Radically different
DETROIT — Two scientists at a U.S. government lab were charged with smuggling vials of deactivated mpox virus into the country from Africa and lying about it during interviews with investigators at a Michigan airport, authorities said Tuesday.
A criminal complaint was unsealed in federal court in Detroit against Vincent Munster, who is chief of the virus ecology section at Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, and Claude Kwe, who works with him as a research fellow.
by Dr. Christine Conelea and Dr. Adrienne Manbeck
Tics, compulsions, and obsessions are part of many people’s everyday lives. As clinicians and researchers at the University of Minnesota Tic and Compulsivity Lab (MnTiC), we see people living with different, unique combinations of these symptoms that can feel interconnected. There are some broad differences between tics, obsessions, and compulsions, but it’s important to note that they do overlap and that a person can have all of these things at the same time. Still, disentangling symptoms in order to provide effective treatment can sometimes be challenging.
Tics and compulsions are similar in that they both involve movements that are repetitive and difficult for the person to control. Research has shown that overlapping genetic, neurological, and psychological factors contribute to both experiences. Because of this, researchers and clinicians consider both tics and compulsions to be on the “obsessive-compulsive spectrum.” However, there are important differences in treatment and in how loved ones can provide support.
Behaviors
Tics are sudden, repetitive, involuntary movements or sounds that are usually very brief. Common tics include rapid or hard eye blinking, facial scrunching, throat clearing or sniffing. In our studies, we have found that people with tics have an average of 8 tics per minute.
Many individuals with tics experience an urge right before they tic. This urge can feel like tension, an itch or pressure that typically goes away after the tic occurs. Tics tend to wax and wane over time. Compulsions are often more rule bound or rigid and are driven by a thought. Common compulsions include checking, counting, washing and reordering. They tend to be longer, smooth movements or sequences of movements. They’re linked to very specific situations, triggers, or thoughts to prevent something bad from happening or to relieve anxiety.
Why Treatments Differ
Although tic disorders and OCD sometimes look similar on the surface (repetitive movements can occur in both), they are different disorders. Subjectively speaking, tics can feel like a “body itch” while compulsions might feel like a “brain itch.” Though they may be very connected for some people, what works for one won’t necessarily work for the other.
In general, we often take a less interventionist approach to tic disorders because tics may not be inherently harmful. On the other hand, because compulsions work to reinforce obsessive thoughts and provide escape from non-harmful but unpleasant feelings, we often intervene with OCD as soon as possible. As clinicians working with children and teens, we want to help kids learn to be brave, learn that they can tolerate distress associated with anxiety, and learn that OCD doesn’t get to make their decisions for them.
Watchful Waiting
In general, OCD will not get better on its own. If a parent notices symptoms associated with distress or impairment, taking action of some kind is often the best approach. If tics aren’t causing problems for a child, it might be best to monitor. If tics become painful, start to bother your child, or in some other way cause harm, that might be the time to pursue treatment. The American Academy of Neurology refers to this as “watchful waiting” and sees it as an appropriate treatment, in some cases, for tics.
Tips for Providing Support
People with tic disorders face high stigma and discrimination compared to the general population. Tics are often hyper-visible and poorly understood. For OCD, stigma is more likely to emerge from public messaging rather than hypervisibility. The general public talks about OCD in a highly stereotyped way that misses a lot of people’s actual experiences with OCD and can trivialize symptoms.
For both OCD and tic disorders, parents can help support their child by collaboratively developing a reward structure for hard work in therapy.
For tic disorders, research has shown that situational factors have an important role in influencing tics, including what a person is doing, who is around them, and how they are feeling. Most people can identify situational factors that make their tics better or worse. Some factors frequently associated with tic exacerbation are fatigue, social events, and starting school in the fall. Stress, frustration, or anxiety-provoking events can make it harder for the brain to inhibit tics. Events frequently reported to coincide with tic reductions include social interactions with familiar people, situations in which the individual is a passive participant or deeply focused on a task, and leisure activities.
Because tics are so reactive to situational factors, one of the best ways to provide support is to create tic-neutral environments. This means eliminating intended or unintended consequences related to the tics, such as minimizing reactions to tics or changes to activities because of tics. We frame this as, “focusing on the person instead of the tics.” Tic neutrality can also help children feel better about tics since they can’t control them.
