Expertise is all about fixing huge thorny issues, but one of many hardest issues is figuring out the place to focus our efforts. There are such a lot of pressing points going through the world. The place ought to we even start?
We requested dozens of individuals to determine what downside on the intersection of know-how and society that they suppose we must always focus extra of our vitality on. We queried scientists, journalists, politicians, entrepreneurs, activists, and CEOs.
Some broad themes emerged: the local weather disaster, international well being, making a simply and equitable society, and AI all got here up often. There have been loads of outliers, too, starting from regulating social media to combating corruption. Learn the complete record to seek out out what they mentioned.
This story is from our most up-to-date print difficulty of MIT Expertise Assessment, which is all about society’s hardest issues, and the way we must always sort out them. For those who don’t subscribe already, join now to get future points once they land.
Innovative new cell therapies might lastly get at tough-to-target cancers
The information: A biotech firm is making headway in leveraging sufferers’ personal immune methods to destroy cancerous cells in stable tumors. Whereas researchers have lately had success in treating some hard-to-treat blood cancers with engineered T cells, stable tumors, which make up the overwhelming majority of most cancers diagnoses, have proved rather more tough.
How they did it: The technicians harvested T cells, which assist the physique battle infections, from a affected person’s blood, earlier than genetically engineering the cells to hold a receptor known as a chimeric antigen receptor, or CAR, which may bind to a protein on the floor of the most cancers cell. Subsequent they develop these engineered cells within the lab, then reinfuse them again into the physique. When the cells encounter the protein they’re designed to acknowledge, they activate and begin destroying the most cancers cells.