1. Claude’s New Gig?
After conquering code and PPT slides, Anthropic now sets its sights on drug discovery. The company released Claude Science for researchers and announced its own development efforts in rare diseases. Fast Company reports live from the demo:
Seemingly every discussion about how AI might radically improve human life quickly turns to the possibility of it curing cancer. … But I came away from Anthropic’s event resolving not to fixate on one or two big, audacious medical goals when thinking about AI and science. If all we get are hundreds or thousands of smaller, more quickly achievable advances, that’s hardly reason to conclude that AI’s promise turned out to be overblown.
But the author’s #1 takeaway? “Claude Science Looks Cool.” (Elsewhere, WSJ on why pharma AI won’t meet Wall Street’s timeline.)
2. Oncology’s New Era?
A new drug for pancreatic cancer brought a ballroom full of researchers to their feet. Stacy Wentworth, author of the Cancer Culture Substack, says why the result “matters beyond a single drug or a single disease”:
Daraxonrasib is not a map. It is a key that, once placed in the lock, leads to cancer cell death. … The old dream of the magic bullet is being remade into something less romantic and more real: not one miraculous cure, but carefully designed treatments matched to the biology of a particular cancer in a particular patient.
3. Nature on TikTok
“The future of fact-based communication is at stake,” declares Nature, on what the rise of TikTok and other platforms mean for those who produce, vet, share, and read research. As misinformation rises, the respected journal is stepping into the fray:
More researchers and science communicators, those who have the knowledge and skills to convey science in line with research integrity principles, need to be on these platforms. As our News feature shows, many scientists are. Nature has a well-established presence on Instagram and YouTube; a few months ago, we also joined TikTok.
Short videos have their strengths and limitations…But done well, narrative storytelling, infographics, animation and video are all incredibly compelling and popular ways to engage people with science.
4. Tick Talk
Ticks are spreading more diseases to new areas, driven by climate change and other shifts. The most mysterious may be “alpha-gal” syndrome, which among other symptoms, makes people allergic to burgers. (Seriously). The New Yorker story will make your skin crawl:
Alpha-gal syndrome was an epidemiological novelty at first—an oft-told tale of far-flung scientists, baffling symptoms, and bloodthirsty ticks. Then it began to spread. The syndrome has now infected people in more than thirty countries on six continents. It can be found in Germany’s Black Forest and on small farms in South Africa, in the rain forests of Peru and the mountains of western Japan.
5. On The Clock
If you like organ clocks, you’re going to love cell clocks. That’s the message from Eric Topol, who breaks down how cell aging varies and what it means for how we understand, predict, and address disease:
Frankly, I would not have expected we could track aging for different cell types, like brain astrocytes or microglia, from the proteins appearing in the blood. But that is what is now possible.
Over 40 cell types were assessed in over 60,000 individuals with over 7,000 proteins biological aging. A compelling pattern was seen for many conditions, [such as] brain astrocytes and the risk of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). People with accelerated aging (“old”) of these cells had a 12.6 fold higher rate of developing AD compared with slow (“young”) aging of astrocytes.