NHS England are investigating as more NHS provider websites have been compromised and are now linking to adult content.
Cancer Cell Apoptosis Avoided by Membrane Oligomerization
Apoptosis in cancer cells may be easier to unleash than previously thought, according to new research led by scientists at Umeå University and collaborators. That finding could open up more cancers to treatment with anti-apoptotic drugs. The team used neutron reflectometry (NR) and ATR-FTIR to detail communication between proteins in and around the mitochondrial outer membrane (MOM).
“We use neutrons as a kind of ‘x-ray’ magnifying glass to study how various proteins talk to each other inside the cell,” Gerhard Gröbner, PhD, told Inside Precision Medicine. He is a professor at Umeå University and senior author of a new study that looks at the role of the Bax protein in apoptosis. The findings appear in ACS Chemical Biology.
Apoptosis is a form of programmed cell death that removes old or damaged cells, enabling the immune system to function properly. When apoptosis does not work as it should, as in many cancers, cells can divide uncontrollably and form tumors.
Many cancer therapies (e.g. drugs and radiation) are designed to trigger apoptosis in tumors. But there are also many aggressive and often incurable cancers that current anti-apoptotic therapies do not work on due to these tumors’ intensive use of survival proteins, such as Bcl-2 and its relatives, which can stop apoptotic death.
“Finding new drugs to inhibit Bcl-2 and its relatives in a wider sense would thus help treat more cancers. Currently only one Bcl-2 drug is available, and it is used for very specific leukemia,” said Gröbner.
“Going forward we will test a range of potential drug candidates to block Bcl-2 to release cell-killing proteins like Bax again to improve therapies,” he added.
The cell‑killing protein Bax protein is one of the most important proteins controlling apoptosis. Once activated, Bax can initiate apoptosis by forming pores in the membranes of mitochondria. Another key protein from the same family, the cell‑protective protein Bcl‑2, instead prevents Bax from killing tumor cells. In nearly half of all human cancers, one of the underlying problems is an increased production of Bcl‑2, which promotes tumor growth and often leads to poor response to therapy.
“In our research, we have used advanced neutron experiments to show how Bcl‑2 protects cancer cells by blocking the death‑inducing proteins that are most often activated by therapy,” said Gröbner.
The team used NR and ATR-FTIR to elucidate the molecular communication between those proteins in and around the mitochondrial outer membrane (MOM). The spatial and temporal changes across model MOM surfaces were resolved during the interaction of Bax with Bcl-2. The NR-derived membrane surface Bax distributions suggested that Bcl-2 mediated Bax sequestration through both Bcl-2/Bax heterodimerization and Bax/Bax oligomerization. Kinetic analysis revealed a two-step process: rapid formation of Bcl-2/Bax heterodimers, followed by slower Bax oligomerization on these complexes
The experiments show that Bcl‑2 can capture and bind several Bax proteins at the same time. This makes the inhibition of cell death more efficient than previously thought. Cancer cells do not need to produce extremely large amounts of Bcl‑2 to protect themselves—even a moderate increase can be sufficient.
The researchers also investigated how the composition of the mitochondrial membrane affects the interaction between the proteins. They found one particular lipid, cardiolipin, can promote apoptosis and help Bax form pores in the membrane. However, even in membranes containing cardiolipin, a sufficiently high level of Bcl‑2 can still prevent cell death.
“In the longer term, this type of knowledge could open up new opportunities for cancer treatment, for example by targeting Bcl‑2 and its protective function,” says Gröbner.
The study was carried out in collaboration between researchers from Umeå University, Lund University, the European Spallation Source (ESS) in Lund, the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source and Diamond Light Source in the United Kingdom, and the Institut Laue‑Langevin (ILL) in France.
The post Cancer Cell Apoptosis Avoided by Membrane Oligomerization appeared first on Inside Precision Medicine.
NHSE official warns staff over criticism of Palantir’s FDP
A senior NHS official is reported to have warned staff about voicing criticism on the rollout of the federated data platform (FDP).
Cyberscammers are bypassing banks’ security with illicit tools sold on Telegram
From inside a money-laundering center in Cambodia, an employee opens a popular Vietnamese banking app on his phone. The app asks him to upload a photo associated with the account, so he clicks on a picture of a 30-something Asian man.
Next, the app requests to open the camera for a video “liveness” check. The scammer holds up a static image of a woman bearing no resemblance to the man who owns the account. After a 90-second wait—as the app tells him to readjust the face inside the frame—he’s in.
The exploit he’s demonstrating, in a video shared with me by a cyberscam researcher named Hieu Minh Ngo, is possible thanks to one of a growing range of illicit hacking services, readily available for purchase on Telegram, that are designed to break “Know Your Customer” (KYC) facial scans.
These banking and crypto safeguards are supposed to confirm that an account belongs to a real person, and that the user’s face matches the identity documents that were provided to open the account. But scammers are bypassing them in order to open mule accounts and launder money. Rather than using a live phone camera feed for a liveness check, the hacks typically deploy a tool known as a virtual camera. Users can replace the video stream with other videos or photos—depicting a real or deepfake person or even an object.
As financial institutions enact enhanced security measures aimed at stopping cyberscammers, these workarounds are the latest round in the cat-and-mouse game between criminal operators and the financial services industry.
Over the course of a two-month investigation earlier this year, MIT Technology Review identified 22 Chinese-, Vietnamese-, and English-language public Telegram channels and groups advertising bypass kits and stolen biometric data. The software kits use a variety of methods to compromise phone operating systems and banking applications, claiming to enable users to get around the compliance checks imposed by financial institutions ranging from major crypto exchanges such as Binance to name-brand banks like Spain’s BBVA.
“Specializing in bank services—handling dirty money,” reads the since-deleted Telegram bio of the program used by the Cambodian launderer, complete with a thumbs-up emoji. “Secure. Professional. High quality.” Some of the channels and groups had thousands of subscribers or members, and many posted bullet points listing their services (“All kinds of KYC verification services”; “It’s all smooth and seamless”) alongside videos purporting to show successful hacks.
Telegram says that after reviewing the accounts, it removed them for violating its terms of service. But such online marketplaces proliferate easily, and multiple channels and groups advertising similar tools remain active.
