A compound that enables the delivery of insulin through the skin has been demonstrated in mice and minipigs. The findings, reported in a paper published in Nature, suggest a potential alternative to injection for diabetes management and may support broader applications in other therapeutics.

Drug delivery through skin is widely used for small molecules owing to its convenience and patient compliance. However, the structure of the skin presents a barrier to larger molecules such as proteins and peptides. Existing methods to enhance skin permeability, including microneedles, ultrasound, and chemical agents, are often invasive and compromise skin integrity, which limits their clinical utility.

Rongjun Chen, Youqing Shen, Jiajia Xiang, Ruhong Zhou and colleagues report a fast skin-permeable polymer called poly2-(N-oxide-N,N-dimethylamino)ethyl methacrylate, which can penetrate through different layers of skin through interactions with the skin’s changing pH gradient.

When combined with insulin, OP facilitates its transport through the skin into systemic circulation and its accumulation in key glucose-regulating tissues, including the liver and skeletal muscles. In diabetic mice and minipigs, application of OP–insulin to the skin lowered blood glucose levels to the normal range within 1–2 hours, which is comparable to the effect of injected insulin, and maintained the normal level for up to 12 hours. No adverse effects were observed in skin cells, blood cells or in the functions of organs including the liver and kidney.

The study demonstrates that OP could achieve skin permeation without disrupting skin structures, and that insulin combined with OP maintains its biological activity. Although further investigation is needed to assess long-term safety, dose control and potential clinical application, the strategy may offer a novel and versatile platform for noninvasive delivery of other biomacromolecules.

Trials of a new cholesterol-lowering pill have shown promising results for people with heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia (HeFH), a genetic disorder that leads to high levels of LDL cholesterol.

HeFH is a common condition affecting about 1 in 250 people, caused by a mutation in a gene that impairs the body’s ability to remove low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol from the bloodstream. This inherited condition increases the risk for premature atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD)—a buildup of fatty deposits in arteries, leading to narrowed vessels that can restrict blood flow to vital organs.

The drug, called Enlicitide and developed by Merck, is a new type of PCSK9 inhibitor. It works by binding to PCSK9, a blood protein that typically degrades the liver receptors that clear LDL cholesterol. By blocking PCSK9, Enlicitide protects these receptors and boosts the liver’s ability to clear LDL cholesterol from the bloodstream, lowering the risk of heart disease.

The findings are published in the journal JAMA.

Year-long trial

The trial was a phase 3, 52-week, randomized trial that included 303 adults from 17 countries with HeFH who were already taking statins or other lipid-lowering therapies. Participants were randomly sorted into two groups. One group received the 20 mg Enlicitide pill once a day while the other group received an inactive pill (placebo). Neither the patients nor the doctors knew who received which.

After 24 weeks, LDL cholesterol levels dropped by an average of 58.2% in patients taking Enlicitide, while those on the placebo saw almost no change. At the 52-week stage at the end of the trial, Enlicitide patients achieved an average drop of 55.3% in their LDL cholesterol, while the placebo group saw their levels rise by 8.7%.

This potential new therapeutic also lowered levels of other cholesterol particles that contribute to ASCVD risk. Apolipoprotein B levels were reduced by 48.2% and Lipoprotein (a) levels decreased by 24.7%.

Drug safety

The drug was also well tolerated with few side effects. The proportion of participants reporting at least one adverse effect was similar between the groups: 77.7% for Enlicitide and 76.2% for the placebo. The proportion of participants who stopped taking the medication due to an adverse effect was also similar, with 2% for Enlicitide and 3% for the placebo.

“In adults with heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia, Enlicitide is an effective and well-tolerated treatment for lowering the level of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol,” wrote the researchers in their study.

Ongoing trials of Enlicitide are gathering data about whether this powerful cholesterol reduction translates into fewer heart attacks and strokes. The scientists also want to test the pill in a wider population of high-risk patients beyond those with HeFH.

A new system could overhaul maps that misclassify hundreds of thousands of smallholder coffee and cacao farmers as working in forests. Without better maps, deforestation regulations could ripple through markets from remote farms to a caffe mocha near you.

Sample Earth, launched by the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT and available on Harvard Dataverse, helps mapmakers build accurate, inclusive maps to prevent smallholder farmers from being wrongly classified as producing major commodities in forested areas. Misclassification risks excluding compliant producers from markets enforcing deforestation-free rules, particularly the European Union’s new regulation (EUDR).

The initiative is the result of a collaboration between Alliance researchers, tech companies (including Google), and the World Cocoa Foundation. Researchers call on private-sector mapmakers to adopt their model to harden their supply chains against disruption.

