A weekly jab in the belly is generating more revenue than the entire AI industry. Ozempic + Mounjaro: $71B in 2025. OpenAI + Anthropic: $29B. And they've barely started. ~2% of the 800 million eligible patients can currently access them. h/t @DrSamuelBHume

A personalized cancer vaccine just delivered strong results in a large trial, yet Moderna's stock still fell more than 17% the same day. Scientists sequence each patient's melanoma after surgery, create an mRNA vaccine from the mutations, and combine it with Keytruda. In a phase 3 trial of 1,137 patients, the risk of recurrence or death dropped 42%. After two years, 82% of patients were alive with no recurrence, compared with 70% in the Keytruda plus placebo group. The catch is that the data leaked two days before the presentation, and some oncologists say the bar is higher than it appears. In a 2023 trial, Keytruda alone before and after surgery cut the risk of recurrence or worsening by a similar amount. The patients and setup were different, but the vaccine now has to show it adds more than a well-established drug on its own. It is not approved yet, it is not clear whether it helps people live longer, and the full data will be available tomorrow (Saturday) at the ESMO cancer meeting in Madrid.

Most of the cholesterol in your blood test never reaches your brain. The brain makes its own and holds about a quarter of all the cholesterol in your body. That matters because this post is not really about a blood number. It is about where brain cholesterol goes and what happens when that system breaks. In a Scripps-led study, researchers switched off single genes in millions of mouse brain cells, and an OpenAI model helped interpret the results. When DCTN1 was switched off, neurons increased the genes they use to make cholesterol. DCTN1 is the gene disrupted in Perry syndrome, a rare inherited brain disease with parkinsonism, and the model pointed to a simple explanation: cholesterol delivery inside those neurons may have failed, so the cells tried to make more. That fits older brain biology. Astrocytes make cholesterol for neurons and deliver it through APOE. In people of European ancestry, one copy of APOE4 roughly triples the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, while two copies raise it about 15-fold. The DCTN1 idea is still only a preprint, with no lab test yet. But if it holds up, the takeaway is clear: in the brain, cholesterol is not just about how much there is. It is about where it goes.

Sources and Notes 1. THE TWO PAPERS - Bilal, Mehra, Rogers and colleagues, Cleveland Clinic and IBM Research, Nature Communications, August 2026. An AI read 9,608 full overnight sleep studies from 9,297 sleep clinic patients and sorted them into five groups, then followed them in medical records. The image is their Figure 2A, CC BY 4.0, with plain labels and notes added. doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-7… - Thapa, Mignot, Zou and colleagues, Stanford, Nature Medicine. SleepFM learned from about 585,000 hours of sleep recordings and was tested on 5,019 Stanford sleep clinic patients. doi.org/10.1038/s41591-025-0… - Rachel Rowe's Nature News and Views on both, 12 October 2026. doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-0… · · · · · 2. WHAT THE AI READ - Cleveland used 14 channels from in-lab sleep studies, including brain waves (EEG), heart rhythm (ECG), oxygen, airflow and breathing effort. Blanking the brain-wave or heart channels moved many patients into different groups. · · · · · 3. THE CLEVELAND NUMBERS - 7,043 patients and 544 deaths in the death analysis. After adjusting for age, sex, BMI, other illnesses and the breathing-pause count (apnea-hypopnea index), the highest-risk group died at 2.38 times the rate of the lowest (95% CI 1.73 to 3.28). Leaving out patients prescribed CPAP, it was 1.76 (1.12 to 2.78). - Compared with people with normal counts, people with mild, moderate or severe apnea by that count didn't die more often. Mild (0.71) and moderate (0.52) groups had lower death rates, and severe was 0.77 (0.58 to 1.02). - The 6 in 100 and 18 in 100 by year 6 are read from Figure 2A, whose curves are weighted so the groups match on age, sex and other factors. Median follow-up was 4.4 years, so the later part of the curves rests on fewer people. - In the Sleep Heart Health Study, a community group recorded at home, the highest-risk group died at 1.58 times the rate (1.07 to 2.32). · · · · · 4. THE STANFORD NUMBERS - The C-index asks, for two patients where one died sooner, how often the model ranks that one higher. 0.5 is a coin toss. SleepFM, which saw the night plus age and sex, scored 0.84 for death (0.81 to 0.87). A small neural network given only age, sex, BMI and race or ethnicity scored 0.79 (0.75 to 0.82). - For stroke, the four-fact model scored about the same as SleepFM's 0.78 (Supplementary Figure 11). · · · · · 5. LIMITS - Both main groups were people sent to sleep clinics, who are sicker than the general public. Neither paper tested a watch, ring or headband, and no trial has tested whether acting on these scores helps.