Banks and butchers
The rise in KYC bypasses has occurred alongside an expansion of a global industry in “pig-butchering” cyberscams. Crypto platforms and banks around the world are facing increasing scrutiny over the flow of illegally obtained money, including profits from such scams, through their platforms. This has prompted tightened banking regulations in countries such as Vietnam and Thailand, where governments have increased customer verification and fraud monitoring requirements and are pushing for stronger anti-money-laundering safeguards in the crypto industry.
Chainalysis, a US blockchain analysis firm, estimates that around $17 billion was stolen in 2025 in crypto scams and fraud, up from $13 billion in 2024. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, meanwhile, warned in a recent report that the expansion of Asian scam syndicates in Africa and the Pacific has helped the industry “dramatically scale up profits.”
That combination of factors—more scrutiny, but also more revenue—has vaulted KYC bypasses to the center of the online marketplace for cyberscam and casino money launderers. Although estimates vary, cybersecurity researchers say these kinds of attacks are rising: The biometrics verification company iProov estimated that virtual-camera attacks were more than 25 times as common worldwide 2024 than in 2023, while Sumsub, a company providing KYC services, reported that “sophisticated” or multi-step fraud attempts, including virtual-camera bypasses, almost tripled last year among its clients.
Three financial institutions that were named as targets on such Telegram channels—the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, as well as BBVA and UK-based Revolut—told me they’re aware of such bypasses and emphasize that they’re an industry-wide challenge. A spokesperson from Binance said it has “observed attempts of this nature to circumvent our controls,” adding that “we have successfully prevented such attacks and remain confident in our systems.” BBVA and Revolut also declined to comment on whether their safeguards had been breached.
It’s difficult to estimate success rates, because companies may not be aware of bypasses—or report them—until later. “What’s important is what we don’t see,” Artem Popov, Sumsub’s head of fraud prevention products, told me, referring to attacks that go undetected. “There’s always part of the story where it might be completely hidden from our eyes, and from the eyes of any company in the industry, using any type of KYC provider.”
How criminals navigate a compliance maze
Advertisements for the exploits appear simple enough, but on the back end, building a successful bypass is complex and often involves multiple methods. Some channels offer to jailbreak a physical phone so that scammers can trigger the use of a virtual camera (VCam) instead of the built-in one whenever they’d like. Other hacks inject code known as a “hooking framework” into a financial institution’s app that triggers the VCam to open. Either way, VCams can be used to dupe KYC safeguards with images or videos that replace genuine, live video of the account’s owner.
Sergiy Yakymchuk, CEO of Talsec, a cybersecurity company that primarily serves financial institutions, reviewed details from the Telegram channels identified by MIT Technology Review and says they are consistent with successful tactics used against his banking and crypto clients. His team received help requests from banks and exchanges for roughly 30 VCam-based hacks over the past year, up from fewer than 10 in 2023.
Increasingly, hackers compromise both the phone itself and the code of the financial institutions’ apps before feeding the virtual camera a mix of stolen biometrics and deepfakes, Yakymchuk says.
“Some time ago, it was enough to decompile the app of a bank and distribute this on Telegram, and that was everything you needed,” he says. “Now it’s not enough, because you have KYC—and more and more things are needed.”
For money launderers, KYC bypasses have “become essential for everything right now—because scam compounds need to move money,” says Ngo, the researcher who shared the demo video. A convicted former hacker who became a cybersecurity advisor for the Vietnamese government, Ngo now runs an anti-scam nonprofit and helps law enforcement investigate money laundering.
He describes how the process works in the case of pig-butchering scams: Funds originating with victims are received into bank accounts controlled or rented by a money-laundering network, known colloquially as “water houses.” Money launderers use KYC bypasses to access the accounts and quickly redistribute the profits before converting them into digital assets—typically in the form of the stablecoin Tether, a type of cryptocurrency that is pegged to the US dollar.
These transactions often happen in seconds, under tightly orchestrated management. “They know, very clearly, the flow of how the banks verify or authenticate accounts,” Ngo says.
A cat-and-mouse game
The growth of cyberscam money laundering has led to heightened scrutiny of financial institutions. In 2023, Binance pleaded guilty in US federal courts to operating without anti-money-laundering safeguards. Donald Trump pardoned former Binance CEO Chaopeng Zhao last October.
Recent analysis from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found that after Zhao’s guilty plea, more than $400 million continued to move to Binance from Huione Group, a Cambodia-based firm that the US sanctioned after the Treasury Department deemed it a “critical node” for money laundering in pig-butchering scams.
Binance says it has “state-of-the-art security systems” that prevented billions in fraud losses and that the company processed more than 71,000 law enforcement requests in 2025.
But John Griffin, a finance and blockchain expert at the University of Texas at Austin, does not think the exchanges are sufficiently secure. “Even though they have all this press about ‘Oh, yes, we’ve changed this and that’—well, the proof is in the pudding. The criminals are still using your exchange,” Griffin told me of the industry at large. “So there must be holes.” (Binance says it “objects to the dubious findings” of Griffin’s work tracking the flow of criminal profits across exchanges like Binance, Huobi, OKX, and Tokenlon, calling it “misleading at best and, at worst, wildly inaccurate.”)
Binance also pointed out that some purported bypass services are themselves scams, casting doubt on whether successful bypasses are as widespread as the Telegram marketplace may suggest. Engaging with such services “exposes individuals to significant security risks,” a spokesperson said. “Even where access appears to be granted, accounts are often already restricted by internal detection and compliance controls, rendering them nonfunctional for trading or withdrawals.”
Regulators around the world are trying to catch up. In Thailand, where citizens’ bank accounts regularly serve as money mules for cyberscams based in neighboring Myanmar and Cambodia, new legislation has enhanced KYC monitoring, limited daily transactions, and strengthened oversight bodies’ ability to suspend accounts. The US money-laundering regulator, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, issued a warning against KYC deepfakes and the use of VCams in late 2024, encouraging platforms to track broader transaction patterns to identify money laundering.
For scammers, any new security or reporting requirements will make bypasses harder, but “it’s not going to stop them,” Ngo says. “It’s just a matter of time.”
Liverpool University Hospitals selects Nervecentre to supply EPR
Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has appointed Nervecentre to supply its new electronic patient record (EPR) system.
NASA is building the first nuclear reactor-powered interplanetary spacecraft. How will it work?
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.
