Radically different
The longevity movement is often associated with people that have enough money for a thousand lifetimes — and want to live long enough to spend it all. When my STAT colleague Sarah Todd recently attended the longevity festival known as Vitalist Bay, however, she discovered that the movement isn’t all wealthy Silicon Valley tech bros.
In this week’s STATus Report, I chat with Sarah about her trip to this California conference, the science of longevity, what the heck a “bodyoid” is, and more.
At least 12 of my colleagues boarded planes to the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Chicago last week to hear Charles Swanton of the Francis Crick Institute in London share results from the world’s first randomized trial on a multi-cancer early detection test.
The trial — a partnership between the U.K. National Health Service and Grail, which makes the Galleri MCED test — randomized 143,000 average English adults aged 50-77 to receive either usual care or MCED testing. The primary endpoint was reduction of stage 3 and 4 cancers across all cancer types.
In May 2025, I joined more than 160 blood cancer advocates on Capitol Hill. At the time, Congress was considering changes to Medicaid, a state and federal program that is a lifeline for more than 75 million Americans, including older adults, children, veterans, people with disabilities, pregnant people, and adults with low incomes. Together, we advocated against policies that threatened to put health care out of reach for millions.
One of those concerning policies was work reporting requirements for people covered by Medicaid. The then-proposed legislation mandated that states verify Medicaid enrollees’ monthly work status at least every six months to ensure that they are engaging each month in a minimum of 80 hours of community service, educational activities, and/or work. But undergoing cancer treatment is already a full-time job; many patients are unable to work because of their condition.
Patients are getting used to being recorded in the doctor’s office. More than a quarter of U.S. practices now use AI-based listening tools called ambient scribes, which capture visits in real time and draft clinical notes for clinicians to enter into patients’ medical records.
But what happens when it’s the patient doing the recording?
Nearly every patient now has a recording device in their pocket, and commercial large language models have made it easier than ever for them to transcribe and interpret audio files. A growing number of consumer apps — with names like VisitRecall, Advoca Health, and AlignCare — are using AI to do just that, delivering summaries and action items for patients after the fact. One called Kin Health, with backing from the co-founder of GoodRx, announced a $9 million seed round in May.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Less than two weeks after scrapping an executive order on AI, President Donald Trump signed a new one on Tuesday. Promising to promote innovation and security, the policy represents a turning point in the White House’s AI governance—but is likely to attract criticism from both opponents and supporters of stricter regulation. Here are five key points from the order:
1. It’s created a voluntary review system: tech companies will be asked to share frontier models with the government for review 30 days before they plan to release them.
2. There’s no mandatory licensing: the government will not require permits before software can be deployed.
3. It establishes a dedicated AI cybersecurity clearinghouse: the new hub will coordinate security checks with the private sector.
4. It’s a watered-down version of the order Trump shelved last month: the earlier version requested models 90 days before their release.
5. But it’s still a move towards stronger AI oversight: the policy marks a clear departure from the White House’s previous hands-off approach.
Plus: here’s why a previous Trump administration’s AI policy was a distraction and how AI is already making online crimes easier.
The defense-tech company Anduril has shared new details about the augmented-reality headset for the military it’s prototyping with Meta, including a vision for ordering drone strikes via eye-tracking and voice commands.
Quay Barnett, who leads the effort at Anduril following a career in the Army’s Special Operations Command, aims to optimize “the human as a weapons system.” His vision is cyborg-inspired: drones and soldiers will see together, share information seamlessly, and make decisions as one.
—James O’Donnell
This is our latest story to be turned into an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 President Trump has signed an AI order that expands model oversight
The long-awaited executive order aims to mitigate security threats. (NYT $)
+It asks companies to submit models voluntarily for tests before release. (NPR)
+ It’s a slimmed-down version of the order Trump shelved in May. (WSJ $)
+ And marks a strategic shift in his AI strategy. (Reuters $)
+ A war over AI regulation is coming to the US. (MIT Technology Review)
2 SpaceX plans to raise $75 billion in IPO at $135 per share
The company intends to sell 555.6 million shares. (Reuters $)+ The fixed price breaks from the traditional IPO process. (Bloomberg $)
+ Morningstar says the valuation should be nearly 50% lower. (BI)
3 Meta has scaled back plans to track workers’ clicks and keystrokes to train AI
All staff can pause it for 30 minutes, with some fully exempt.(The Information $)
+ The changes follow a fierce backlash to the tracking plans. (Reuters $)
+ AI is supercharging surveillance. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Microsoft wants to ‘make users addicted’ to its new AI assistant
According tointernal documents for the “Scout” tool. (404 Media)
+ Microsoft launched the assistant on Tuesday. (TechCrunch)
5 Mathematicians fear that AI threatens their field
A new declaration raises concerns about AI’s trustworthiness. (Ars Technica)
+ It arrives a week after OpenAI said it solved a famous math problem. (WSJ $)
+ A startup wants to change how mathematicians do math. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Scientists have found a way to supercharge computer worms with AI
The worm could target any known flaw in the world’s computers. (NYT $)
+ AI supercharging scams. (MIT Technology Review)
7 Google must let UK publishers opt out of AI search features
Online publishers can choose not to appear in the AI Overviews. (BBC)
+ Google is now testing features for sites to exit AI search. (Reuters $)
8 America’s data center build-out is falling way behind schedule
60% of those planned for completion in 2027 aren’t yet under construction. (WSJ $)
+ Nobody wants a data center in their backyard. (MIT Technology Review)
9 EVs are getting cheaper worldwide—except in the US
The US is short on supportive policies and affordable Chinese EVs. (Rest of World)
10 The European Parliament is ditching Google for… Quant
The French search engine is the new default on in-house computers. (Politico)
+ The switch comes amid a broader push to wean the EU off US tech. (FT $)
Quote of the day
—Dan Coatsworth, head of markets at AJ Bell, tells CNBC that SpaceX’s IPO price looks overloaded with expectations.
