Research lab
Harvard Medical School is Harvard University's graduate school for medicine and biomedical research, encompassing the Blavatnik Institute.
AI risk scores read from mammograms rose from a median 2.1 to 6.6 over the six years before breast cancer diagnosis in a Radiology study of 54,014 women. The retrospective result supports tracking each woman's score across screening rounds and leaves open what a rise should trigger.
Reality
Five Harvard and NIH scientists won the 2026 Warren Alpert Foundation prize for BCL11A work that led to Casgevy, the first CRISPR medicine. The prize honours genetics that took decades to reach patients, at a time when cost and conditioning toxicity limit how many people receive the edit.
Reality
Jesse Poganik's Harvard group reports that donor hearts shifted toward their recipients' biological age in mice and in 11 human transplants. The bioRxiv preprint has not been peer reviewed, so it is enough to question the under-45 donor preference but not to rewrite it.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
Broad Institute-led researchers have catalogued mitochondrial proteins in one plant and five human parasites across nine papers in Cell and related journals. Parasite proteins that human mitochondria lack give neglected tropical disease programs a first list of candidate drug targets to test.
Reality
Stephen Harrison's Harvard lab imaged a rotavirus breaking into a cell and found that VP7, not the protein he expected, forms the pore that releases its genome. The team reported the mechanism Sept. 10 in Science, and Harrison sees it as a lead on delivering large gene therapies into cells.
Reality
Harvard Medical School researchers found that a virus fusing with a cell ruptures the nucleus, spilling host DNA that trips the cGAS alarm within an hour. The team says the work could inform how viral-vector gene therapies and vaccines are designed.
Reality
In a Deakin University trial, an independent rater scored the lifestyle arm 8.55 points down on a 60-point depression scale against 6.82 for CBT, clearing a non-inferiority margin the team set at 1.6 points before randomisation.
Reality
The MIT group measured skin and lung cells from 2-month-old and 26-month-old mice both ways at once, using the destructive sequencing read to label the optical one. Human tissue, the authors say, is next.
Reality
Existing 2D/3D registration models align well for some patients and fail for others. MIT's xvr, out today in Nature, fits itself to one patient in about five minutes, then matches that patient's X-rays to their 3D scan in seconds.
Reality
Direct RNA sequencing turned up a library of hybrid transcripts in mammalian cells, almost 400 of them responsive to inflammatory signals. The one-gene-one-protein reference list has no slot for any of them.
Reality
Its authors say an 18-dimensional property grid, which decides which chemical subspaces get docked at all, cuts compute by orders of magnitude, and they back the platform with nanomolar inhibitors of two targets plus co-crystal structures.
Reality
Enhanced rock weathering's problem has always been rate rather than chemistry, and a Nature Biotechnology result attacks the rate directly. The 2.6-fold gain was measured on kilograms of mineral in a flow reactor.
Reality
The 2.6-fold speedup came from deleting the microbe's own off switch. That leaves the hard part of this work to whoever writes the discharge permit for a basin full of it.
Reality
Medicare's G2211 code paid $16 extra for ongoing, relationship-based care and drew 26 million claims in its first year. Claims volume, though, is the one thing a fee-schedule tweak is guaranteed to move.
Reality
Harvard's Church lab reports AGENTEX in Nature: engineered tRNAs and ribosomes in a cell-free mix. Nobody has to recode an organism to prototype a genetic code any more.
Reality
Scientific American asked endocrinologists what testosterone therapy actually does for cisgender men. The approved use is tightly bounded; the demand, and now the policy, is not.
Reality
The atlas turns kinase-inhibitor selection into a matching problem. What is missing is evidence that the match predicts which drug works in a patient.
Reality
An Australian study flagged a fatal immune disorder in a baby before symptoms appeared. Dozens of pilots now face harder questions: cost, who interprets variants, and findings nobody can act on.
Reality
The steepest annual decline since 1963 is being credited to most favored nation deals. The contracts are not public, the models are not live, and the index measures pharmacy receipts.
Reality
A Harvard-led analysis of 12.7 million US death certificates puts flight attendants and pilots first and second among 503 occupations. The authors ask for protections that match exposure.
Reality