For OCD, minimizing parent accommodation, parents helping kids avoid anxiety-provoking things, can be helpful. Parents can help their kids by reducing accomodation and encouraging their children to be brave and face their fears in manageable, developmentally-appropriate ways.
About the Authors:
Christine Conelea, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the University of Minnesota, a licensed clinical psychologist, and the director of the MnTiC Lab. Dr. Conelea’s research interests include Tourette Syndrome/tic disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and anxiety disorders. She is particularly interested in understanding how the brain, environment, and psychosocial factors interact to impact symptoms and treatment outcomes.
Adrienne Manbeck, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow in the MnTiC Lab. Dr. Manbeck earned her doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of Minnesota and completed her pre-doctoral internship at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, PA. Dr. Manbeck’s research aims to better understand the development, maintenance, and treatment of OCD and anxiety disorders across the lifespan, with a particular emphasis on the impact of societal stressors on these disorders, including the ways in which societal stressors impact symptom severity, access to high-quality treatment, and impact of treatment on symptoms.
More Reading:
Micali, N., Heyman, I., Perez, M., Hilton, K., Nakatani, E., Turner, C., & Mataix-Cols, D. (2010). Long-term outcomes of obsessive–compulsive disorder: Follow-up of 142 children and adolescents. British Journal of Psychiatry, 197(2), 128–134.
Conelea, C.A., Woods, D.W., Zinner, S.H. et al. The Impact of Tourette Syndrome in Adults: Results from the Tourette Syndrome Impact Survey. Community Ment Health J 49, 110–120 (2013).
Tourette Association of America Tourette Awareness Month resources
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The post Tics and OCD: Why Treatments Differ and Ways to Support Your Kids appeared first on International OCD Foundation.
A new study published in Cell Reports titled, “Kinase condensates enrich ATP and trigger autophosphorylation,” suggests that cellular phase separation, a mechanism that organizes biomolecules into dense, liquid-like condensates, may play a previously underappreciated role in regulating kinase activity. The findings suggest that aberrant condensate formation could contribute to oncogenic signaling while also offering new opportunities for drug targeting.
“Many biological molecules have this propensity to spontaneously separate,” said Lindsay Case, PhD, assistant professor of biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and corresponding author of the study. “We were really interested in asking, if we have these kinases forming droplets, what is the consequence of that in the context of signaling?”
Phase separation occurs when proteins condense into highly concentrated liquid-like droplets within cells, analogous to oil droplets separating from vinegar. Although biomolecular condensates have emerged as important organizers of cellular processes, their impact on kinase signaling has remained incompletely understood.
The researchers examined three kinases: focal adhesion kinase (FAK), Mst2, and Abl. Across all three systems, condensate formation increased kinase activity by concentrating enzymes and substrates, thereby promoting phosphorylation reactions.
For FAK, the team found that elevated protein levels were sufficient to drive droplet formation and activate downstream growth signaling. The findings raise the possibility that FAK overexpression in tumors could promote constitutive signaling through condensate formation, potentially contributing to cancer progression and metastasis.
“It was surprising that just by condensing this protein into a droplet, you can actually turn on a signaling pathway that should be turned off,” said Case. “If FAK concentration is too high, you’re always getting these droplets and you’re always signaling, regardless of what the receptors that are supposed to be controlling this are doing.”
Mst2 and Abl also phase separated at high concentrations, which led to increased activity. For Mst2, phase separation is a strategy that healthy cells use to control the Hippo signaling pathway, which promotes cell growth and survival. Phase separation can also lead both enzymes to phosphorylate additional targets, and activate different signaling pathways.
“It’s not just that you’re getting faster phosphorylation, but in those cases, the patterns of what is actually getting phosphorylated were very different inside of the droplet compared to what might be happening in a non-droplet context,” Case says. “The kinase is able to phosphorylate amino acid residues beyond the set of canonical sites that have been described before.”
Mechanistically, the team found that kinase condensates selectively concentrate ATP, the phosphate donor required for kinase activity. Positively charged regions within kinases appear to recruit negatively charged ATP molecules to support phosphorylation.
Using machine-learning analysis, the investigators predicted that approximately 45% of the roughly 500 human kinases possess the molecular features needed to form similar condensates. The findings suggest that phase separation may represent a widespread regulatory mechanism that could influence both normal cellular signaling and disease-associated kinase activity.
