Scientists at Harvard Medical School have designed a versatile, ChatGPT-like AI model capable of performing an array of diagnostic tasks across multiple forms of cancers. The new AI system, described Sept. 4 in Nature, goes a step beyond many current AI approaches to cancer diagnosis, the researchers said. Current AI systems are typically trained to perform specific tasks - such as detecting cancer presence or predicting a tumor's genetic profile - and they tend to work only in a handful of cancer types.

Stroke patients who survive a blood clot in the brain's blood vessels are prone to developing new blockages during their recovery periods, even if they receive vessel-clearing interventions. In an effort to avoid further clots, doctors at 57 sites around the U.S. tested a possible solution: the addition of anti-coagulant drugs to medicine that dissolves blood clots. But results from the clinical trial, led by Opeolu Adeoye, MD, head of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, indicate two such drugs did not improve outcomes.

Investigators involved in a multicenter study co-led by Cedars-Sinai discovered a pathway by which immune cells prevent the lungs' protective barrier from healing after viral infections like COVID-19. The findings, published in Nature may lead to new therapeutic treatment options. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how viral infections can cause long-lasting effects - a condition called long COVID. Also known as post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, long COVID has left a devastating trail of people who continue to live with long-term debilitation after infection.

Researchers have discovered an antibody able to neutralize all known variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, as well as distantly related SARS-like coronaviruses that infect other animals. As part of a new study on hybrid immunity to the virus, the large, multi-institution research team led by The University of Texas at Austin discovered and isolated a broadly neutralizing plasma antibody, called SC27, from a single patient.

Nowadays, there's lots of buzz about spectacular new medical treatments such as personalised cancer therapy with modified immune cells or antibodies. Such treatments, however, are very complex and expensive and so find only limited application. Most medical therapies are still based on small chemical compounds that can be produced in large quantities and thus at low cost. The bottleneck in the development of new molecular therapies is the limited number of new active substances that can be found using current techniques. A method developed in the 2000s at Harvard and ETH Zurich promises to provide a remedy: DNA-encoded chemical libraries (DEL).