🧬 Science printed placentas and cured someone with scissors (sort of)

This week in biotech: scientists figured out how to 3D print functional placentas (pregnancy tests included), gene editors went from invention to human cure in 5.5 years, and somewhere in France, a researcher is watching cheese quality decline in real-time because cows are too hot and eating the wrong grass. Meanwhile, Kim Kardashian convinced millions that $2,500 MRI scans are the new wellness essential, and a Cambridge PhD student looked at the biotech industry's spectacular failure rate and thought, "We should probably save all that data before it disappears forever." Spoiler: nobody's doing it yet.

Scientists at the University of Technology Sydney 3D printed tiny placentas that test positive on pregnancy tests, which is either groundbreaking medical research or the world's most elaborate lab prank. They used a droplet-on-demand bioprinter (an office inkjet, but make it science) to create functional mini-placentas complete with all three major cell types and actual pregnancy hormones.

Turns out studying early pregnancy is nearly impossible because first-trimester tissue is unsafe to obtain, and by birth, the placenta's changed so much it's useless for understanding early complications. Preeclampsia affects 2-8% of pregnancies and causes around 46,000 maternal deaths annually, remaining "one of medicine's great mysteries" partly because we couldn't study it without endangering actual pregnancies.

The team swapped out traditional Matrigel (yes, extracted from mouse tumors) for synthetic materials and bioprinted cells at precise stiffness levels that mimic natural implantation sites. Within days, cells self-organize into proper organoids with all the right cell types. Apparently, cells are better at IKEA-style assembly than humans.

They're already testing aspirin and metformin on these organoids to screen for preeclampsia treatments. The platform enables CRISPR gene editing to identify key placentation players and could eventually help predict and prevent pregnancy complications before they endanger lives. The research was published in Nature Communications in September 2025.

Finally, pregnancy research that doesn't require invading actual pregnancies.

Climate change crossed the line. It's coming for cheese, and apparently, that's where humanity draws its final stand.

French researchers at INRAE fed 40 cows different diets for 19 weeks and discovered something catastrophic: as droughts force farmers to swap grass for corn, cheese becomes less flavorful, less yellow, firmer, and nutritionally inferior. Climate change is turning gourmet French cheese into bland grocery store blocks. Lead researcher Matthieu Bouchon warned, "If climate change progresses the way it's going, we'll feel it in our cheese."

Cows evolved to eat grass (four stomachs for this specific purpose). When they graze fresh herbage, beneficial microbes transfer from soil to grass to cow to milk to cheese to your gut. Grass-fed cows produce milk rich in omega-3s, probiotics, and compounds creating that yellow color and savory flavor. It's terroir for cheese, except climate change is destroying it.

The study published in the Journal of Dairy Science ranged from 75% grass to 100% corn diets. Results were dramatic: grass-fed cheese was yellower, smoother, and more aromatic. Corn-fed cheese was whiter, firmer, and milder with fewer probiotics. Worse, even 25% grass in the diet is critical - removing that last quarter has worse effects than cutting from 75% to 50%.

This affects France's 46 regional Protected Designation of Origin cheeses, potentially destroying what defines them. Next time you're paying $30 for fancy French cheese, you're buying the last generation of traditionally produced cheese before climate change rewrites the recipe.

Kim Kardashian promoted $2,500 full-body MRI scans to her 355 million Instagram followers, because the wellness industrial complex looked at healthcare and thought, "needs more performative anxiety for rich people." The trend involves celebrities like Bryan Johnson, Maria Menounos, and Paris Hilton getting scans from companies like Prenuvo and sharing results publicly. Johnson posts his brain age (42 versus chronological 47), hippocampal volume (72nd percentile), and muscle mass (100th percentile, obviously) like CrossFit PRs. Quantified-self culture meets medical imaging.

Maria Menounos actually caught a 3.9cm pancreatic tumor during her Prenuvo scan in January 2023. She had symptoms that CT scans missed. The MRI found it, she had surgery, and she's cancer-free. Her cancer type has a generalized 48% five-year survival rate. This is the success story these companies point to, and it's genuinely compelling.

But literally no medical society recommends full-body MRI screening for healthy people - not ACPM, not ACR, not FDA, not USPSTF. Dr. Gary Young called it "not a good way to use scarce healthcare resources." The problem is false positives. About 15-30% of diagnostic imaging contains incidental findings. Most don't need treatment, but chasing them down creates costs, additional testing, procedures, complications, and emotional harm. There's also overdiagnosis of slow-growing things that would never cause problems if you hadn't gone looking.

Bonus privacy risk: 2019 Mayo Clinic research showed commercial facial recognition identifies people from brain MRIs with 83% accuracy despite de-identification. Your brain scan might not be anonymous, which matters for the 100,000+ people now in Prenuvo's database. Companies position these as longevity optimization rather than disease detection, because calling it "wellness" makes the lack of evidence easier to swallow. Prenuvo announced a 100,000-person study to prove these scans improve outcomes, but it won't finish until 2034. Critics note evidence should come before widespread marketing.