Just before Artemis II began its historic slingshot around the moon, Jared Isaacman, the recently confirmed NASA administrator, made a flurry of announcements from the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC. He said the US would soon undertake far more regular moon missions and establish the foundations for a base at the lunar south pole before the end of the decade. He also affirmed the space agency’s commitment to putting a nuclear reactor on the lunar surface.
These goals were largely expected—but there was still one surprise. Isaacman also said NASA would build the first-ever nuclear reactor-powered interplanetary spacecraft and fly it to Mars by the end of 2028. It’s called the Space Reactor-1 Freedom, or SR-1 for short. “After decades of study, and billions spent on concepts that have never left Earth, America will finally get underway on nuclear power in space,” he said at the event. “We will launch the first-of-its-kind interplanetary mission.”
A successful mission would herald a new era in spaceflight, one in which traveling between Earth, the moon, and Mars would—according to a range of experts—be faster and easier than ever. And it might just give the US the edge in the race against China—allowing the country to beat its greatest geopolitical rival to landing astronauts on another planet.
While experts agree the timeline is extremely tight, they’re excited to see if America’s space agency and its industry partners can deliver an engineering miracle. “You wake up to that announcement, and it puts a big smile on your face,” says Simon Middleburgh, co-director of the Nuclear Futures Institute at Bangor University in Wales.
Little detail on SR-1 is publicly available, and NASA’s own spaceflight researchers did not respond to requests for comment. But MIT Technology Review spoke to several nuclear power and propulsion experts to find out how the new nuclear-powered spacecraft might work.
Nuclear propulsion 101
Traditionally, spaceflight has been powered by chemical propulsion. Liquefied hydrogen and liquefied oxygen are mixed, and then ignited, within a rocket; the searingly hot exhaust from this explosion is ejected through a nozzle, which propels the rocket forth.
Chemical propulsion offers a significant amount of thrust and will, for the foreseeable future, still be used to launch spacecraft from Earth. But nuclear propulsion would enable spacecraft to fly through the solar system for far longer, and faster, than is currently possible.
“You get more bang per kilogram,” says Middleburgh. A nuclear fuel source is far more energy-dense than its conventional cousin, which means it’s orders of magnitude more efficient. “It’s really, really, really high efficiency,” says Lindsey Holmes, an expert in space nuclear technology and the vice president of advanced projects at Analytical Mechanics Associates, an aerospace company in Virginia.
The approach also removes one other element of the traditional power equation: solar. Spacecraft, including the Artemis II mission’s Orion space capsule, often rely on the sun for power. But this can be a problem, since it doesn’t always shine in space, particularly when a planet or moon gets in its way—and as you head toward the outer solar system, beyond Mars, there’s just less sunlight available.
To circumvent this issue, nuclear energy sources have been used in spacecraft plenty of times before—including on both Voyager missions and the Saturn-interrogating Cassini probe. Known as radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs, these use plutonium, which radioactively decays and generates heat in the process. That heat is then converted into electricity for the spacecraft to use. RTGs, however, aren’t the same as nuclear reactors; they are more akin to radioactive batteries—more rudimentary and considerably less powerful.
So how will a nuclear-reactor-powered spacecraft work?
Despite operational differences, the fundamentals of running a nuclear reactor in space are much the same as they are on Earth. First, get some uranium fuel; then bombard it with neutrons. This ruptures the uranium’s unstable atomic nuclei, which expel a torrent of extra neutrons—and that rapidly escalates into a self-sustaining, roasting-hot nuclear fission reaction. Its prodigious heat output can then be used to produce electricity.
Doing this in space may sound like an act of lunacy, but it’s not: The idea, and even a lot of the basic technology, has been around for decades. The Soviet Union sent dozens of nuclear reactors into orbit (often to power spy satellites), while the US deployed just one, known as SNAP-10A, back in 1965—a technological demonstration to see if it would operate normally in space. The aim was for the reactor to generate electricity for at least a year, but it ran for just over a month before a high-voltage failure in the spacecraft caused it to malfunction and shut down.
Now, more than half a century later, the US wants its second-ever space-based nuclear reactor to do something totally different: power an interplanetary spacecraft.
To be clear, the US has started, and terminated, myriad programs looking into nuclear propulsion. The latest casualty was DRACO, a collaboration between NASA and the Department of Defense, which ended in 2025. Like several previous efforts, DRACO was canceled because of a mix of high experimentation costs, lower prices for conventional rocket propulsion, and the difficulty of ensuring that ground tests could be performed safely and effectively (they are creating an incredibly powerful nuclear reaction, after all).
But now external considerations may be changing the calculus. The Artemis program has jump-started America’s return to the moon, and the new space race has palpable momentum behind it. The first nation to deploy nuclear propulsion would have a serious advantage navigating through deep space.
“I think it’s a very doable technology,” says Philip Metzger, a spaceflight engineering researcher at the Florida Space Institute. “I’m happy to see them finally doing this.”
One version of this technology is known as nuclear thermal propulsion, or NTP. You start with a nuclear reactor, one that’s cooking at around 5,000°F. Then “you’ve got a cold gas, and you squirt cold gas over the hot reactor,” says Middleburgh. “The gas expands, you shoot it out the back of a nozzle, and you have an impulse. And that impulse drives you forward.”
Because the thrust depends on the speed of the gas being ejected, the propellant gas needs to be light, making hydrogen a popular choice. But hydrogen is a corrosive and explosive substance, so using it in NTP engines can make them precarious to operate. On top of this, NTP doesn’t necessarily have a very long operating life.
Alternatively, there’s nuclear electric propulsion, or NEP, which “is very low thrust, but very efficient, so you can use it for a long period of time,” says Sebastian Corbisiero, the US Department of Energy’s national technical director of space reactor programs. This method uses heat from a fission reactor to generate power. That power is used to electrify a gas and then blast it out of the spacecraft, generating thrust.
Both NTP and NEP have been investigated by US researchers, because both have the added benefit of making it easier and safer for human beings to explore the solar system. Astronauts in space are exposed to harmful cosmic radiation, but because nuclear propulsion makes spacecraft speedier and more agile, they’d spend less time in it. “It solves the radiation problem,” says Metzger. “That’s one of the main motivations for inventing better propulsion to and from Mars.”
