Wow, this is a pretty striking result for my Strong Epigenetic Theory of Aging: transplant an old heart into a young animal and the heart is rejuvenated. But transplant a young heart into an old animal, and it quickly ages to match the recipient. This shows that biological age is not simply something an organ accumulates locally as irreversible “wear and tear.” Instead, to a large degree, it is a state imposed by the organism-wide environment. The authors saw bidirectional remodeling of both DNA methylation and gene expression, with old hearts in young hosts moving toward youthful programs and young hearts in old hosts moving toward aged ones. That is exactly what you’d expect to see if aging is a regulated, system-level state where the epigenome is acting as the writable control layer that tissues continuously adjust to the organism’s age.

AI is changing medical practice, as @RBMD1982 points out @nytopinion But there are certainly concerns regarding deskilling and never-skilling among younger physicians, trainees, and students (w/@AdamRodmanMD) "Now, the chatbot in my pocket reassures me that I will always know enough, or have access to the cloud-based intelligence that generally does."

Here come the nanoparticles to help treat cancer or get rid of senescent cells, reduce fibrosis @ScienceMagazine @ScienceVisuals

There's been steady progress using organs in a dish—organoids— for medical research. But now there's the immunoid to enhance our understanding of the complex immune system in people, and at the individual level. @CellStemCell .

In people with heart failure compared with healthy controls, the gut microbiome changes and that is linked to severity of heart dysfunction and outcomes @NatureCVR

We're missing out on the value of genomics in medical practice. The cost (not charge) to do a polygenic risk score for all these diseases (Figure) and more is only $20 and they are informative for high-risk (top 5%) across ancestries A new review @NEJM

Patients with refractory cancer seeking treatment with engineered T cells (CAR T) are going to China where the cost is considerably less China $150-300K US $550-800K

AlphaFold: predicting the protein structure from amino acid sequence for >200 million proteins (awarded @NobelPrize) Today Alpha Genome Atlas: predicting the molecular impact of all 9 billion variants of the human genome

The story tying peripheral blood immune cells and neurodegenerative disease gets legs. @ScienceMagazine today a summary of this important report on T cells "beautiful work"

There were recent landmark papers on how blood monocytes replace the microglia in the brain and promote inflammation, increasing risk of Alzheimer’s (AD) Today, this has been reinforced @NatureNeuro by the discovery of dysfunctional bone marrow blood cell production and its effect on the brain "The present study supports the emerging understanding that AD is not solely a brain disease; especially at later stages, it also encompasses a dysfunction of the peripheral immune system."

The clinician's role in the AI medical era "Clinicians cannot, and should not, resist powerful AI technologies if these systems improve the quality of patient care." "We contend that the clinician's enduring role is accountability." [I think the enduring role is well beyond that, but OK] perspective by @andrewparsonsMD and @AdamRodmanMD @AnnalsofIM