The Biotech Futurist

The World Health Organization's African regional office counts nearly a million trained health workers without a job, in a region that has under half the workforce it needs; imaging staff and laboratory technicians are among the cadres most often unemployed. In New Zealand, six emergency departments ran a high-sensitivity troponin assay on whole blood at the bedside instead of in the laboratory, and cut the stay by three quarters of an hour with the same event rate at thirty days. A language model can tell that two papers report one trial and still counts them twice when it adds up the evidence. Coherent Raman photons were made to travel straight back toward the lens from a homogeneous liquid, a direction that was supposed to need an interface or disorder. The US regulator approved an antibody alone for a genetically defined rectal cancer, so some patients can skip chemotherapy, radiation and surgery, on a one-year response endpoint and pending a confirmatory trial.Sources: https://lucafusarbassini.org/d/2026-10-20

A transformer pretrained on gene-essentiality scores now reads an ordinary transcriptome and returns an inferred vulnerability profile, so the expensive screen is needed for training and not at the moment of use. A review of virtual cells published the same day reports that independent benchmarks find scale alone does not buy generalisation outside the training distribution. A model that predicts antibiotic resistance from routine hospital mass spectra does worse than fail at a second hospital: it attaches resistant isolates to the wrong neighbours and carries the wrong prior with them. India capped distributor margins on 137 anti-cancer drugs, patented ones included, with new ceiling prices from 9 November. Anthropic committed a twentieth of its shares to a public benefit fund held in a wholly owned company rather than a charity.Sources: https://lucafusarbassini.org/d/2026-10-19

A chemical-biology paper names a failure mode of structure prediction and gives it a word: models place ligands where the training data already were. Two other fields published the same complaint about units on the same day, one for nuclear mechanics, one for sleep trackers. In an English assessment unit, a deterioration score was computed without the oxygen a patient was receiving and without the confusion she had developed. A nanopore workflow in Sheffield put a price on the small laboratory: cost-neutral at nine samples per run. Two randomised trials reported no effect, and one of them measured why.Sources: https://lucafusarbassini.org/d/2026-10-18

A new brief counts 577 approved diagnostics for six epidemic diseases in Africa and finds half of them cannot run where people first ask for help. In eastern Congo, a researcher says patients take Ebola for malaria and arrive when nothing can be done. Germany decided the same week to pay for mammography from age 45, with its own panel estimating that about one screen-detected tumour in seven would never have surfaced. Mayo's electrocardiogram model doubled new diagnoses of advanced liver disease, and most patients did not complete the test it recommended. Google put a simulator between its laboratory agents and the pipetting robot.Sources: https://lucafusarbassini.org/d/2026-10-17

The director of Europe's largest photonics diagnostics institute put numbers on what a new clinic test may cost: €5,000 to €10,000 for the box, about €1 for the test, an answer in 10 to 15 minutes. On the same day a book introduction observed that a molecular biology lab still looks like one from the 1960s, and a surgical trial in Alexandria replaced a routine operation with a daily blood marker. Korea published what happens when patients are sent back from tertiary hospitals: under a fifth were confirmed treated where they were sent. In India, training school principals by smartphone instead of in person implemented less of the programme, not the same amount for less money.Sources: https://lucafusarbassini.org/d/2026-10-16

Half of the recent intensive-care stays in the most used public ICU database have no infusion rows at all, so part of the drift that people train models to chase belongs to the recording system. A cardiology group reports that the information in circulating troponin sits in which compartment carries it. A four-metabolite urine panel separated eight cancers well, and its authors did the screening arithmetic themselves and landed on a positive predictive value of 6.7%. Earth observation published a year-long single-blind test against metered gas releases, in which artificial-intelligence methods produced most of the false positives. Three intensive-care trials appeared in one journal on the same day, and the number that triggers treatment escalation in all of them is a weighted sum whose weights its own authors describe as arbitrary.Sources: https://lucafusarbassini.org/d/2026-10-15