How to build a nuclear-powered spaceship
For SR-1, NASA has opted for nuclear electric propulsion. NEP is “a much simpler affair” than its thermal counterpart, says Middleburgh. Essentially, you just need to plug a nuclear reactor into a power-and-propulsion system. Luckily for NASA, it’s already got one.
For many years, NASA—along with its space agency partners in Canada, Europe, Japan, and the Middle East—was preparing for Gateway, meant to be humanity’s first space station to orbit around the moon. Isaacman canceled the project in March, but that doesn’t mean its technology will go to waste; the power-and-propulsion element of the nixed space station will be used in SR-1 instead. This contraption was going to be powered by solar energy. It’ll now be attached to an in-development nuclear reactor custom built to survive in space.
What might the SR-1 look like? MIT Technology Review saw a presentation by Steve Sinacore, program executive of NASA’s Space Reactor Office, that offers some clues. So far, the concept art makes it look like a colossal fletched arrow. At the back will be the power-and-propulsion system, while its tip will hold a 20-kilowatt-or-greater uranium-filled nuclear reactor. (For context, a typical nuclear plant on Earth is 50,000 times more powerful, producing a gigawatt of power.)
NASA
The “fletches” on SR-1 are large fins that allow the reactor to cool down. “You have to have really large radiators,” says Holmes, since the nuclear fission process produces so much heat that much of it has to be vented into space—otherwise, the reactor and spacecraft will melt.
According to that presentation, the spacecraft’s hardware development is due to start this June. By January 2028, SR-1’s systems should be ready for assembly and testing. And by that October, the spacecraft will arrive at the launch site, ready for liftoff before the year’s end. Will the nuclear reactor manage to hold itself together? “Going through the launch safely is going to be a challenge,” says Middleburgh. “You are being shaken, rattled, and rolled.”
Then, he says, “once you’re up in space, once you’ve got through that few minutes of hell in getting there, it’s zero-gravity considerations you have to worry about.” The question then becomes: Will the mechanics of the reactor, built on terra firma, still work?
For safety reasons, the nuclear reactor will be switched on around two days post-launch, when it’s comfortably in space. Uranium isn’t tremendously dangerous by itself, but that can’t be said of the nuclear waste products that emerge when the reactor is activated, so you don’t want any of that to fall back to Earth.
If this schedule is adhered to, and SR-1 works as planned, it’s expected to reach Mars about a year after launch. “It’s an aggressive timeline,” says Holmes, something she suspects is being driven partly by China’s and Russia’s own deep-space nuclear ambitions. The two countries aim to place their own nuclear reactor on the moon’s surface to power the planned International Lunar Research Station—a jointly operated lunar base—by 2035.
Whether it flies or fails in space, SR-1’s operations should help NASA with putting a nuclear reactor on the moon soon after. “All of the things we’d be learning about how that system operates in space [are] very helpful for a surface application, because basically it’s the same,” says Corbisiero. “There’s still no air on the moon.”
And if SR-1 does triumph, it will be a game-changing victory for NASA. It will also be “a massive win for the human race, frankly,” says Middleburgh. “It will be a marvel of engineering, and it will move the dial in humans potentially taking a step on Mars.” Like many of his colleagues, including Holmes, he remains thrilled by the prospect of the first-ever nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft—even with the incredibly ambitious timeline.
“These are the things that get us up in the morning,” he says. “These are the sorts of things we will remember when we’re old.”
Prediction of Relapse Using Digital Technology in People in Recovery From Substance Use Disorders: Early Economic Evaluation With a Case Study of the Subreal App
Background: Many people relapse after achieving abstinence in substance use disorders. Health care providers may scan the horizon for new technologies to predict response that allow interventions to be targeted rather than routine. Currently, no such predictive technologies are available in the United Kingdom. The Subreal app is available for use in research contexts, but no clinical data specific to the app are yet available. Early health economic modeling can use data from the literature to explore characteristics essential for the new technology to be cost-effective. This information can guide developers in setting performance targets and pricing and estimating potential cost savings and/or cost-effectiveness for health care providers. Objective: This study was supported by a UK industry funding body to explore the potential of digital technologies such as the Subreal app to offer cost savings or cost-effectiveness for health care providers. We explored the threshold price and clinical effectiveness required to deliver cost savings and cost-effectiveness in 2 subpopulations with substance use disorders in a UK setting. Methods: Deterministic models were used to estimate costs per relapse and quality-adjusted life years over 1-, 5-, and 20-year time horizons for people who have achieved abstinence after treatment for alcohol or opioid misuse. The intervention was a digital technology predicting relapse, provided—in addition to standard care—for 1 year post achievement of abstinence. In Subreal, biomarker data are collected daily through the app, and artificial intelligence–enhanced risk assessment flags patients who require additional support. The comparator was event-driven, reactive response to relapse. Costs and quality-of-life estimates were calculated using Markov models with data from existing published sources. The base-case estimate of 15% reduction in first-year relapse rates was based on a previous study on a similar but simpler digital technology. Results: Digital technologies such as the Subreal app have the potential to be cost-saving from a UK health and social care perspective, especially when used over a longer time horizon. Assuming a reduction of 15% in first-year relapse rates, digital technologies have the potential to be cost-saving, provided that they do not cost more than £300 (US $400.09) and £460 (US $613.47) per patient per annum for alcohol and opioid use disorders, respectively. No cost was included for postalert care, as it was assumed that this could be met within existing resources. Cost savings would be achieved predominantly through a reduction in treatment requirements as fewer people relapse. Price thresholds would reduce correspondingly if a <15% reduction in relapse rates were achieved. Conclusions: Developers of digital technologies that aim to reduce relapse need to focus on the generation of evidence of clinical effectiveness and develop a commercially sustainable pricing model that allows health care providers to benefit from cost savings.
From Colossal to Chickens: The Scientists Behind Neion Bio’s Biologics Platform
Twenty years ago, Sven Bocklandt, PhD, sought to create a hypoallergenic cat. He had the genetic engineering chops to do it, but the embryology was beyond his capabilities. At a small animal genetic engineering conference, known as TARC (Transgenic Animal Research Conference), held near Lake Tahoe, he met James Kehler, VMD, PhD, whose research at that time was to make transgenic and knockout cats as models of human disease.