Healthcare as a status symbol, quantified-self meets medical imaging. You're not sick, you're just not datapoints yet.

History happened, and nobody noticed because we're all doomscrolling. Prime Medicine treated the first-ever human with prime editing, correcting a genetic disease and potentially curing Chronic Granulomatous Disease. Scientists went from inventing this technology in 2019 to curing a patient in 2025. Take that, bureaucracy.

Prime editing is David Liu's latest genetic Swiss Army knife. If CRISPR-Cas9 is scissors hoping cellular repair works correctly (it often doesn't), prime editing is a word-processor search-and-replace. It uses Cas9 nickase fused to reverse transcriptase, guided by pegRNA specifying both target site and desired edit. The system nicks one DNA strand, writes" new genetic information directly, and leaves. No double-strand breaks, no donor DNA needed, all 12 base conversions plus insertions and deletions. Theoretically corrects 89% of known disease-causing variants.

The patient had p47phox CGD, a rare inherited immunodeficiency (1 in 100-200K births) caused by a GT deletion preventing immune cells from killing bacteria and fungi. Standard cure is stem cell transplantation with all its risks - graft-versus-host disease, graft failure, and finding donors. Prime editing uses your own cells, eliminating those issues.

They collected the patient's stem cells, corrected the mutation, and infused edited cells back post-conditioning. One IV dose. Results were exceptional: 58% of neutrophils restored function by Day 15, 66% by Day 30. The curative threshold is 20%. This patient hit 3x that target.

Bonus: Neutrophils engrafted by Day 14, platelets by Day 19. Nearly twice as fast as approved gene editing tech (usually Days 27 and 35). Faster engraftment means shorter hospitalizations, quicker recovery, and lower infection risk.

No serious adverse events related to the therapy. Everything observed was from the conditioning regimen. DNA editing apparently doesn't cause side effects.

From an academic paper to a human cure in 5.5 years. Science occasionally moves fast.

A PhD candidate at Cambridge looked at biotech's 60% failure rate within five years and thought, "That's a lot of perfectly good knowledge disappearing into bankruptcy court." So Ruxandra Teslo contributed to a policy proposal at the Institute for Progress, suggesting we raid failed companies' FDA filing cabinets before their secrets die with them.

This isn't an FDA initiative. It's a think tank proposal suggesting we use bankruptcy law to buy orphaned FDA submissions and make them public. Like SEC's EDGAR database, but for drug development.

Large pharma companies have internal FDA filing archives accumulated over decades. They know what works, what the FDA wants, and how to format submissions. Small biotechs start from scratch every time. It's like living where you have laws but no access to case law, so you hire expensive lawyers just to know what's legal.

The proposal targets Common Technical Documents (CTDs): 10-20K page dossiers containing manufacturing methods, clinical trial designs, FDA correspondence, and quality control procedures. These are currently inaccessible under trade secret protections. When companies fail, this knowledge evaporates.

The plan: monitor bankruptcy proceedings, submit calibrated bids through Asset Purchase Agreements, and acquire non-exclusive rights to regulatory data. Build a library of CTDs across major modalities. Anyone with plans to revive the drug program can outbid the Fund, preserving development incentives.

Applications are genuinely useful: Train AI to auto-draft submissions. Create searchable precedent databases. Reduce costly amendment cycles. Novo Nordisk used its internal CTD database to train ML, which cut Clinical Study Report creation from 12 weeks to 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, Chinese biotech startups enter clinical trials within 18 months versus several years for U.S. companies. U.S. early-stage funding dropped from $2.6B in Q1 2025 to $900M in Q2 2025. China overtook the U.S. in active clinical trials. This is fine.

Brian Finrow, CEO of LumenBio, supports it: "Even limited open access to prior IND filings would significantly accelerate development and reduce risk for innovators."

Of course, this is just a proposal. No funding exists, no organization established. It's a really good idea floating in policy space while biotech companies continue failing and their knowledge continues disappearing. Someone should probably fund this.

Another week, another reminder that the future arrives unevenly distributed and occasionally absurd. We've got pregnancy research that doesn't require pregnant people, a gene editing therapy that just cured its first patient faster than most regulatory approvals, and climate change threatening the very soul of French fromage.

The prime editing story especially gives us hope! From academic paper to functional human treatment in 5.5 years is genuinely something else. Though we're still processing the fact that your favorite artisanal cheese might not survive the next few decades, and that preventive full-body MRI scans remain controversial despite celebrities treating them like essential wellness rituals.

What hit you hardest this week? The speed of prime editing? The existential cheese crisis? The fact that we're literally throwing away pharmaceutical knowledge every time a biotech fails? Hit reply and tell us – we read every response and your takes often become next week's research rabbit holes.

And if you know someone who needs their weekly dose of "wait, they can do that now?" science, share this along. We're loving this community we're building together.

Until next week, stay curious (and maybe stock up on good French cheese while you still can), Prateek & Jere

P.S. – If biotech regulatory transparency sounds like something that matters to you, the Institute for Progress has the full policy proposal. Someone should probably fund it before more knowledge evaporates into bankruptcy court.