One More Thing
Marseille’s battle against the surveillance state
Heading toward Marseille’s central train station, Eda Nano points out what looks like a streetlamp on the Rue des Abeilles. But this sleek piece of urban furniture is not a lamp. It’s a video camera, with a 360-degree view of the narrow street.
Nano, a 39-year-old developer, wants to make Marseille residents more aware that they’re being watched. She’s part of a growing group of activists resisting the rise of policing cameras in their hometown.
Find out how the rebellious port city of Marseille is fighting the surveillance state.
—Fleur Macdonald
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)
+ These aerial photos of solar farms transform renewable energy into abstract art.
+ Open a window over Earth’s water with this hypnotic 4K atmospheric film made from satellite imagery.
+ Spend three relaxing hours with David Attenborough narrating this collection of extraordinary wildlife moments.
+ Radiohead sounds beautiful on traditional Japanese instruments in this koto performance of “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”.
CAR T-cell therapy has enabled two patients who had been waiting for years for a kidney transplantation to find a match. Published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, preliminary results from a Phase I clinical trial show that CAR T therapy can significantly increase the chances of a match for people whose immune system would otherwise reject over 99% of kidneys available for transplant.
“This is the first demonstration that CAR T cells can be used not only to treat cancer, but also to help patients who previously had no opportunity to receive a compatible donor kidney,” said Ali Naji, MD, PhD, professor of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania and principal investigator of the study. “For patients who have spent years on the kidney transplant waiting list, this approach could be transformative.”
More than 91,000 people in the U.S. are currently waiting for a kidney transplant. Physicians assess each patient’s likelihood of finding a compatible donor using the calculated panel reactive antibody (cPRA) score, which measures how broadly the immune system is primed to attack foreign tissues. For instance, a cPRA score of 90% means the patient is expected to reject 90% of kidneys available for transplant, leaving only a small pool of potential matches available to them.
The ongoing CTOT-46 clinical trial is recruiting kidney transplant candidates with a cPRA score of 99.5% or higher who have been waiting for a kidney transplant for at least one year. Although the study will continue until up to 20 highly sensitized candidates have been recruited, preliminary results from the first two patients enrolled show promise for this innovative approach.
Both participants were treated with a dual CAR T therapy designed to remove the immune cells responsible for making antibodies that lead to organ rejection after a kidney transplant. The CAR T cells are engineered to target the CD19 and BCMA proteins, leading to the depletion of memory B cells and antibody-producing plasma cells, respectively. This strategy significantly reduced the levels of circulating antibodies produced by these cells, enabling both patients to receive kidneys from donors that would have previously been incompatible.
One of the patients had been diagnosed with focal glomerulosclerosis at age 14, leading to kidney failure at a young age. His cPRA score had reached nearly 100% after his immune system rejected a second kidney transplant, making a third transplantation next to impossible. After years of waiting for an extremely unlikely match, the CAR T cells lowered his antibody levels enough to find a match within months.
Importantly, the depletion of immune cells was temporary, and the population of B cells and plasma cells returned to normal levels over time. Neither of the patients has shown signs of organ rejection or antibody rebound months after transplantation. Additionally, no cases of severe cytokine release syndrome or neurotoxicity were reported—two common complications of CAR T-cell therapy.
“In this early trial, the CAR T-cell treatment was tolerated well, with no severe side effects, and the immune system began to recover as expected,” said Robert Montgomery, MD, PhD, chair of the department of surgery at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute. “This early success reflects what cell therapy can do for transplant medicine and opens up new options for patients that could save thousands more lives every year.”