Producers of coffee and cacao, and the companies that buy their products, could soon lose access to the world’s second-largest economy. The European Union, at the end of next year, will phase in the long-delayed EUDR legislation that requires many agricultural commodities to be certified deforestation-free. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of producers will face considerable hurdles, and not because they produce on land that hasn’t been deforested since 2020 (the EU’s cutoff date): It’s due to maps that wrongly classify their farmland as forest.

For example, the EU’s main reference map, published in 2025, misclassifies more than half the coffee production zones in Colombia, China, Guatemala and Mexico as forest, according to research by the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT. Similar reference maps have the same shortcomings. This is because these maps are “trained” on land-cover datasets that largely exclude remote areas cultivated by smallholders.

Improving these maps is urgent. To spark the creation of better maps, the Alliance recently launched Sample Earth, a trusted and inclusive global benchmark and reference dataset that accurately represents remote smallholder farms. The initial data tranche includes approximately 100,000 open-access, time-stamped geolocation points in Ghana and Vietnam. The countries are the second-largest producers of cacao and coffee, respectively.

“Maps are needed for due diligence, and buyers will likely steer clear of areas misclassified as ‘high risk’ for deforestation,” said Louis Reymondin, a data scientist at the Alliance. “With Sample Earth, we invite governments, companies, NGOs and research institutions to invest in expanding this inclusive, high-quality land-cover reference to preserve livelihoods and incentivize environmental protection.”

Smallholders produce an estimated 60% of the world’s coffee and 90% of its cacao. If maps used for compliance are inaccurate, buyers may decline purchases from entire regions rather than risk penalties for non-compliance, effectively shutting smallholders out of major markets.

“Most maps are not accurate at local scales because the data is biased toward regions with a lot of training data,” said Thibaud Vantalon, a scientist at the Alliance’s Digital Inclusion research area. “Remote regions are very poorly mapped. Sample Earth means to fill this gap in training data for smallholders.”

Making map-making better

Sample Earth is designed to improve map accuracy and to streamline the map-making workflow. Data scientists, the people who make maps with satellite imagery, spend an estimated 80% of their time collecting, cleaning and organizing training data. Sample Earth provides reference samples to reduce that burden and speed up the creation of accurate land-cover maps for compliance.

“High-quality data and data-based action are the foundation for compliance with deforestation-free rules and net-zero carbon emission targets,” said Michael Matarasso, the Impact Director and Head of North America at the World Cocoa Foundation (WCF), a partner in Sample Earth.

“However, highly accurate public data is rare… This poses a significant risk to all stakeholders involved. A standard to deliver highly accurate and transparent data in partnership with governments and farmers is of critical importance more than ever.”

Sample Earth aims to set a new transparency and quality benchmark for map-based compliance tools. Currently, no universal standard exists for third-party accuracy assessments of maps used in deforestation due diligence. Sample Earth plans to include a built-in improvement mechanism that allows mapmakers to access confidential land-use reference data to validate and refine their maps without exposing individual farmers’ locations.

“Global forest maps have advanced, but without open, standardized reference data, progress in disambiguating forest land use from other land use like cacao and coffee agroforestry remains limited” said Rémi d’Annunzio, Forestry Officer at FAO and product manager of Whisp. “Today, initiatives like the Forest Data Partnership and DIASCA are putting efforts such as Sample Earth high on the global agenda as we work to define and standardize guidelines for open reference data collection.”

Sample Earth builds on nearly two decades of Alliance research using satellite imagery to monitor land-cover changes across the Global South. The team plans to expand the dataset within Vietnam and Ghana and add other countries with high rates of misclassified smallholder farms, including Colombia and Honduras, along with coffee- and cacao-producing nations across Africa and Asia.

Seeking modern cartographers

Sample Earth’s roster of collaborators includes the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, Germany’s international development agency (GIZ), Google, Satelligence and WCF. The Alliance is actively seeking more collaborators and investors.

“For EUDR to succeed, we need to lower the burden of monitoring and reporting, and we need to ensure that longstanding smallholder farms can be reliably reported as non-deforested areas,” said Dan Morris, a researcher at Google AI for Nature and Society. “AI combined with satellite imagery is a powerful tool that can help address these challenges, but AI systems are only as good as their training and validation data.”

Inaction could disrupt supply chains and consumer markets, and not just in the EU; other jurisdictions are following suit in building similar legislation that will apply to most agricultural commodities. Supply constraints are feasible if maps do not quickly improve, which could push up prices. It’s bad news across supply chains, from vulnerable smallholders who already face myriad challenges to food-inflation-weary consumers worldwide.

