Researchers have engineered a cow capable of producing milk that contains human insulin. This could result in an alternative for insulin production. The process involves inserting human DNA coding for insulin into cow embryos. It could dramatically simplify the process and cost of producing the drug. A single cow can produce enough milk every day to supply thousands of type 1 diabetes patients with their daily insulin for an entire month. Scaling up production, ensuring the health and welfare of the transgenic cows, and navigating regulatory approvals are still huge challenges that lie ahead before the process can replace conventional methods of insulin production.

Evo is a long-context biological foundation model capable of both prediction tasks and generative design, from molecular to whole genome scale. The model generalizes across the fundamental languages of biology, DNA, RNA, and proteins to generate DNA sequences using a context length of 131k tokens. It is based on StripedHyena, a deep signal processing architecture designed to improve efficiency and quality over prevailing Transformer architecture. A playground is available where users can generate DNA in their browsers using Evo.

Tardigrades have an incredible ability to stay alive in extreme environments. Researchers from the University of Wyoming found that expressing key tardigrade proteins in human cells slowed metabolism. The research could eventually lead to treatments for slowing down aging or safe cell storage at cold temperatures. There is other research underway looking at whether tardigrade proteins can stabilize important blood products used to treat genetic diseases.

A sequence prediction model for DNA built on the Transformer competitor Mamba. It is extremely efficient and powerful for a small model.

Profluent, a Berkeley startup, has used generative AI technology to create new gene editors based on CRISPR. The company has used one of the AI-generated gene editors to edit human DNA, but it has yet to put any of them through clinical trials. While Profluent plans to open source the gene editors generated by its AI technology, it will not be open sourcing the AI technology itself. The project is part of a wider effort to build AI technologies that improve medical care.

Chinese researchers have created a robot controlled by a tiny organoid made from human stem cells. The brain tissue is hooked up to a neural interface, allowing it to pass instructions to the humanoid robot body. The setup will allow researchers to study brain-computer interfaces and help develop techniques for integrating organoids with the human brain. Organoids could one day be used to repair the human brain through transplantation.

Ligo has open-sourced its implementation of AlphaFold3, letting researchers use the protein structure prediction model freely.