💊 Huntington's Disease Gets Its First Real Treatment

Remember when gene therapy was just science fiction that killed patients in clinical trials? Well, uniQure just released data showing they slowed Huntington's disease by 75%. NASA found potential alien fossils, but Congress might kill the confirmation mission. Scientists proved lizards prefer quattro formaggi pizza, and someone figured out how to freeze organs forever. This week in biotech: where breakthroughs meet bureaucratic disasters and researchers can't resist studying the obvious.

Researchers at University College London just achieved what decades of attempts couldn't: slowing Huntington's disease progression. The one-time gene therapy, called AMT-130, reduced disease progression by 75% over three years compared to matched controls. This is the first treatment to ever meaningfully slow one of neurology's cruelest diseases.

The catch? It requires 8-20 hours of brain surgery where surgeons use MRI guidance to inject a modified virus directly into the brain's striatum. The virus delivers artificial microRNA that silences the mutant huntingtin gene, causing the disease. One surgery, lifetime effect (hopefully).

The trial enrolled just 29 patients, with only 12 completing the 36-month high-dose protocol. Researchers compared them to 940 matched controls from a disease registry. The slowing showed up across multiple measures: motor function slowed by 59%, cognitive decline by 88-113% depending on the test. Neurofilament light, a biomarker of brain cell death that normally increases 20-30% over three years in HD patients, actually decreased by 8%.

Professor Ed Wild, who led the trial, got emotional describing the results: "My patients in the trial are stable over time in a way I'm not used to seeing in Huntington's disease, and one of them is my only medically-retired Huntington's disease patient who has been able to go back to work."

The therapy isn't without risks. Three patients had serious neurological events (brain swelling, severe headaches) before protocols were adjusted. All recovered, and there've been no new serious adverse events since December 2022. The FDA granted it a Breakthrough Therapy designation, and uniQure plans to submit for approval in early 2026.

Let’s add a grain of salt here. This data hasn't been peer-reviewed yet; it's a relatively small trial, and the field has a history of heartbreaking failures. But for the 30,000 Americans with Huntington's watching their bodies and minds deteriorate on a predictable timeline, this is the first time hope comes with actual numbers attached.

NASA's Perseverance rover discovered something in July 2024 that nobody wanted to oversell: a 3.5-billion-year-old rock covered in what could be fossilized microbial life. After a year of analysis, NASA quietly announced in September that it couldn't find another explanation for what they're seeing. This is either the clearest sign we've ever found of ancient Martian life, or the universe's most elaborate geological troll.

The rock, nicknamed "Cheyava Falls," features "leopard spots" - millimeter-scale patterns with light cores surrounded by dark rings rich in iron phosphate and iron sulfide. On Earth, these exact patterns form when microbes interact with minerals. The rover also detected organic compounds (carbon-based molecules), and the rock formed in an ancient river channel where water once flowed.

Published in Nature, the research examined every plausible non-biological explanation: high temperatures, acidic conditions, complex water-rock interactions over eons. Each explanation falls short. The mineral assemblages suggest moderate temperatures and neutral pH, exactly what life prefers. The patterns resemble terrestrial biosignatures so closely that lead author Joel Hurowitz called it "the clearest sign of life that we've ever found on Mars."

Here's the problem: proving it requires bringing the sample back to Earth for isotopic analysis and high-resolution microscopy. The rock sits sealed in a tube in Perseverance's belly, one of 27 cores collected for the Mars Sample Return mission. That mission originally planned to return samples in 2031 for $6 billion. The cost ballooned to $11 billion with a 2040 timeline. The Trump administration proposed cutting 47% of NASA's science budget and potentially canceling 41 missions, including sample return.

Meanwhile, China's Tianwen-3 mission plans to launch around 2028 and return samples by 2031. The irony of discovering potential alien fossils, then watching China confirm (or debunk) them first because of budget politic,s is peak 2025.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson put it bluntly: "I don't think we want the only sample return coming back on a Chinese spacecraft." But Congress might disagree when they see the price tag.

Researchers went to Togo to take nine rainbow lizards to a seaside resort and offered them a choice: quattro formaggi pizza or fully loaded toppings. The lizards overwhelmingly chose cheese. This won them the 2025 Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition, awarded September 18th at MIT for research that makes you laugh, then think.

The study, published in the African Journal of Ecology, investigated urban wildlife foraging behavior by testing whether Agama agama lizards show food preferences when confronted with human cuisine. Turns out they're sophisticated diners who prefer simple, cheese-focused options over complex flavor profiles. The researchers noted the lizards "displayed clear preference patterns" (scientific speak for "these lizards really liked the cheese pizza").

Just a little funny thing. The lead author, Luca Luiselli, is the journal's Editor-in-Chief, which means he basically peer-reviewed his own lizard pizza study. Because of course he did.

This year's Ig Nobel ceremony celebrated genuinely absurd science that somehow matters. Eight physicists from four countries used thermodynamics and phase transition theory to solve why pasta sauce clumps, publishing in Physics of Fluids (a serious aerodynamics journal). They discovered that keeping starch concentration above 1% prevents the cacio e pepe disaster. The team admitted they wanted to "satisfy our curiosity" about why their pasta kept failing, proving scientists are just regular people who can't cook.

