This year's Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine recognized Karl Deisseroth and his Stanford colleagues for developing optogenetics, a method that uses light to control neurons. The award was part of a science Nobel slate in which all six laureates across medicine, physics, and chemistry were men. Women have received only 4% of science Nobels since the prizes began, a figure that has risen to 12% in the past decade, according to reporting from STAT.
The clinical promise of optogenetics was underscored by a study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers injected a gene into the retinas of 10 patients with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disorder that leads to blindness. About half experienced some vision restoration, and the technique is also being explored for chronic pain and deafness.
Elsewhere, the digital health company Everlywell launched Clairity Breast, a $249 direct-to-consumer service that predicts five-year breast cancer risk from an uploaded mammogram. The tool is among a growing set of AI-based risk algorithms for medical images, though clinicians remain uncertain about the value of such early-stage technologies before real-world studies are done.