In future work, Case hopes to explore designing drugs that could mimic ATP’s ability to be attracted into droplets within a cell, which could reduce side effects.
The post Kinase Droplets Activate Growth Signals, Path for Cancer Therapy appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
Rise and shine, everyone, another busy day is on the way. And it is getting off to a pleasant start here on the Pharmalot campus, where clear blue skies and comfy breezes are greeting us. Who could ask for anything more? Actually, we could — it is time to reheat the kettle for another cuppa stimulation. Our choice today is old-fashioned green tea. And here is a helpful tip — a teaspoon of honey enhances the flavors splendidly. Of course, you are invited to join us. For the full experience, we are now hawking replicas — take a look. Meanwhile, here are a few tidbits to help you along. As always, do keep in touch. We appreciate feedback, criticism, and tips….
Eli Lilly has told about 50 hospitals participating in a federal drug discount program to submit comprehensive claims data over the next five days or they will no longer receive the mandated price breaks, STAT writes. The move comes after the company announced a policy last January demanding such data in a bid to reduce what it calls duplicate discounts paid to participating hospitals. For the past few years, more than 2,300 hospitals have complied with the demand, but Lilly said that some of the larger hospitals systems around the U.S. have refused to do so, despite recent follow-up letters regarding the policy that went into effect on Feb. 1. Up to 1,000 have so far not complied.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is scheduled to have a closed-door roundtable this week with over a dozen groups advocating for rare disease treatments, Bloomberg Law reports. The meeting, scheduled for Wednesday, will connect FDA Acting Commissioner Kyle Diamantas and other senior agency officials with at least 10 rare disease groups for a private conversation about advancing treatments that often struggle to meet the agency’s rigorous approval process. The meeting comes as the rare disease community has sought more clarity from regulators amid turmoil over recent decisions for rare drugs. Under former Commissioner Marty Makary, who resigned last month, several initial rejections were issued to companies seeking to market rare disease drugs and gene therapies.
Nature Medicine, Published online: 02 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04407-5
Between 2020 and 2023, in Massachusetts, receiving medically tailored meals was associated with reductions in hospitalizations and emergency department visits and lower healthcare costs.
The rapid rise of GLP-1 receptor agonists has transformed the treatment of obesity and type 2 diabetes. Now, a large observational study suggests these drugs may also play a role in cancer prevention.
Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine reported that women taking GLP-1 medications were significantly less likely to develop breast cancer than comparable women who did not receive the drugs. The findings, presented at the 2026 American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting and simultaneously published in JCO Oncology Practice, add to a growing body of evidence linking GLP-1 therapy to reduced cancer risk.
While the study cannot establish causation, investigators say the results provide a strong rationale for prospective clinical trials evaluating whether GLP-1 drugs could become part of future breast cancer prevention strategies.
GLP-1 receptor agonists were originally developed to improve blood glucose control in patients with type 2 diabetes. More recently, agents such as semaglutide and tirzepatide have become widely used for weight management because of their ability to produce substantial and sustained weight loss.
Interest in the drugs has expanded beyond metabolic disease as researchers have begun exploring their broader biological effects. Obesity is a well-established risk factor for postmenopausal breast cancer, and GLP-1 therapies influence several pathways implicated in cancer development, including chronic inflammation, insulin signaling, and metabolic regulation.
“While our study was observational and does not definitively confirm an association between GLP-1 medications and reduced breast cancer incidence, it does add to the growing body of evidence suggesting that it’s worth investigating these weight-loss drugs as potential cancer prevention tools,” said Elizabeth McDonald, MD, PhD, professor of radiology at Penn Medicine and lead investigator of the study.
The researchers analyzed electronic health records from women who underwent breast imaging at Penn Medicine between January 2022 and June 2025.
The primary analysis included nearly 95,000 women between the ages of 45 and 80 who had a body mass index above 25, placing them in the overweight or obesity categories. Approximately 15,000 women had documented exposure to a GLP-1 medication before breast imaging, while nearly 80,000 had no recorded use of the drugs.
Breast cancer was diagnosed in 1.65% of women who had received a GLP-1 prescription compared with 2.6% of women who had not.
After statistical analysis, GLP-1 use was associated with a 37% reduction in the odds of developing breast cancer.
To address potential confounding factors, investigators also performed a propensity-matched analysis pairing GLP-1 users and non-users based on age, race, ethnicity, body mass index, breast density, and diabetes status.