Sample Earth’s proposition is straightforward: better, inclusive training datasets will yield more accurate maps, protect compliant farmers from unwarranted exclusion, and give buyers and governments transparent tools to verify deforestation-free claims. By filling the data gaps that leave smallholder landscapes underrepresented, Sample Earth aims to make compliance affordable and fair, while supporting conservation and sustainable livelihoods in the tropics.

Provided by The Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture

Agricultural producers and manufacturers often need information about crop attributes, from nutrient content to chemical composition, to make management decisions. In recent years, multispectral imaging has emerged as a useful tool for product analysis, but the required equipment is expensive. Standard RGB cameras are much more affordable, but their images show only visible attributes.

However, if RGB images can be “translated” to multispectral images, pictures taken with a smartphone or any regular camera can yield sophisticated information. This process requires complex computer modeling and machine learning, but once the techniques are developed, they can be applied to simple devices anyone can use.

In two new papers published in Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign explore the reconstruction of multispectral and hyperspectral images from RGB for chemical analysis of sweet potatoes and maize.

“An RGB camera captures only the visible range in three bands, red, green, and blue. The pictures cannot provide any chemical information, which you often need for crop analysis. We reconstructed images from these three bands to include information from the near-infrared range, which you can use to determine chemical composition,” said Mohammed Kamruzzaman, assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering (ABE), part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences and The Grainger College of Engineering at the U. of I. He is corresponding author on both studies.

“This work has many potential applications in the agricultural industry and can significantly lower costs. While a multispectral camera costs $10,000 or more, you can get an RGB camera for a few hundred dollars,” he added.

Analysis of sweet potato attributes
In the first paper, the researchers provide a large dataset of reconstructed images for chemical analysis of sweet potatoes that anyone can access and use for their own modeling.

“Most existing image reconstruction models focus on non-biological objects like tables and chairs, which are very different from biological objects. Our goal was to create an RGB-to-hyperspectral image dataset for a biological sample and make it publicly available,” said lead author Ocean Monjur, doctoral student in ABE.

Sweet potatoes are a popular food source, and they are also used for a wide range of industrial purposes including textiles, biodegradable polymers, and biofuels. Assessing quality attributes such as brix (sugar content), moisture, and dry matter is important for determining the usage and value of potatoes. Chemical laboratory analysis is time-consuming and destroys the samples. Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is fast, accurate, and non-destructive, but it is expensive and complicated.

That’s why the researchers created Agro-HSR, a large database of reconstructed RGB to HSI images for the agricultural industry. The dataset includes 1322 image pairs from 790 sweet potato samples, collected from one or both sides of each potato. For 141 potato samples, they measured brix, firmness, and moisture content to evaluate the accuracy of the reconstructed images, finding them to be highly correlated with the actual measurements.

They tested their dataset on five popular hyperspectral imaging reconstruction models to determine which performed best, finding that two models (Restormer and MST++) consistently outperformed the others on all metrics.

“To our knowledge, this is the largest dataset for hyperspectral image reconstruction, not just for agriculture but overall. We are providing this database so anyone can use it to train or develop their own models, including models for other agricultural products,” Kamruzzaman said.

Evaluating chlorophyll content for maize growth
In the second paper, the researchers describe a novel method for multispectral image reconstruction to analyze chlorophyll content in maize. They also introduce a simple device that people can use to take pictures in the field and get immediate results.

“Our target measure is chlorophyll content, which is an indicator of plant growth. With this device you can take a picture, get the chlorophyll content, and determine the crop’s growth status,” Kamruzzaman said.

To develop their model, the researchers collected images from three different locations: a research field in Hengshui, China; the U. of I. Plant Biology Greenhouse; and the U. of I. Vegetable Crops Research Farm.

At each location, they divided the area into varying levels of soil fertility, and at the Illinois research farm, they subjected the maize to three levels of stress by flooding throughout the growth period.

In all of these settings, they tested several modeling approaches to reconstructing multispectral images from RGB. Based on their findings, they created a novel model called Window-Adaptive Spatial-Spectral Attention Transformer (WASSAT), which more accurately aligned with the actual data.

“We combined spectral and spatial attention modes to establish an adaptive window that can discern crops from soil and other elements, capturing the complexity of a field environment. Then we reconstructed 10-band images to predict chlorophyll content, and we found our results performed better than other models,” said lead author Di Song, doctoral student in ABE.

“We have developed a handheld device that incorporates the model. You can use it to take an RGB image, which will be converted to a multispectral image that provides much more information,” he said. “Next, we plan to add a prediction model, so the farmer can simply take a picture and get the chlorophyll content without having to interpret the images.”

This approach offers a cost-effective solution for accurate crop monitoring, enabling precise growth assessment and stress detection, the researchers concluded in the paper.

If Eli Lilly’s obesity pill orforglipron is approved and priced around $200 per month, analysts at Truist predict patients will flock to it.