The two men bonded, agreed the hypoallergenic cat idea was “crazy enough,” and decided to move forward with it. They worked together, completely unfunded, for years—FedEx’ing samples back and forth as Bocklandt was on the west coast and Kehler on the east coast—trying to make their “garage cat” while each one worked different day jobs.
Bocklandt, passionate about animal genome engineering, continued to develop different ideas for genome engineering in animals. Around the same time that he started sharing his ideas with scientists like George Church, PhD, a start-up focused on animal genome engineering was taking shape—Colossal Biosciences, co-founded by Church. Introductions were made, and Bocklandt joined in 2022 as species director to work on the dire wolf project. Kehler joined a short time later as VP. And everyone knows the rest of that story (there was no shortage of media coverage).
The pair eventually succeeded with the cat project: his name is Archie, and he is, Kehler noted, only partially hypoallergenic. But the generation of Archie and the dire wolves may not be the successes of this story. The real success may be what Bocklandt and Kehler learned along the way—and what they are going to do next.
Chickens as the next biologic factory
Neion Bio, co-founded by Dimi Kellari and Sam Levin, PhD, and located on the Rockefeller University campus on the east side of Manhattan, is aiming to re-engineer eggs to produce drugs in chickens. The team uses genetic engineering to integrate therapeutic proteins into native egg proteins, creating a new manufacturing platform for drugs that runs on grain and water.
Bocklandt joined the team at Neion Bio as CSO after leaving Colossal in 2024; Kehler joined more recently, as head of avian sciences.
When thinking about producing complex proteins, using the chicken “makes a lot of sense,” Bocklandt told GEN. Breeding and genetic engineering are all established in the chicken. And the vaccine industry has established an existing infrastructure to grow eggs under disease-free conditions. Purifying proteins out of an egg, Bocklandt added, is easier than purifying them out of a Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) culture (the traditional cell choice for drug production) because there are fewer host proteins.
It makes “far more sense” than what we’re doing right now, Bocklandt noted, which is using CHO cells. “Everyone is doing that because everyone has been doing it that way,” he asserted.
“The fact that we’re now seriously questioning whether CHO cells should remain the default manufacturing platform for biologics is long overdue,” noted Ola Wlodek, PhD, CEO of Constructive Bio. “Any credible new approach that breaks this decades-old lock-in is ultimately good for patients and for the field.”
For Kehler, who did his graduate work in the lab of stem cell pioneer Hans Schöler, PhD, the chicken is a clear choice because it is the only species, besides the mouse, where the primordial germ cells have been used to transmit genetically modified gametes to the next generation.
Mike McGrew, PhD, group leader at the Roslin Institute in the U.K., and an advisor to Neion Bio, demonstrated years ago that modifying chicken primordial germ cells is a reliable way of making gene-edited chickens. This background is comforting to Kehler, who noted that, “unlike at Colossal, where everything was bleeding edge, we are able to focus on a single species and capitalize on some pretty tried and true technology.”
Drugs in eggs meet biomanufacturing reality
The lab space on the Rockefeller University campus can support research and even house chickens. But it cannot support the production of a drug. When asked about turning their egg-borne proteins into drugs, the company leans on the existing infrastructure that supports vaccines in specific pathogen free (SPF) eggs. The idea is that the egg whites will be frozen in giant batches and then processed in a CDMO.
When asked about potential challenges, Bocklandt noted that, “technically, there’s not much to worry about. I have no concerns about Neion Bio being able to do what we want to do or what we need to do.”
But there may be hurdles ahead. Rahul Dhanda, co-founder, president, and CEO of Syntis Bio, told GEN that “at the beginning, everything can look like it has infinite potential—it’s when you actually build and operate the system that the real challenges show up.”
More specifically, Dhanda pointed out that biomanufacturing “ultimately comes down to reliable, consistent, and cost-efficient production.” Leveraging animal biology for drug manufacturing is exciting, he noted, “but scalability and cost are still open questions, especially at this early stage. Biological variability between animals and individual outputs, like eggs, introduces additional risk compared to more controlled cell-based systems,” Dhanda added.
Wlodek agreed: “because egg-based production is inherently a biological supply chain, it will face avian flu risks, batch-to-batch variability from seasonal and flock effects, animal-welfare/regulatory overhead, and practical limits on how fast you can expand output compared with stainless-steel or single-use fermenters.”
Microbial and yeast systems still “win decisively on GMP containment, land/water footprint,” she noted, and “the ability to go from a few liters to tens of thousands of liters in weeks rather than months.”
Dhanda agreed that “getting it to work in principle is far different from getting it to work at scale, and that seems far off.”
If these challenges can be addressed at scale, safely and humanely, Dhanda noted, the approach could deliver meaningful health benefits—”but there are still significant logistical and technical hurdles to work through.”
Engineering the chicken genome
Creating dire wolves at Colossal started with deriving wolf cells, editing them, and cloning them back into a live animal. But cloning doesn’t exist in birds. To genetically engineer chickens, the Neion Bio team edits the germline, starting the process with a fertilized egg.
The egg is incubated for 65 hours, at which point germ cells float in the blood because the ovaries and testes don’t exist yet. A microliter of the blood is removed, put into cell culture media, and the germ cells grow out. The transgene that codes for the therapeutic protein is inserted using CRISPR-Cas enzymes, in the coding region of a gene that codes for Ovalbumin—which makes up a bit over 50% of the egg white protein. This protein is made “on a massive scale” by the oviduct, the company noted.
The genome is screened for correct integration and potential off-target edits. Once the clone is approved, several thousand cells are injected back into another embryo (also at 65 days old). After incubation, the egg hatches and becomes a chicken.
Kanuma set the precedent—but not the scale
In 2015, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Kanuma (sebelipase alfa) to treat Lysosomal Acid Lipase (LAL) deficiency, also known as Wolman disease. The drug, an enzyme replacement therapy, was the first treatment for patients with the rare disease and the first drug to be made in chickens. Kanuma is produced by Alexion Pharmaceuticals, which was acquired by AstraZeneca in 2021.
This historical precedent may provide a proof of concept for Neion Bio. That said, “the scale required for Kanuma is very different from what would be needed for large biosimilars,” explained Wlodek.
