Two robots that look roughly like people just reached inside a live animal and removed an organ. No film studio staged the scene. It happened in a lab in California, and it is a first for medicine. Surgeons at the University of California San Diego used two teleoperated humanoid robots to remove the gallbladders from […]
Cambridge biotech Alchemab Therapeutics has extended its Series A round with a £25 million ($34 million) investment from the British Business Bank, which the company says is the state-owned lender’s largest backing of a life sciences company to date. The money will help the clinical-stage firm build its drug pipeline and expand a proprietary antibody […]
Utah has quietly become the first US state to let an AI chatbot renew prescriptions without a doctor, according to the Associated Press. The programme, run by a company called Doctronic, launched in January and has set off a fierce medical debate. Residents can skip the doctor’s office and refill prescriptions online through the chatbot. It […]
Your prescription, printed to order. A Finnish startup wants to turn the back room of your pharmacy into a tiny, automated drug factory, and it just raised $14m to do it in America. CurifyLabs has closed a $14m (€12m) Series A, the company announced. The Helsinki firm makes machines and software that let pharmacies 3D-print […]
Novartis has agreed to buy Myricx Bio, a small British oncology company, for up to $1.5bn, adding an early-stage but potentially significant technology to a cancer pipeline the industry keeps racing to expand. The Swiss group will pay $1.1bn upfront, with up to $400m more tied to milestones, in a deal that fits the pattern […]
The NHS will use AI inside its app to direct patients in England to the right services, the government has announced. The tool will assess symptoms and work out whether someone needs a GP appointment, a pharmacy visit, or a trip to A&E. The update is expected to reach 200,000 patients over the next year before […]
Scientists in Minnesota have built a cell from scratch. It can feed, grow, and divide, and it competes with its own offspring. Its makers do not claim it is alive. But the line between chemistry and biology just got a lot thinner. The team at the University of Minnesota calls its creation SpudCell, and says […]
Meta says it can turn brain activity into typed sentences without opening your skull. The leap is real. So is the catch: the system learns from typing, the one thing its intended users cannot do. On Monday, Meta unveiled the second version of Brain2Qwerty, a system that reads the brain signals people produce while typing […]
A Silicon Valley startup says it has built a pharmacy with no pharmacist behind the counter. Sealed bottles go in, filled and checked prescriptions come out, in about a minute. The company, Queue, came out of stealth on Tuesday with a working machine and fresh money. It has raised a $12.6mn seed round led by […]
The US government has just handed scientists the largest map of human health ever assembled. It pairs more than half a million genomes with real medical records, and it arrives as the programme behind it faces deep budget cuts. The database comes from All of Us, a research programme run by the National Institutes of […]
