The Download: tech’s hardest problems, and cancer-fighting cell therapies

Know-how is all about fixing large thorny issues, but one of many hardest issues is figuring out the place to focus our efforts. There are such a lot of pressing points dealing with the world. The place ought to we even start? 

We requested dozens of individuals to determine what drawback on the intersection of know-how and society that they suppose we should always focus extra of our vitality on. We queried scientists, journalists, politicians, entrepreneurs, activists, and CEOs.

Some broad themes emerged: the local weather disaster, world well being, making a simply and equitable society, and AI all got here up often. There have been loads of outliers, too, starting from regulating social media to combating corruption. Read the full list to find out what they said.

This story is from our most up-to-date print challenge of MIT Technology Review, which is all about society’s hardest issues, and the way we should always deal with them. In the event you don’t subscribe already, sign up now to get future points after they land.

Innovative new cell therapies might lastly get at tough-to-target cancers

The information: A biotech firm is making headway in leveraging sufferers’ personal immune methods to destroy cancerous cells in stable tumors. Whereas researchers have not too long ago had success in treating some hard-to-treat blood cancers with engineered T cells, stable tumors, which make up the overwhelming majority of most cancers diagnoses, have proved way more troublesome.

How they did it: The technicians harvested T cells, which assist the physique combat infections, from a affected person’s blood, earlier than genetically engineering the cells to hold a receptor known as a chimeric antigen receptor, or CAR, which may bind to a protein on the floor of the most cancers cell. Subsequent they develop these engineered cells within the lab, then reinfuse them again into the physique. When the cells encounter the protein they’re designed to acknowledge, they activate and begin destroying the most cancers cells.