An Odyssean journey
For both Bocklandt and Kehler, the move to Neion Bio feels like their careers are coming full circle. When Bocklandt first left Colossal, he was not sure how he would surpass that level of excitement. But the move came at an interesting time for him; the call to join Neion Bio came just weeks after he learned that his sister had been diagnosed with leukemia.
He thought, “Well, maybe this is not such a bad use of my skills.”
Earlier in his career, he didn’t think that he had anything special to add to a field like cancer research. But now Bocklandt sees it differently: throughout his career, he has pushed the state-of-the-art of genetic engineering. Now, he said, “I bring something to the field. And the fact that I can do my passion, animal genetic engineering, and apply that to make drugs better, cheaper, and more accessible, is really exciting.”
As for Kehler, Neion’s goal was his goal all along. He went to the University of Pennsylvania to make better animal models to test drugs for humans. “It never really dawned on me that we could use animals to make the drugs for humans. But taking everything I know about stem cell biology, germ cell biology, and gene editing, and bringing that to bear to make what should be a disruptive, transformational approach to making drugs—it feels like the culmination of my career.”
Neion (pronounced Neon) Bio is named after the birthplace of Odysseus; Mount Neion is a mountain mentioned in Homer’s The Odyssey as a landmark on Ithaca—Odysseus’ island home. As described by the company, the name is a testament to the shared qualities between the Greek hero and the company’s goals: relying on intelligence and resourcefulness over strength. And yes, Odysseus was successful in his return home to reclaim his throne. But it was a bittersweet success given the enormous cost and hardship.
Neion Bio’s name may mirror the resilience and ingenuity required to undertake the journey, but time will tell how long the similarities in the namesake are shared between the two.
The post From Colossal to Chickens: The Scientists Behind Neion Bio’s Biologics Platform appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
A longitudinal analysis of the prevalence of restrictive interventions involving women with mental health conditions, learning disabilities or autism in mental health services in England
IntroductionRestrictive interventions, including physical restraint, seclusion, chemical restraint, and segregation, continue to be used within mental health services, despite sustained policy efforts to promote least-restrictive and trauma-informed care. However, little is known about national trends affecting women, for whom restrictive interventions often carry heightened risks of re-traumatisation and stigma.MethodsWe conducted a longitudinal secondary analysis of publicly available administrative data from the Mental Health Bulletin covering NHS-funded mental health services in England between 2017 and 2025. Annual counts of restrictive interventions involving women were examined relative to the number of women detained under the Mental Health Act to estimate annual rates per 1,000 detained. Regression modelling was used to assess temporal trends overall, by age group and type of restrictive intervention, and interrupted time-series analyses to examine changes following implementation of the Mental Health Units (Use of Force) Act 2018 (“Seni’s Law”). Trends were also examined alongside available national data on restrictive interventions involving men.ResultsRates of restrictive interventions involving women increased by approximately 12 percent per year over the study period, with no evidence of a reduction following the introduction of Seni’s Law. Increases were most pronounced for chemical restraint, seclusion, and segregation, while physical and mechanical restraint remained stable. Restrictive interventions declined among women under 18 but increased consistently across all adult age groups, indicating a widening age-related divergence. Although overall trends broadly mirrored those observed among men, the types of restrictive interventions used and their potential impact may differ, highlighting gendered dimensions in how restrictive practices are experienced and applied.DiscussionDespite extensive national initiatives, restrictive interventions involving women have continued to rise in England, highlighting a persistent gap between policy intent and practice. The findings suggest that legislative frameworks alone are insufficient to achieve meaningful reductions without operational changes in clinical practice, organisational culture, and monitoring systems. Internationally, the study contributes rare gender-disaggregated longitudinal evidence and highlights the need for comparable monitoring systems and coordinated research to inform rights-based, trauma-informed strategies to reduce restrictive interventions in mental health services.
The problem with thinking you’re part Neanderthal
You’ve probably heard some version of this idea before: that many of us have an “inner Neanderthal.” That is to say, around 45,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens first arrived in Europe, they met members of a cousin species—the broad-browed, heavier-set Neanderthals—and, well, one thing led to another, which is why some people now carry a small amount of Neanderthal DNA.
This DNA is arguably the 21st century’s most celebrated discovery in human evolution. It has been connected to all kinds of traits and health conditions, and it helped win the Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo a Nobel Prize.
But in 2024, a pair of French population geneticists called into question the foundation of the popular and pervasive theory.
Lounès Chikhi and Rémi Tournebize, then colleagues at the Université de Toulouse, proposed an alternative explanation for the very same genomic patterns. The problem, they said, was that the original evidence for the inner Neanderthal was based on a statistical assumption: that humans, Neanderthals, and their ancestors all mated randomly in huge, continent-size populations. That meant a person in South Africa was just as likely to reproduce with a person in West Africa or East Africa as with someone from their own community.
Archaeological, genetic, and fossil evidence all shows, though, that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa in smaller groups, cut off from one another by deserts, mountains, and cultural divides. People sometimes crossed those barriers, but more often they partnered up within them.
In the terminology of the field, this dynamic is called population structure. Because of structure, genes do not spread evenly through a population but can concentrate in some places and be totally absent from others. The human gene pool is not so much an Olympic-size swimming pool as a complex network of tidal pools whose connectivity ebbs and flows over time.
This dynamic greatly complicates the math at the heart of evolutionary biology, which long relied on assumptions like randomly mating populations to extract general principles from limited data. If you take structure into account, Chikhi told me recently, then there are other ways to explain the DNA that some living people share with Neanderthals—ways that don’t require any interspecies sex at all.
“I believe most species are spatially organized and structured in different, complex ways,” says Chikhi, who has researched population structure for more than two decades and has also studied lemurs, orangutans, and island birds. “It’s a general failure of our field that we do not compare our results in a clear way with alternative scenarios.” (Pääbo did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
The inner Neanderthal became a story we could tell ourselves about our flaws and genetic destiny: Don’t blame me; blame the prognathic caveman hiding in my cells.
Chikhi and Tournebize’s argument is about population structure, yes, but at heart, it is actually one about methods—how modern evolutionary science deploys computer models and statistical techniques to make sense of mountains upon mountains of genetic data.
They’re not the only scientists who are worried. “People think we really understand how genomes evolve and can write sophisticated algorithms for saying what happened,” says William Amos, a University of Cambridge population geneticist who has been critical of the “inner Neanderthal” theory. But, he adds, those models are “based on simple assumptions that are often wrong.”
