Medicine

Featuring three one-on-one conversations, our tenth anniversary closing session is not to be missed! We begin with comedian Iliza Shlesinger, who opens up to bestselling author Kate Bowler about using humor to confront trauma and other health challenges. Then the spotlight moves to Mia McLeoad, an independent, and Penry Gustafson, a Republican, two of the South Carolina Si...

The world has renewed hope that impactful treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias may finally be on the horizon. While previous therapies have modestly improved memory and cognition, none has altered the fundamental biology of the disease. Now, we have clinical trial results from monoclonal antibodies that appear to do just that by removing the amyloid-bet...

When it comes to biomedical research, Earth’s gravity can be an obstacle, making it harder to program stem cells into viable organs, obscuring the crystalline structure of proteins, and interfering with cellular communication channels. The possibility of using space to advance science is no longer an exercise in imagination as biotech start-ups begin sending experiments in...

The belief that the paralyzed will walk and the deaf will hear is a staple of religion, literature, and myth. Now, technology is actually making that happen. Zeen has designed a battery-free mobility device to combine the best functions of a walker and wheelchair. Wristbands created by Neosensory feed sound vibrations directly from the skin to the brain, improving the abil...

Research that can generate transformative, high-impact biomedical and health breakthroughs, from the molecular to the societal, is gaining traction as the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) gets off the ground. Launched by federal legislation in March 2022, ARPA-H will make pivotal investments to stimulate dynamic health solutions that can reshape millio...

Will AI bring in robot doctors? Chat GPT: “Yes, these robots can assist in various healthcare tasks, such as diagnosing illnesses, performing surgeries, or providing personalized care to patients.” How will AI be regulated? Chat GPT: “Regulatory approaches may vary between countries, but the overarching goal is to strike a balance between fostering innovation and safeguard...

For many women reaching middle age, menopause is a liberating signal that the childbearing years have come to an end. But with its characteristic hot flashes and complex effects on memory, sleep, sexual functioning, bones, and mental health, this inevitable part of aging is also marked by physical and emotional challenges. Misinformation, research gaps, cultural myths, and...

Although essential to ensure the safety and effectiveness of new drugs and devices, clinical trials tend to be costly and slow to reach conclusions, and there is often an imbalance in the race, gender, and age of participants. Efforts to reinvigorate the research ecosystem aim to broaden access to trials, increase their diversity, and make it more efficient to capture pro...

Advances in health and medicine no longer rest entirely in the hands of scientists and clinicians. Patients and citizen activists are stepping up to influence research priorities, crowd-source data, and scour arcane medical literature in search of novel experimental approaches. Often, they are motivated by personal experiences, the refusal to accept that a disease lacks tr...

Remarkable screening and diagnostic tools are being developed so that disease can be identified in its earliest stages, when it is most treatable, and disease subtypes can be isolated to accommodate more precise treatment. New technology for testing blood can find cancer long before symptoms appear, a spinal fluid protein appears to be a biomarker for Parkinson’s disease,...

For decades, new therapies were routinely tested only in men, and assumed to work the same way in women. The landmark NIH Revitalization Act, with its requirement that women be included in clinical trials, rang in a new era. But on the law’s 30th anniversary, progress remains incomplete. Research into many conditions that primarily affect women are underfunded, findings ar...

Amazing discoveries are happening in the garages and high school science classes of young pioneers. A 17-year-old invented color-changing stitches, dyed with beet juice, to provide early warning signs of infection. A Time Magazine “Kid of the Year” is building a device to detect contaminants in the water supply and using AI to call out cyberbullying. Another teenager devel...

When voices rise together in song, dancers tango across the floor, or a painter takes to a canvas, they may be engaging in a hobby, a passion, or a career. Most likely, they aren’t thinking about their brain circuitry or the cascading biochemical responses being sparked by their artistic pursuits. But we now have imaging technology and wearable sensors that can capture tha...

Reproductive health, critical though it is, is not the sum of women’s health. The distinctive development of female bodies across the lifespan requires targeted study to uncover the pathways of acute and chronic conditions and the treatments that will control or cure them. Women generally live longer than men, but are at greater risk of osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s disease, a...

More than 14 million Americans live with a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, yet the availability of urgently needed treatment is completely inadequate. In Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health, author Thomas Insel offers a pathway towards wellness built around what he calls the three Ps—people, place, and purpose. A psychi...

No doctor awakens in the morning determined to discriminate against patients of color, yet their daily clinical decisions too often have that result. Implicit bias—unconscious assumptions and stereotypes—often cause the harm. The failure to ask the right questions, listen closely and reserve judgment can sabotage communication in any patient/physician encounter, but it wor...