Tag
#bioengineering
Every article tagged “bioengineering”.
5 articles
Biotechnology
Gene therapy is given once, and almost every hard problem in the field comes from that
The virus that delivers a working gene also teaches the immune system to destroy it. You get one attempt — which is why the dose is enormous, the price is enormous, and a large share of patients are excluded before treatment is even considered.
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Biotechnology
Your glucose monitor is not measuring your blood, and that explains almost every reading you disagreed with
The sensor on your arm reads the fluid between cells, not blood, using an enzyme wired to an electrode. The lag, the disagreement with a fingerprick, the fourteen-day lifespan and the mysterious 3 a.m. low all follow from that.
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Biotechnology
The insulin in that pen was made by microbes that were handed a human gene
Until 1982 insulin came from slaughtered pigs and cattle. Today it is brewed by bacteria or yeast carrying a synthetic human gene — and the fermentation is the easy part. What happens after it is the reason a protein drug costs what it does.
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Biotechnology
A cancer drug that cannot be manufactured in a factory, because it is made out of the patient
CAR-T therapy takes a patient's own immune cells, gives them a receptor that does not exist in nature, and puts them back. It has cured people whose leukaemia had run out of options — and its cost, its side effects and its failure against solid tumours all trace to the same design.
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Biotechnology
AI can predict a protein's shape in minutes. That is not the same as knowing what it does
A fifty-year-old problem in biology broke open in 2020, and the method that cracked it does not simulate physics at all. Here is what a structure prediction is actually inferring, what its confidence score means, and the four things it still gets wrong.
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