastroenterology and hematology, DeepSeek V3 achieved the highest accuracy, while R1 ranked first in cardiology and neurology. ChatGPT o1 achieved the highest accuracy in the topic of coronary artery disease, with no statistical significance. <strong>Conclusions:</strong> DeepSeek V3 and R1 showed remarkable potential in facilitating clinical decision-making in the Chinese professional examination, with both outperforming ChatGPT 4o and o1. Nonetheless, future research should continue evaluating their economic efficiency and susceptibility to hallucination.
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It Is the Journey, Not the Destination: Moving From End Points to Trajectories When Assessing Chatbot Mental Health Safety

Large language models are rapidly becoming embedded in everyday life through artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots that people use for practical assistance and companionship, as well as for support with mental health and emotional wellbeing. Alongside clear benefits, clinicians and public reports increasingly describe a minority of users whose interactions seem to drift over days or weeks toward strongly questionable convictions, delusions or suicidal crises. Importantly, clinically meaningful deterioration can occur even without overtly unsafe text outputs, via more insidious processes such as compulsive use and sleep disruption, as well as withdrawal from human contact and progressive narrowing of attention around the chatbot relationship. In this Viewpoint, we argue that risk often arises not at a single tipping point but through trajectory effects that accumulate across extended dialogue, and that prevailing safety evaluation approaches are misaligned with this reality because they primarily score risk at discrete conversational endpoints often reached through scripted dialogues lasting just a single turn or several turns. Mental health benchmarks and safety suites (including clinician-informed efforts) have advanced the field by testing refusal behaviour, toxicity, and adversarial prompting, but they often treat the last message as the unit of analysis and therefore miss when risk-relevant relational cues, signs of validation, contradiction handling, and shifts in certainty first emerge and how they compound. We propose that mental health safety assessment should shift from endpoints to trajectories by 1) treating the whole dialogue, not just the end result, as the focus of evaluation; 2) reporting turn-by-turn dynamics such as delusion confirmation and harm enablement, as well as timing and persistence of safety interventions; and 3) calibrating short multi-turn tests against longer, clinically realistic interaction sequences that can reveal context-length effects and drift. We further argue that transcript-only evaluation is insufficient in mental health contexts. Similar language can reflect very different internal states, and the relationship between expressed psychopathology and real-world harm is non-linear. Safety research should therefore incorporate proximal human outcomes after interactions (e.g., shifts in certainty, openness to counterevidence, arousal, urge to continue, and subsequent sleep or behaviour) and build prospective clinical surveillance infrastructure that supports consented transcript donation and linkage to health outcomes. Together, these steps would enable benchmarks that are clinically relevant and better aligned with the kinds of harms now being observed in real-world chatbot use.
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