And if they’re wrong, what’s at stake is far more than a single evolutionary mystery.
A captivating story of interspecies passion
Back in 2010, Pääbo’s lab pulled off something of a miracle. The researchers were able to extract DNA from nuclei in the cells of 40,000-year-old Neanderthal bones. DNA breaks down quickly after death, but the group got enough of it from three different individuals to produce a draft sequence of the entire Neanderthal genome, with 4 billion base pairs.
As part of their study, they performed a statistical test comparing their Neanderthal genome with the genomes of five present-day people from different parts of the world. That’s how they discovered that modern humans of non-African ancestry had a small amount of DNA in common with Neanderthals, a species that diverged from the Homo sapiens line more than 400,000 years ago, that they did not share with either modern humans of African ancestry or our closest living relative, the chimpanzee.
WELLCOME COLLECTION
Pääbo’s team interpreted this as evidence of sexual reproduction between ancient Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals they encountered after they expanded out of Africa. “Neanderthals are not totally extinct,” Pääbo said to the BBC in 2010. “In some of us, they live on a little bit.”
The discovery was monumental on its own—but even more so because it reversed a previous consensus. More than a decade earlier, in 1997, Pääbo had sequenced a much smaller amount of Neanderthal DNA, in that case from a cell structure called a mitochondrion. It was different enough from Homo sapiens mitochondrial DNA for his team to cautiously conclude there had been “little or no interbreeding” between the two species.
After 2010, though, the idea of hybridization, also called admixture, effectively became canon. Top journals like Science and Nature published study after study on the inner Neanderthal. Some scientists have argued that Homo sapiens would never have adapted to colder habitats in Europe and Asia without an infusion of Neanderthal DNA. Other research teams used Pääbo’s techniques to find genetic traces of interbreeding with an extinct group of hominins in Asia, called the Denisovans, and a mysterious “ghost lineage” in Africa. Biologists used similar tests to find evidence of interbreeding between chimpanzees and bonobos, polar and brown bears, and all kinds of other animals.
The inner-Neanderthal hypothesis also took a turn for the personal. Various studies linked Neanderthal DNA to a head-spinning range of conditions: alcoholism, asthma, autism, ADHD, depression, diabetes, heart disease, skin cancer, and severe covid-19. Some researchers suggested that Neanderthal DNA had an impact on hair and skin color, while others assigned individuals a “NeanderScore” that was correlated with skull shape and prevalence of schizophrenia markers. Commercial genetic testing companies like 23andMe started offering customers Neanderthal ancestry reports.
The inner Neanderthal became a story we could tell ourselves about our flaws and genetic destiny: Don’t blame me; blame the prognathic caveman hiding in my cells. Or as Latif Nasser, a host of the popular-science program Radiolab, put it when he was hospitalized with Crohn’s disease, another Neanderthal-associated condition: “I just keep imagining these tiny Neanderthals … just, like, stabbing me and drawing these little droplets of blood out of me.”
“These things become meaningful to people,” Chikhi says. “What we say will be important to how people view themselves.”
The pitfalls of simplistic solutions
When population geneticists built the theoretical framework for evolutionary biology in the early 20th century, genes were only abstract units of heredity inferred from experiments with peas and fruit flies. Population genetics developed theory far more quickly than it accumulated data. As a result, many data-driven scientists dismissed the study of evolution as a form of storytelling based on unexamined assumptions and preconceived ideas.
By the ’90s, though, genes were no longer abstractions but sequenced segments of DNA. Genomic sequencing grounded evolutionary studies in the kind of hard data that a chemist or physicist could respect.
Yet biologists could not simply read evolutionary history from genomes as though they were books. They were trying to determine which of a nearly infinite number of plausible histories was the most likely to have created the patterns they observed in a small sample of genomes. For that, they needed simplified, algorithmic models of evolution. The study of evolution shifted from storytelling to statistics, and from biology to computer science.
That suited Chikhi, who as a child was drawn to the predictable laws and numerical precision of math and science. He entered the field in the mid-’90s just as the first big studies of human DNA were settling old debates about human origins. DNA showed that Africa harbored far more genetic diversity than the entire rest of the planet. The new evidence supported the idea that modern humans evolved for hundreds of thousands of years in Africa and expanded to the other continents only in the last 100,000 years. For Chikhi, whose parents were Algerian immigrants, this discovery was a powerful challenge to the way some archaeologists and biologists talked about race. DNA could be used to deconstruct rather than encourage the pernicious idea that human races had deep-seated evolutionary differences based on their places of origin.
At the same time, though, he was wary of the tendency to treat DNA as the final verdict on open questions in evolution. Chikhi had been surprised when, back in 1997, Pääbo and his team used that small amount of mitochondrial DNA to rule out hybridization between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. He didn’t think that the absence of Neanderthal DNA there necessarily meant it wouldn’t be found elsewhere in the Homo sapiens genome.
Chikhi’s own research in the aughts opened his eyes to the gaps between historical reality and models of evolution. For one, despite the assumption of random mating, none of the animals Chikhi studied actually mated randomly. Orangutans lived in highly fragmented habitats, which restricted their pool of potential mates, and female birds were often extremely picky about their male partners.
These factors could confound an evolutionary biologist’s traditional statistical tool kit. Scientists were starting to apply a mathematical technique to estimate historical population sizes for a species from the genome of just a single individual. This method showed sharp population declines in the histories of many different species. Chikhi realized, though, that the apparent declines could be an artifact of treating a structured population as one that evolved with random mating; in that case, the technique could indicate a bottleneck even if all the subgroups were actually growing in size. “This is completely counterintuitive,” he says.
That’s at least partly why, when Pääbo’s 2010 Neanderthal genome came out, Chikhi was impressed with the sheer technical accomplishment but also leery of the findings about hybridization. “It was the type of thing we conclude too quickly based on genetic data,” he says. Pääbo’s work mentioned population structure as a possible alternative explanation—but didn’t follow up.
Just a couple of years later, a pair of independent scientists named Anders Eriksson and Andrea Manica picked up the idea, building a model with simple population structure that explicitly excluded admixture. They simulated human evolution starting from 500,000 years ago and found that their model produced the same genomic patterns Pääbo’s group had interpreted as evidence of hybridization.