Some antisense oligonucleotides kill prion-infected mice and leave healthy mice unharmed, so the standard preclinical safety test cannot see this toxicity at all. The same shape of problem recurred all day. A nine-valent Escherichia coli vaccine raised strong antibodies in 17,701 older adults and protected nobody. A trauma biomarker read for years as endothelial turns out to sit in epithelium. A national census of Tanzanian laboratories found 13% of installed analysers not working, breakdown first among the causes. Each number was fine; its meaning came from somewhere nobody had checked.Sources: https://lucafusarbassini.org/d/2026-10-14

Two papers today trace the two most useful DNA machines in biology back to the same conflict, bacteria against their viruses. One is a bacterial reverse transcriptase that adds repeats the way telomerase does. The other, proposed as the ancestor of CRISPR, is a phage protein that reads double-stranded DNA with a code skipping every third base. Both carry the same three-part design: an enzyme, a noncoding RNA built of tandem repeats, and a dedicated partner gene. Away from the enzymes, several measurements medicine leans on were audited today, from the guarantee behind every q-value to the lung-function endpoint that decided two trials in one afternoon.Sources: https://lucafusarbassini.org/d/2026-10-13

Today's items line up along one chain. A phone-mounted fundus camera with offline AI screened more than a thousand people in Liberia, and a label-free whole-blood imager was tried on sepsis in an intensive care unit. The UK accepted all 44 recommendations of its AI commission, including monitoring devices "throughout their working life", and Zambia showed a regulator can approve a drug in 12 working days by relying on reviews already done elsewhere. Against that, Gilbert Welch argues Grail's multicancer blood test found more cancers without reducing late-stage disease, and Helen Pearson shows science often already holds the answer and fails to add it up. The measurement is getting cheap. What decides whether it helps is calibration, synthesis, lifecycle approval and the choice of endpoint.Sources: https://lucafusarbassini.org/d/2026-10-12

How about play in animals?
 
Today I have the pleasure to discuss outstanding research in ethology with Elisabetta Palagi from the University of Pisa, who has been a leader in Primatology for over 30 years, and, among several successes, was recently awarded the Animal Behavior Society Fellowship Award for her outstanding research.
 
In this episode, we explore animal play behavior, focusing on social play. We examine its definition and functions across different animal groups, gaining insights into its diverse manifestations. We delve into the methodologies used by ethologists to study play and its decline as animals mature. We discuss the paradoxical nature of play, its role in social competence development, and its significance among infant chimpanzees. Communication and rough-and-tumble play are explored, along with self-handicapping and the enduring importance of play in adulthood. We compare playfulness in bonobos and chimpanzees and investigate facial expressions and mimicry in play and sexual behavior. This journey unravels the evolutionary significance of play, communication dynamics, and its impact on social bonds in animal societies.
 
If you liked this episode, please consider subscribing to The Biotech Futurist on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Google Podcast, or your favorite platform, and leaving a positive review. The growth of this podcast depends critically on word-of-mouth. Thank you for your help. Follow The Biotech Futurist on Instagram and YouTube, and DM or email me if you have any curiosity. You can always download the transcript of this episode and find the links to the papers we mention on my website, lucafusarbassini.com. The jingle is by Gabriele Fusar Bassini. Elisabetta Palagi’s picture is by Luca Ragaini.
RESOURCES
[ACADEMIC] Rough-and-tumble play as a window on animal communication: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/brv.12172#:~:text=ABSTRACT,of%20escalation%20to%20serious%20fighting.
[ACADEMIC] Not just for fun! Social play as a springboard for adult social competence in human and non-human primates: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00265-018-2506-6
[ACADEMIC] Mirror replication of sexual facial expressions increases the success of sexual contacts in bonobos: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-75790-3#:~:text=In%20bonobos%2C%20during%20sex%20RFM,%2D%20and%20hetero%2Dsexual%20interactions