The post CAR T-Cell Therapy Expands Access to Kidney Transplants appeared first on Inside Precision Medicine.
People who carry a higher number of genetic variants for increased pulse pressure may be at increased risk of having dementia as a contributing factor in their deaths, research suggests.
The findings, in Neurology, point to shared genetics underpinning cardiometabolic disease and dementia.
Although it is known that cardiometabolic conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and stroke are associated with the neurodegenerative disease, it has been unclear how genetic predictors for the former influence the latter.
Pulse pressure is the difference between systolic and diastolic pressure and a higher number is indicative of poorer cardiac health, such as hardened arteries or poor heart function.
“While having the APOE ɛ4 allele, a gene variant, is the strongest common genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, some people may inherit a combination of small effect gene variants linked to cardiometabolic disease that may also increase the risk,” explained researcher Laura Raffield, PhD, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“Our study found an association with genetic variants linked to high pulse pressure and an increased risk of death from dementia.”
Late-life dementia is strongly inherited, with genetics responsible for around 60% to 80% of Alzheimer’s disease.
While the APOE ɛ4 allele is a well-known genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, other common genetic variants have been implicated and there may also be vascular contributions.
The study investigated how polygenic risk scores for cardiometabolic disease related to dementia-related outcomes among more than 8000 participants in the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study.
The authors note that REGARDS has particularly high numbers of Black participants, who are underrepresented in late-life dementia research, and eight in 10 in the current study identified as non-Hispanic Black.
Study participants had a mean age of 63.7 years at the start of the study and underwent screening for cognitive function annually. They were followed for up to 14 years for risk of death from dementia and nine years for cognitive impairment, on average.
A total of 619 people developed cognitive impairment during this time compared with 7159 with no such impairment. The 459 individuals who had dementia listed as a cause of death were compared with 8362 who died from other causes or for whom the reason was missing.
A higher polygenic risk score for pulse pressure was associated with a 16% increased risk of dementia as a contributing cause of death, after accounting for potential confounding factors.
This statistically significant result was not seen in polygenic risk scores for systolic or diastolic blood pressure, potentially supporting earlier research indicating that pulse pressure is a better predictor of coronary heart disease.
The polygenic risk score for pulse pressure was not associated with incident cognitive impairment, suggesting limited shared genetics between this dementia-related outcomes.
Overall, there were significant or nominal associations in polygenic risk scores for triglycerides, pulse pressure, type 2 diabetes and both the endpoint of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias and also dementia as a contributing cause of death. However, this was not the case with incident cognitive impairment.
In addition, the results confirmed that the APOE variant was a predictor of both dementia as a contributing cause of death and incident cognitive impairment, and that local African ancestry was associated with nominally attenuated effect size.
The authors concluded that the inconsistent results between incident cognitive impairment and dementia as a contributing cause of death “imply that different dementia-related end points may capture distinct biological pathways.”
They elaborated: “For example, genetic risk factors of [cardiometabolic diseases] may be more strongly related to later disease progression, such as amyloid accumulation throughout later life, rather than to early cognitive impairment.”
The post Genetically Raised Pulse Pressure Predisposes to Dementia-Linked Death appeared first on Inside Precision Medicine.
Jakob Uszkoreit went from inventing the “T” in ChatGPT to putting the “AI” in Alnylam’s RNAi therapeutics.
After over a dozen years at Google, where he’d co-authored the seminal “Attention is all you need” paper that laid the foundations for artificial intelligence models like GPT, Uszkoreit in 2021 left a job at Google Brain to start Inceptive Nucleics. The company is building “AI foundation models of life” — models that will hopefully learn so much about how biology operates that they will be reusable across many different tasks without having to be trained specifically to do them.
On Wednesday, Alnylam and Inceptive announced a new, three-year strategic collaboration worth up to $2 billion, with $30 million up front in cash and equity in the startup. The additional payments will be predicated on the co-discovered drugs achieving preclinical, regulatory, and commercial sales milestones. In 2025, Alnylam’s total revenues were $3.7 billion.
A fourth major health insurer is suing HaloMD over its use of the No Surprises Act’s arbitration process, arguing that the middleman deceived arbitrators by sending them a “sham letter” and misleading price data.
Highmark Health, a Pennsylvania-based Blue Cross Blue Shield licensee with over 7 million members, claims in a complaint filed June 1 in U.S. District Court in Western Pennsylvania that HaloMD and one of its clients, a neuromonitoring provider called Bromedicon, submitted more than 450 ineligible disputes with the company and won more than $3.9 million. Like the three Blue Cross plans before it, Highmark wants those awards tossed and its money returned.
“Defendants’ scheme is not a good faith attempt to obtain fair reimbursement,” Highmark’s complaint says. “It is a deliberate effort to wrongfully extract inflated payments from Highmark.”