ChatGPT found that a woman was misdiagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer Her husband used AI to scan her biopsy records and found she actually had an IDH1-mutation, less severe, but still serious

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🧬 China can now print a cancer vaccine in one day. A Shanghai facility uses mRNA and AI to build custom vaccines from a single biopsy. Speed saves lives. Sources: S. China Morning Post, The Straits Times #omgfacts# #CancerResearch# #Biotechnology#

Last month Moderna reported the first individualized cancer vaccine to pass a Phase 3. Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel and a16z's Jorge Conde on what that actually means: The treatment works by sequencing a patient’s tumor and healthy cells, identifying the mutations relevant to their cancer, and encoding up to 34 of them into an mRNA specific to the individual. Rather than simply unleashing the immune system, the goal is to teach it what to recognize and attack. In this conversation, they unpack the engineering challenge of manufacturing a different medicine for every patient, how Moderna has brought the process down to roughly 42 days from biopsy to treatment, and what it would take to manufacture personalized medicines at scale. 00:00 Intro 02:35 A Phase 3 that beat the standard of care 06:00 Why today's immunotherapy fails 40% of patients 09:35 A vaccine for cancer you already have 11:20 Why mRNA worked where 1,000 trials failed 13:15 90% of cancer antigens are unique to you 16:35 Why this vaccine only gets better from here 21:00 The only thing Moderna needs is your DNA sequence 22:20 Why the first robot was intentionally inefficient 27:10 How the FDA approves a drug that's different every time 33:05 A cancer treatment with the side effects of a flu shot 33:30 Why pancreatic cancer is worth a risk 36:30 Rare liver disease next, then autoimmune YouTube: @moderna_tx @JorgeCondeBio

🔥A BITCOIN BEAR MARKET MOLDS YOU INTO SOMETHING THE BULL MARKET CROWD WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND🔥 You earn it at 2:17 AM when the house is silent, your phone brightness is at 8%, and you’re staring at another red candle while reheating coffee you made six hours ago. Glory gets forged when Bitcoin drops another 11% during the exact week your car needs tires, the property tax bill hits, and some guy with a laser-eye profile picture announces he “sold months ago” like he personally escaped Saigon. Your conviction gets tested while you’re standing in the grocery aisle mentally converting a $7 box of cereal into sats. It hardens when your wife asks how Bitcoin is doing, you make a weird little face, and she immediately says “oh” before returning to whatever normal people do with their evenings. You survive the months where opening TradingView feels like checking the results of a biopsy. Another Sunday night arrives. Asia opens. Bitcoin instantly gets punched in the throat for reasons apparently known only to God, a Singaporean market maker, and one 24-year-old quant living inside an office chair. You keep stacking. You learn the exact sound your refrigerator makes at midnight because you’ve spent enough nights sitting at the kitchen table reading miner capitulation data while the entire civilized world sleeps. Eventually the fear burns away. The number on the screen stops controlling your heartbeat, red candles become inventory, and every smug victory lap from tourists sounds like somebody bragging about leaving the gym halfway through the workout. THAT is what the bear market gives you. It strips away the dopamine addict, the tourist, the leverage goblin, the guy who thought generational wealth would arrive before his DoorDash order. What remains is a Bitcoiner with scar tissue. Then the cycle turns. Liquidity returns, the candles go vertical, your group chats resurrect from the dead, and suddenly everyone who called you insane wants to know whether “it’s too late to buy.” That moment feels different when you lived through the basement. You remember the ugly mornings. You recall buying while your portfolio looked like a crime scene and you remember every time the market tried to humiliate you out of your coins. And now you get to watch the same asset everybody buried rip through price levels they once called impossible. THAT GLORY IS EARNED. The bull market pays you. The bear market BUILDS the person capable of holding long enough to collect. The TIME to WIN is NOW. $BTC

After Kiley was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, doctors told her she might have only months to live. At 18, she wrote a will, chose a casket, and began living scan to scan. But, over the next five years, she kept on living, defying expectations. Her scans stayed stable. Why? How? After a recent MRI, her husband @ColeLemasters used ChatGPT to help make sense of the dense language in her radiology report. That conversation led him back to Kiley’s original biopsy records, where ChatGPT helped surface a crucial detail: an IDH1 mutation. In partnership with her neuro-oncologist, he then confirmed what that meant. Under updated medical standards, Kiley’s tumor was not glioblastoma, but an IDH-mutant astrocytoma: still serious, but with a very different prognosis. Instead of bracing for the worst, Kiley and her doctors began focusing her treatment plan on long-term care. Now, after years of uncertainty, she and Cole are planning for a future.

