Expertise is all about fixing large 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 establish what drawback on the intersection of expertise and society that they assume we should 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 regularly. There have been loads of outliers, too, starting from regulating social media to preventing corruption. Learn the total checklist to search out out what they stated.
This story is from our most up-to-date print subject of MIT Expertise Overview, which is all about society’s hardest issues, and the way we should always sort out them. If you happen to 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 programs to destroy cancerous cells in stable tumors. Whereas researchers have just 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 far more troublesome.
How they did it: The technicians harvested T cells, which assist the physique combat 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.
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