The association remained significant in the matched cohort, where GLP-1 exposure was linked to approximately 25% lower odds of breast cancer diagnosis.
“These findings support the need for prospective trials investigating incretin medications for breast cancer prevention,” the authors concluded in their ASCO abstract.
The biological explanation remains uncertain, but several plausible mechanisms exist.
Weight loss itself is likely an important contributor. Excess adipose tissue promotes inflammation, alters hormone levels, and creates a metabolic environment associated with increased breast cancer risk, particularly after menopause.
However, researchers suspect the benefits may extend beyond weight reduction alone.
GLP-1 receptor agonists have been shown to reduce systemic inflammation, improve insulin sensitivity, and influence metabolic pathways that may contribute to tumor initiation and growth. Emerging laboratory studies have also suggested potential effects on cellular signaling and epigenetic regulation.
“GLP-1 medications are intriguing from a cancer research perspective because they weren’t designed for cancer therapy, but they do affect many different targets and pathways associated with cancer development, so we’re eager to study them in this context,” McDonald said.
The findings arrive at a time when breast cancer prevention options remain limited.
For women at very high genetic risk, preventive mastectomy can dramatically reduce cancer incidence but is an irreversible surgical intervention. Anti-estrogen therapies such as tamoxifen can also reduce risk substantially, yet uptake has historically been low because of concerns about side effects.
In contrast, GLP-1 medications are already being used by millions of patients worldwide and have established safety profiles in obesity and diabetes management.
If future prospective studies confirm a protective effect, these agents could potentially represent a new category of pharmacologic prevention for women at elevated breast cancer risk.
Researchers at Penn are already planning a multisite clinical trial that will evaluate whether GLP-1 therapy can reduce breast cancer incidence among high-risk women, including breast cancer survivors.
Despite the encouraging findings, the study has several limitations typical of retrospective analyses.
The investigators did not evaluate individual GLP-1 agents, duration of treatment, genetic predisposition, breast cancer subtype, or stage at diagnosis. Residual confounding also remains possible despite matching analyses.
Because the study was observational, it cannot determine whether GLP-1 therapy directly lowers breast cancer risk or whether other factors associated with medication use contributed to the observed differences.
Nevertheless, the consistency of the signal across multiple analyses strengthens the case for prospective investigation.
“Ultimately, we want to find better options to prevent breast cancer,” McDonald said. “It’s been encouraging to see the survival rates for breast cancer improve over recent decades, and we’d love to see the same gains in prevention.”
As GLP-1 therapies continue to reshape obesity treatment, researchers are increasingly asking whether their benefits extend far beyond weight management. This study suggests breast cancer prevention may be one of the most important questions to answer next.
The post GLP-1 Weight Loss Drugs Linked to Lower Breast Cancer Risk appeared first on Inside Precision Medicine.
The global health care sector is under increasing strain.
Decades of chronic underinvestment and constraints in recruitment have coincided with a surge in demand for services for aging populations. Gaps in provision are already taking a toll, with fragmented access to care and high rates of stress and burnout among staff. And it’s getting worse. The World Health Organization has warned that current shortfalls will increase to 11 million workers by 2030.
In their urgent hunt for a solution, many health-care providers are now pinning their hopes on agentic AI, with more than two-thirds (68%) having already adopted AI agents into their workforce, according to KPMG.
The technology is being deployed to automate complex back-office processes, collaborate with medical teams, and even triage patients, all in a bid to reduce the cognitive load on clinicians and improve quality of care for patients as the supply of human health-care workers dwindles.
Until now, the benefits of digitalization within health care have been limited.
Many staff have blamed slow or outdated technology for adding to the administrative burden rather than alleviating it. For example, U.S. patient data was migrated to electronic health records (EHRs) in the early 2000s, but this data remains fragmented and reliant on manual inputs.
New telehealth services and digital care tools, like remote monitors, have had similar shortcomings, says Ashis Barad, MD, chief digital and technology officer at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), an academic medical center in New York that focuses on musculoskeletal health. Both technologies have helped improve access to health care by removing geographical barriers, he says, but they’ve failed to replicate the quality of in-person care or win trust from patients.
Agentic AI is different from these existing technologies, he insists.