I'm a cardiologist. Curcumin may be one of the most legitimately promising anti-inflammatory compounds available — and the exact form that works best is the one with documented cases of liver injury. That tension is the whole story, and almost nobody tells it honestly. Let me give you both halves. First, why the form matters more than the compound. Standard turmeric and cheap curcumin are almost pharmacologically useless. Absorption is dismal, the liver metabolizes it within minutes, and blood levels barely register. Most people taking turmeric capsules are essentially taking an expensive yellow placebo. Phytosomal curcumin — curcumin bound to phospholipids, the best-studied being Meriva — changes that completely. A randomized crossover trial in the Journal of Natural Products found 29-fold higher total absorption compared to standard curcuminoids. That single fact explains why decades of curcumin research looked underwhelming. We were testing a molecule that never reached the bloodstream. What the absorbed form actually does. It works upstream, at the genetic level, by downregulating NF-κB — the master switch controlling inflammatory gene expression. Downstream of that: reduced TNF-alpha, IL-6, and COX-2. TNF-alpha is the one I find most interesting. It's a central driver of "inflammaging" — the chronic low-grade inflammation that accelerates biological aging. It's the same target as the TNF-inhibitor drugs used in rheumatoid arthritis, which observational data has linked to substantially lower Alzheimer's risk. Lowering TNF-alpha through a supplement is not the same as a biologic drug. But the pathway is real, and it's the right pathway. The human evidence that impressed me most. This isn't cell culture. In a multicenter randomized trial, 52 biopsy-proven MASH patients received Meriva 2g/day or placebo for 72 weeks. Biopsy-proven. Seventy-two weeks. That's a serious trial design for a supplement. Additional randomized trials in NAFLD have shown reductions in ALT, AST, cholesterol, triglycerides, waist circumference, and liver volume. As a cardiologist, that matters — fatty liver and cardiovascular disease share the same metabolic root, and ALT is one of the most underread markers on a standard panel. Now the part the enthusiasts leave out. The NIH's LiverTox database documents several dozen cases of clinically apparent acute liver injury attributed to turmeric products — and it specifically implicates the high-bioavailability forms. There was an outbreak of acute hepatitis with jaundice in Italy traced to enhanced-absorption curcumin. Sit with the irony: the reason these formulations work is the same reason they can hurt you. You made a poorly absorbed compound highly absorbed. You did not merely increase the benefit. You increased the dose the liver actually sees. A genetic susceptibility has been identified — an HLA variant that appears to predispose certain people. Most will never have a problem. Some will. And a note on piperine. Many products add black pepper extract to boost absorption. It works — by inhibiting the liver enzymes that clear the compound. That same mechanism affects how your liver clears your other medications. If you take anything metabolized hepatically, this matters. Meriva achieves its absorption through phospholipids rather than enzyme blockade, which is one argument in its favor. So where do I land? This is one of the few natural compounds with genuine randomized human data hitting a mechanism that matters. I take it seriously. But treat it like a drug, because pharmacologically that is what an enhanced-absorption formulation is. Get a baseline ALT and AST before starting, and recheck at 8-12 weeks. That single step converts an unmonitored risk into a managed one, and virtually nobody does it. Skip it entirely if you have existing liver disease, gallbladder disease, or bile duct obstruction. Curcumin stimulates gallbladder contraction and can worsen biliary colic. Be cautious if you're on blood thinners — it has antiplatelet effects. And stop immediately for dark urine, yellowing eyes, right upper quadrant pain, or unexplained fatigue. The lesson underneath this is bigger than curcumin. We've been trained to believe "natural" means "safe," so we skip the monitoring we'd never skip with a prescription. But a supplement engineered for 29-fold absorption isn't a spice anymore. It's pharmacology in a capsule with no oversight. The compound may genuinely help you. Just check your liver while it does.