One night of sleep can hint at how long you might live. When doctors suspect sleep apnea, they send you for a sleep test. You spend the night wired up in a clinic, and the main score is simple: how many times an hour you stop breathing. At Cleveland Clinic, that number did not predict who was more likely to die. An AI that read the rest of the night did. Using brain waves, heartbeat and breathing, it sorted about 9,300 patients into five risk groups. Six years later, about 18 in 100 in the highest-risk group had died, versus 6 in 100 in the lowest. Even among people the same age and weight, with the same number of breathing stops, the highest-risk group still died at more than twice the rate. Age, sex and weight do much of the work. At Stanford, a similar AI looked at pairs of patients where one died first and picked the right one 84 times out of 100. A simple model using only age, sex, weight and race got 79. Both studies looked at people referred to sleep clinics, and neither tested a smartwatch or ring.

If you wake up at night to pee and wonder when it is too much, one big Finnish survey puts the line at two. This post has a million views and no numbers. In adults aged 18 to 79, one trip rarely bothered people, and quality of life dropped meaningfully from two on. Twice is common after 70. Roughly a third to over half of older adults do it, and up to about 1 in 6 adults aged 20 to 40. Sometimes the cause is a blocked airway. In sleep apnea, breathing in against a closed throat is thought to stretch the heart, which releases a hormone that makes the kidneys pass more salt and water. In a small before-and-after study, 40 people with apnea who stuck with CPAP for three months went from 2.1 trips a night to 1.2. Two or more trips is linked to about 27% higher risk of death in observational studies, or 1.6 extra deaths per 100 people over five years at 60. It is likely a marker of other illness. If that is you, keep a three-day bladder diary for your doctor, and mention if you snore or wake up unrested.

86.7% skin cancer cure rate? Not quite. That headline comes from 13 spots out of 15 at one clinic in Boise, Idaho. In a 2022 trial, two researchers there brushed vitamin C dissolved in DMSO, a solvent that soaks through skin, onto basal cell cancers twice a day. At 8 weeks, biopsies found no cancer left in 13 of 15, while a prescription cream cleared 8 of 14. In a second, not yet peer reviewed study, 15 of 27 squamous cell cancers confined to the skin's top layer cleared. That's the 56%. Basal cell is the most common cancer in America, but it's also among the most curable. In a UK trial of 501 patients, surgery still worked for 98% of those followed to 5 years. With 15 and 14 spots, vitamin C's edge could be luck. The squamous study only reports to 12 weeks, far too soon to know whether cancers come back. If a bigger trial holds up, a simple brush-on could spare some people surgery. Until then, if you have a diagnosed spot, ask your dermatologist about treatments with at least 5 years of results.

Rectal cancer treatment can be brutal. But for a small group of patients, the FDA just approved a much lighter option. Once rectal cancer has grown into nearby tissue or lymph nodes, treatment often means chemo, pelvic radiation and then surgery. Some people end up with a permanent bag. In 2022, a Memorial Sloan Kettering team gave the immunotherapy drug Jemperli to 12 patients whose tumors had a DNA repair fault called mismatch repair deficiency. All 12 showed no sign of cancer when the team reported, and none needed surgery. Yesterday, the @FDA approved Jemperli for the roughly 3% of these tumors with that fault. In a larger trial, about half to two-thirds of patients reached a year with no detectable cancer and no operation, depending on who was doing the counting. The fault often runs in families. If you or a relative has colon or rectal cancer, ask whether the biopsy was tested for it.

If antibiotics fail, the backup may be a virus. A San Francisco company says its AI redesigned one to kill bacteria, and a doctor gave it to a patient. The virus is a phage. Felix d'Herelle named them in 1917, and doctors in Soviet Georgia kept using them after the West switched to antibiotics in the 1940s. The hard part is the match. Each phage kills only certain strains, so teams search collections for one that fits. Radical Numerics says a cocktail of its redesigned phages killed the patient's resistant bacteria in the lab. A doctor then gave it under compassionate use, the route for unapproved treatments when options run out. The company calls it the first AI-designed virus given to a person. It has not said whether the patient improved. If redesigned phages work in trials, treatment could be written for each infection instead of hunted for.

If you've ever wondered whether eating less slows aging, eight people sealed inside a glass dome found out the hard way. In 1991, they locked themselves into Biosphere 2—a three-acre greenhouse in the Arizona desert—for two years. The farm couldn't grow enough food, so they went hungry. Their doctor, Roy Walford, was a UCLA aging researcher who had made mice live up to 65% longer by underfeeding them, and he tracked everyone's blood. Within six months, cholesterol had fallen by a third, and blood pressure and blood sugar dropped too. Almost no one can eat that little for years. Drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro can do some of the work for you. People on Ozempic ate about a third less at an all-you-can-eat lunch, and Berkeley scientists showed this year that it slowed aging and extended life in old female mice, much as cutting calories does. No trial has shown it slows aging in people yet. If one does, the oldest anti-aging result in the lab may come from a weekly dose of GLP-1.

The hair-loss pill all over your feed is a 47-year-old blood pressure drug. It is minoxidil, the stuff in Rogaine. Veradermics made a slow-release tablet, and in a trial of 536 men it grew about four times as much new hair as a placebo in six months. The catch: extra body hair in 9% of men on the higher dose. Dermatologists already prescribe plain minoxidil tablets off-label, and no trial has put the new pill up against them. The women's trial reports next year. If you are losing hair, ask your dermatologist about the old tablet now instead of waiting for the new one.