Rather than relying on manual inputs or defaulting to human workers for any case that sits slightly outside a rigid framework, AI agents can handle nuanced, complex scenarios. They can make autonomous decisions, retrieve information from expert clinical sources, and iterate over time, freeing clinicians to focus on higher-level patient care. As Dr. Barad puts it: “Agentic AI takes your workflow and collapses it, augments it, supercharges it, and makes it more performant.”
At HSS, AI agents have already been deployed in multiple areas. They handle complex backend processes, such as insurance claims that previously took several weeks to complete and involved both HSS staff and a third-party contractor to handle the volume. Now, says Dr. Barad, AI agents complete 1,100 claims per month. They’ve reduced the appeals stage from 45 minutes to five and improved the success rate of those appeals from 65% to 100% in the nine months since implementation. HSS now handles all claims in-house.
Building on that success, HSS is now deploying AI agents in non-clinical patient-facing settings with an AI scheduling and triage service, as part of a collaboration with enterprise agentic AI developer Ema Unlimited. The service is accessible 24/7 via web, text, or phone. It uses conversational AI to ask patients clarifying questions about their condition and then books appointments with the most appropriate clinician, factoring in location, insurance coverage, and physician availability. “It completes the whole loop,” says Dr. Barad. The AI agent is trained on “all of our context, all of our rules, and all of our knowledge base,” he adds, providing patients with streamlined access to highly specialist knowledge from world-leading surgeons.
Given the high-stakes decisions delegated to AI agents, the triage service has built-in safeguards—sensitive, complex, or uncertain scenarios are escalated to human specialists. Every decision made by the AI agent is auditable and human staff can step in at any point. Patient data is kept secure and the system is trained on all HSS protocols, policies, and care pathways. By keeping humans in the loop, Ema says its technology strikes the balance between efficient automation, patient-first safety, and human-informed decision making.
As the technology becomes more prolific, it will be incumbent on providers to ensure they have these sorts of guardrails embedded into systems, says Dr. Barad. At HSS all decisions around the technology are filtered through an AI subcommittee that Dr. Barad co-chairs alongside a senior nursing executive. AI agents that may touch on patient care will be scrutinized with far more rigor than, say, backend processes, he explains.
For example, Dr. Barad has plans to create a dedicated AI lab at the HSS main campus in New York City—a move that aims to democratize access to the technology across the organization. It will be open to all staff looking to understand or build AI agents, he explains, with informative classes and one-on-one training. “We’re getting agentic AI into everybody’s hands,” he says. This echoes research by Deloitte, which found that leading agentic AI adopters in health care were far more likely to have opted for multiagent solutions, redesigning end-to-end workflows rather than sticking to narrow solutions or individual use cases.
The key, it appears, is to integrate AI agents across the entire enterprise, treating them as a general-purpose technology. As Dr. Barad puts it: “It’s wrong to think of agentic AI in use cases… It’s a general-purpose technology, analogous to electricity.”
In practice, this means health-care providers need to set the right foundation to achieve value with agentic AI. This includes creating a unified data strategy, one that integrates fragmented data sources across an organization to create a single, comprehensive source of truth. In health care, data is often split across multiple departments and providers, each with their own legacy IT system.
In systems that rely on fragmented data sources, metrics often lack standardized definitions too. For example, Dr. Barad says that each hospital he’s worked in has had a slightly different definition for “time to start surgery,” a metric commonly used to gauge operating room efficiency. This level of fragmentation impedes AI agents from retrieving information from different sources or applications and assimilating the tacit knowledge that differentiates them from other technologies.
By creating greater interoperability of data at HSS, patient-facing AI agents can draw from a patient’s clinical care history and existing recommendations from their clinician, combine this information with current symptoms, and decide whether a situation requires escalation before notifying the correct specialist and informing the patient.
For Dr. Barad, the potential for AI agents to overhaul health care and alleviate the current pressures on resources, access, and patient care is huge.
He envisions a future in which 90% of non-clinical health-care tasks could be administered by AI agents, freeing clinicians up for what he calls white-glove work, meaning the most complex, specialized, and sensitive cases.
Most health-care providers seem equally optimistic. According to research by KPMG, 84% of providers are already comfortable handing decision making about specific processes over to AI agents.
“We’re spending so much time on keyboards and computers right now that we’re actually not doing what we should be doing,” says Dr. Barad. “This is going to rehumanize health care.”
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.