POST 1 — DANCING WITH THE STORM (Things My Patients Taught Me — 1 of 20) The first time I met Lily, she was dancing with her IV pole at dawn. It was just past six in the morning. The pediatric oncology ward was silent except for the beep of monitors and the whisper of small bare feet against the floor. She couldn't have been more than six years old. Her head was smooth as an egg, stripped bare by chemotherapy — but crowned with a determination no medicine could touch. She wore a hospital gown covered in dinosaurs and a tutu the color of cotton candy, clearly smuggled in from the world outside those sterile walls. One hand gripped the metal pole dripping medicine into her veins. The other arched over her head in a wobbly, defiant ballet pose. I stood frozen in the doorway, thirty years of medical training suddenly weightless in my hands. Nobody had ever told me that cancer and courage could dance together at sunrise. "You're new," she said, noticing me without breaking her concentration. Her eyes were enormous in her hollowed-out face. "I'm Lily. I have leukemia." "I'm Dr. Taylor," I said, kneeling to meet her. "And I love your dancing." She attempted another turn, the IV line twisting around the pole. "Ballet class is on Tuesdays. But I'm always here on Tuesdays now. So I practice by myself." A shadow crossed her face as she touched her bare scalp. "I used to have hair for ballet. Long, like Rapunzel." "I think ballerinas come in all styles," I offered. "Including with no hair." She considered this like a tiny philosopher. Then she pointed to the IV pole. "This is Fred. And this—" she touched the line disappearing under her gown "—is Ginger. Because they're dancing with me." She leaned in, conspirator to conspirator. "If the medicine is my friend, it doesn't feel so scary." Her smile bloomed — then crumpled as a wave of nausea hit. I grabbed the pink basin just in time. She retched, her tiny frame convulsing with an illness far too big for it to hold. When it passed, she looked up at me, embarrassed. "Sorry." "Never apologize for being sick, Lily. That's what hospitals are for." Over the next nine months, I watched this child endure things that would break grown adults. During her first bone marrow biopsy — a needle driven into the hip bone, excruciating even with sedation — I held her hand while the tears ran down her face. "Think of something beautiful," I whispered. "Swan Lake," she gasped through gritted teeth. "I'm dancing in Swan Lake." Afterward, I locked myself in a supply closet and wept. I nearly transferred out of pediatrics. I didn't think I could bear it. Then came the storm. One afternoon, thunder rattled the windows and lightning tore the sky open. The other children were frightened. Not Lily. She pressed her face to the glass, transfixed. "It's like the whole world is getting better," she said. I asked what she meant. "My dad says storms clean everything. They wash away all the yucky stuff so new things can grow." She turned to me, eyes blazing with conviction. "Like my medicine. It feels bad now. But it's cleaning out the bad cells so the good ones can grow." I stood there, humbled to my core by a six-year-old. She had grasped something most adults never do — that growth sometimes requires the storm. That what feels like destruction is often just the beginning of renewal. Then she said the thing I've carried for the rest of my career: "Sometimes, when it hurts too much, I make the music in my head louder than the hurt." Two months later, her final biopsy came back clean. Remission. The whole nursing staff lined the hallway and applauded as she left in her tutu, a soft fuzz of new hair on her scalp. Ten years later, a card arrived in the mail. Inside was a photograph of a teenager on pointe shoes, arms forming a perfect oval above her head, long chestnut hair swept into a bun. The note read: Still dancing. Still cancer-free. Thank you for helping me dance through the storm. That photo has sat on my desk ever since. Lily taught me that joy can coexist with suffering — and that hope sometimes pirouettes on bare feet down a sterile hospital hallway. On my hardest days, when the weight of this work feels like too much, I still hear a six-year-old's voice: Make the music louder than the hurt. And somehow, I find the strength to keep going. Who's the youngest person who ever taught you something you'll never forget? Tell me below. 👇 And follow along — one patient, one lesson, every day.

A parasitic infection can sometimes produce symptoms that resemble a brain tumour. A 60 year old man in Spain sought medical attention after about two weeks of persistent headaches along with mild changes in behaviour. Initial brain imaging showed several lesions throughout the brain, which raised concern for possible metastatic cancer. However, further investigations including scans of the rest of the body, and additional tests did not reveal any primary tumour. Because the cause remained unclear, doctors carried out a high resolution MRI scan. This revealed multiple fluid filled cysts in the brain containing larvae of Taenia solium, the pork tapeworm. The condition is known as neurocysticercosis. It occurs when a person accidentally ingests tapeworm eggs, usually through food or water contaminated with human faecal matter. This is different from eating pork containing adult tapeworms. After ingestion, the eggs hatch, the larvae enter the bloodstream, and in rare cases they reach the brain where they form cysts. The MRI findings showed these cysts clearly enough for doctors to identify the larvae within them. Once the true cause was discovered, an invasive brain biopsy was avoided. The man was treated with antiparasitic medication and made a full recovery without complications. What made the case unusual was that he had never travelled outside Spain, where this infection is rare. Doctors believe exposure may have occurred years earlier through indirect contact with someone from an area where the parasite is more common. “Autochthonous Neurocysticercosis Brain Lesions Mimicking Metastatic Disease, Spain” Emerging Infectious Diseases