The Peace Prize went to researchers who got German students drunk on vodka and made them speak Dutch. Native speakers judged the drunk students MORE fluent than sober ones, though the students themselves didn't think they improved. The study started at a Vienna conference when someone joked that their English got better with drinks. They actually tested it and published the results, titling the phenomenon "Dutch courage."

Other winners: researchers who painted cows with zebra stripes to reduce fly bites (it worked), scientists who studied whether alcohol impairs bat flying (it does), and someone who recorded one fingernail's growth for 35 years.

All studies were peer-reviewed, published in legitimate journals, and answered questions nobody knew needed asking. The Ig Nobel Prize celebrates science that's ridiculous but rigorous, proving the best research sometimes starts with "I wonder if lizards like pizza?"

Colossal Biosciences announced $120 million in new funding on September 17th, bringing their total to $555 million at a $10.3 billion valuation. Most outlets covered the money. They missed the actual story: Colossal successfully cultured pigeon primordial germ cells for the first time in history, removing the fundamental biological barrier to bird genome engineering.

For 20 years, scientists could only culture primordial germ cells (PGCs) from chickens and geese. The chicken recipe never worked on any other bird species, not even closely related quail. This matters because birds can't be cloned like mammals (eggs are opaque, development happens outside the body), so PGC culture and editing is the ONLY way to pass genetic modifications to offspring. No PGCs, no genome engineering, no de-extinction.

Colossal tested over 300 combinations of growth factors and discovered that pleiotrophin (not midkine, which works in chickens) drives pigeon PGC proliferation through the Wnt/β-catenin pathway. The cells have been cultured for over 60 days and counting, published as a bioRxiv preprint the same day as the funding announcement.

This unlocks 300+ species in the pigeon/dove family, including 68 threatened species (14 critically endangered). Applications extend beyond de-extinction to genetic rescue of endangered populations facing inbreeding depression. Scientists at Western University and the University of East Anglia called it "impressive genetic engineering" with "valuable potential applications in avian conservation."

CEO Ben Lamm now projects dodos in 5-7 years, previously impossible to estimate before solving the PGC problem. The process requires two breeding generations (making moms and dads separately), successful embryo transfers from chickens to rock pigeons to Nicobar pigeons, then scaling to thousands of genetically diverse "dodos" (really pigeon-dodo hybrids with dodo traits edited in).

The criticism remains valid: IUCN's Canid Specialist Group declared Colossal's dire wolves "neither dire wolves nor proxies" and creating phenotypic proxies "does not contribute to conservation." Colossal's own CSO Beth Shapiro acknowledged you can't bring back an organism "identical to a species that used to be alive." The $555 million raised could protect all 10,787 endangered species on the IUCN Red List at $2 million per species.

But the PGC breakthrough is real science with immediate conservation applications. Whether it leads to dodo-like birds in Mauritius or just better tools for saving pigeons that still exist, this is the first time the timeline has moved from "science fiction" to "technically feasible."

Until Labs raised $58 million from Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Field Ventures to solve a problem killing thousands: nearly 12,000 potentially life-saving organs get discarded annually just in the US because current preservation methods give surgeons just 4-12 hours for hearts and lungs, 24-36 hours for kidneys. The company is developing reversible cryopreservation that could preserve organs indefinitely at -150°C, turning emergency transplants into planned procedures.

Founded by Laura Deming (who started aging research at 12 in Cynthia Kenyon's lab, attended MIT at 14, dropped out for a Thiel Fellowship at 17, and founded Longevity Fund at 19), Until Labs is attacking the technical challenge of vitrification: converting organs to a glass-like state without ice crystals, then uniformly rewarming without thermal cracking.

The approach combines novel cryoprotective agents, custom electromagnetic hardware for rapid rewarming, optimized perfusion protocols, and molecular modeling. In February 2024, they successfully demonstrated recovery of electrical activity in vitrified and rewarmed rat brain slices, showing neurons could survive the freeze-thaw cycle. They're now testing protocols in large animal organs but haven't disclosed results or species yet.

Here's the part of why this matters. 100,000+ patients sit on transplant waiting lists while 13 people die daily waiting for organs. Of donated organs, one in five gets discarded due to time constraints, logistical delays, or risk-averse decisions about "marginal" organs. Kidneys have a 33% discard rate, with some receiving 26 million placement attempts before disposal.

If Until Labs succeeds, cryopreservation could eliminate geographic barriers (patients must currently live within 2 hours of transplant centers), allow thorough organ testing and better matching, transform emergency surgeries into elective procedures, and create organ "banks" similar to blood banks. The technology could extend beyond transplantation to medical hibernation and long-term tissue preservation for research.

The challenges are substantial: cryoprotectants at concentrations needed (4-9M) can be toxic, uniform rewarming without cracking is technically difficult, and scaling from rodent tissue to human organs is a major leap. The company hasn't disclosed timelines for human trials or provided success rates for large animal work.

With 46,000+ transplants performed in 2023 but 12,000 viable organs discarded, the need is clear. Until Labs has raised $106 million total to prove reversible cryopreservation isn't just theoretically possible but practically achievable. If they succeed, thousands of additional lives get saved annually. If they fail, it's just another Silicon Valley attempt to solve death with venture capital and liquid nitrogen.

Keep questioning everything (and maybe avoid painting your cows like zebras), Prateek & Jere

P.S. If the dodo does come back in 5-7 years, we're calling it now: someone will immediately try to make it into a pet. Nature is healing, capitalism is eternal.