“Working with structured models is really out of the comfort zone of a lot of population geneticists,” says Eriksson, now a professor at the University of Tartu in Estonia.
Their research impressed Chikhi. “At the time, I thought people would focus on population structure in the evolution of humans,” he says. Instead, he watched as the inner-Neanderthal hypothesis took on a life of its own. Scientists produced new methods to quantify hybridization but rarely examined whether population structure would yield the same results. To Chikhi, this wasn’t science; it was storytelling, like some of the old narratives about the evolution of racial differences.
Chikhi and Tournebize decided to take a crack at the problem themselves. “I’ve always been very skeptical about science, and population genetics in particular,” says Tournebize, now a researcher at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development. “We make a lot of assumptions, and the models we use are very simplistic.” As detailed in a 2024 paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, they built a model of human evolution that replaced randomly mating continent-wide populations with many smaller populations linked by occasional migration. Then they let it run—a million times.
At the end of the simulation, they kept the 20 scenarios that produced genomes most similar to the ones in a sample of actual Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. Many of these scenarios produced long segments of DNA like the ones their peers argued could only have been inherited from Neanderthals. They showed that several statistics, which other scientists had proposed as measurements of Neanderthal DNA, couldn’t actually distinguish between hybridization and population structure. What’s more, they showed that many of the models that supported hybridization failed to accurately predict other known features of human evolution.
“A model will say there was admixture but then predict diversity that is totally incompatible with what we actually know of human diversity,” Chikhi says. “Nobody seems to care.”
So how did Neanderthal DNA wind up in living people if not via interspecies passion? Chikhi and Tournebize think it’s more likely that it was inherited by both Neanderthals and some sapiens groups in Africa from a common ancestor living at least half a million years ago. If the sapiens groups carrying those genetic variants included the people who migrated out of Africa, then the two human species would have already had the DNA in common when they came into contact in Europe and Asia—no sex required.
“The interpretation of genetic data is not straightforward,” Chikhi says. “We always have to make assumptions. Nobody takes data and magically comes up with a solution.”
Embracing the uncertainty
Most of the half-dozen population geneticists I spoke with praised Chikhi and Tournebize’s ingenuity and appreciated the spirit of their critique. “Their paper forces us to think more critically about the model we use for inference and consider alternatives,” says Aaron Ragsdale, a population geneticist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His own work likewise suggests that the earliest Homo sapiens populations in Africa were probably structured—and that this is the likely reason for genomic patterns that other research groups had attributed to hybridization with a mysterious “ghost lineage” of hominins in Africa.
Yet most researchers still believe that modern humans and Neanderthals did probably have children with each other tens of thousands of years ago. Several pointed to the fact that fossil DNA of Homo sapiens who died thousands of years ago had longer chunks of apparent Neanderthal DNA than living people, which is exactly what you would expect if they had a more recent Neanderthal ancestor. (To address this possibility, Chikhi and Tournebize included DNA from 10 ancient humans in their study and found that most of them fit the structured model.) And while the Harvard population geneticist David Reich, who helped design the statistical test from Pääbo’s 2010 study, declined an interview, he did say he thought Chikhi and Tournebize’s model was “weak” and “very contrived,” adding that “there are multiple lines of evidence for Neanderthal admixture into modern humans that make the evidence for this overwhelming.” (Two other authors of that study, Richard Green and Nick Patterson, did not respond to requests for comment.)
Nevertheless, most scientists these days welcome the development of structured, or “spatially explicit,” models that account for the fact that any given member of a population is usually more closely related to individuals living nearby than to those living far away.
Loosening our attachment to certain narratives of evolution can create space for wonder at the sheer complexity of life’s history.
Other scientists also say that random mating isn’t the only assumption in population genetics that merits scrutiny. Models rarely factor in natural selection, which can also create genetic patterns that look like hybridization. Another common assumption is that everyone’s DNA mutates at the same, constant rate. “All the theory says the mutation rate is fixed,” says Amos, the Cambridge population geneticist. But he thinks that rate would have slowed drastically in the group of Homo sapiens that expanded to Europe around 45,000 years ago. This, too, could have created genomic patterns that other scientists interpret as evidence of interbreeding with Neanderthals.
COURTESY OF 23ANDME
The point here isn’t that a complex model of evolution with many moving pieces is necessarily better than a simple one. Scientists need to reduce complexity in order to see the underlying processes more clearly. But simple models require assumptions, and scientists need to reevaluate those assumptions in light of what they learn. “As you get more data, you can justify more complex models of the world,” says Mark Thomas, a population geneticist at University College London, who wrote a history of random mating in population genetics that highlighted how the field was starting to see it as “a limiting assumption as opposed to a simplifying one.”
It can feel discouraging to couch conversations about the past in confusing terms like “population structure” and “mutation rates.” It seems almost antithetical to the spirit of science to talk more about uncertainty at the same time we are developing powerful technologies and enormous data sets for analyzing evolution. These tools often yield novel answers, but they can also limit the questions we ask. The French archaeologist Ludovic Slimak, for example, has complained that the idea of the inner Neanderthal has domesticated our image of Neanderthals and made it difficult to imagine their humanity as distinct from our own. Investigating Neanderthal DNA is sexier to many young researchers than searching for archaeological and fossil evidence of how Neanderthals actually lived.
Loosening our attachment to certain narratives of evolution can create space for wonder at the sheer complexity of life’s history. Ultimately, that’s what Chikhi and Tournebize hope to do. After all, they don’t believe the question of population structure versus hybridization is either-or. It’s possible, and even likely, that both played a role in human evolution. “Our structured model does not necessarily mean that no admixture ever took place,” Chikhi and Tournebize wrote in their study. “What our results suggest is that, if admixture ever occurred, it is currently hard to identify using existing methods.”
Future methods might disentangle the different factors, but it’s just as important, Chikhi says, for scientists to be up-front about their assumptions and test alternatives. “There’s still so much uncertainty on so many aspects of the demographic history of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens,” he notes.
Keep that in mind the next time you read about your inner Neanderthal. The association between this DNA and some diseases may be real, of course—but would journals publish these studies without the additional claim that the DNA is from Neanderthals? Any good storyteller knows that sex sells, even in science.
Ben Crair is a science and travel writer based in Berlin.