Eli Lilly’s trio of obesity medications could reach $101 billion in peak revenue worldwide, with 17.6 million eligible people around the world taking one of the pharma’s medications, according to a new estimate from Truist Securities.

The firm has updated revenue expectations for Lilly in light of the recent White House agreement to lower the price of its weight loss medications and provide access to those drugs to Medicare patients. While a lower price would suggest less revenue, Truist is confident that Lilly has secured a wider patient population with the deal.

Truist had previously expected Lilly’s incretin medicines—which are the approved injectable drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound, as well as the hotly anticipated oral option orforglipron—to reach $85 billion in peak sales. The number went up by $16 billion mainly thanks to orforglipron, which has risen from peak revenue assumptions of $22 billion to $41 billion. The firm is predicting higher uptake due to favorable pricing that will boost accessibility for patients.

If Lilly prices the drug at around $200 per month, Truist said it believes patients will flock to it.

“We note that the obesity market is highly elastic with higher volumes of patients tending to stay on drug for longer periods of time given lower price points,” Truist wrote. “We also believe that the orforglipron pricing will increase competitiveness with compounders that may otherwise have captured market share in the obesity space.”

Lilly is working to bring orforglipron to market after a series of positive readouts, both for weight loss and for treating diabetes. Truist suspects Lilly will use a priority review voucher it has in hand to get the drug through the FDA faster, with access beginning in the first half of 2026.

“We anticipate rapid uptake and significant expansion of the obesity market once the oral pill has been approved,” Truist wrote.

Orforglipron is expected to book about $500 million in sales for its first year on the market, reaching 360,000 patients. Overall, Truist expects the trio of medicines to collect $25.7 billion in 2026.

The CRO market in the APAC region is thriving, particularly in China, due to intense clinical trial and innovation development, with Western investors and pharma leaning in.

Growth in the Asia–Pacific (APAC) CRO market is trending upwards, with forecasts estimated at $18.9 billion in 2025, and are expected to reach $31.1 billion by 2030. The compound annual growth (CAGR) is expected at 10.43% during that period, on the heels of the 11.5% CAGR forecast for the U.S. market.

The burgeoning CRO activity is tied to the burst of clinical trials and innovation in the APAC market, and particularly China, with Western investors and pharma keeping tabs.

There has been a fair amount of financial investment in the APAC CRO market, said Helen Chen, head of Asia healthcare, at L.E.K. Consulting. This year, Blackstone announced it had secured a majority stake in Japan’s largest CRO, CMIC, and Singaporean CRO Novotech announced the same month that affiliates of GIC and Temasek would acquire significant stake in the company.

Goldman Sachs announced initiation coverage of Chinese CRO Hangzhou Tigermed in October with a Buy rating, citing “improving earnings visibility for 2026-2028.”

These recent transactions reflect earlier investments in the APAC CRO sector, such as the December 2022 acquisition of Singapore-based George Clinical, the company that would later rebrand as Emerald Clinical Trials, by Hillhouse Investment. In October 2021, Blackstone announced its acquisition of Nucleus Network, Australia’s largest Phase I clinical trials specialist.

About 15 years ago, only a very small amount of multinational clinical trials (MCTs) ran in the APAC region, said Vera Zheng, senior vice president, Asia/Pacific Strategy and head of Greater China, Parexel International. But now, 55% of MCTs sponsored by U.S. and European biopharma have at least one APAC site inclusion, up from 36% in 2019, she added.

Today, Parexel has nearly 9,000 employees in the APAC region, up 16% since 2021, Zheng said. Of the 24,000 employed globally, APAC accounts for more than one-third of employees.

The expectation is this boom in APAC CRO and pharma interest to continue, Chen and Zheng agreed, owing to a growing pharma market and populations in the region.

The China Boom

Global expansion continues to be a key priority for Chinese biopharma and biotech companies, as China-to-global clinical trials and licensing deals hit new records, as noted in a report issued by L.E.K. Consulting last week. This trend opens greater opportunities for multinational pharmas to acquire distinctive, early stage Chinese assets that strengthen their global pipelines, and increases demand for CROs with high-quality global systems, regulatory know-how and multiregional execution capabilities to support cross-border development.

In-China trial volume has risen rapidly compared to the U.S. and Europe, positioning the country as a major global player in clinical development, according to the L.E.K. report. Chen confirmed the intense interest, noting one of the firm’s clients, a Big Pharma company, has said it anticipates licensing 30% of its compounds from China.

Healthcare is also strategic natural priority; there are regulatory upgrades and reimbursement reforms. In June 2025, China’s Center for Drug Evaluation (CDE) proposed a 30-working-day fast-track review for eligible innovative drugs, which would shorten the current 60-day timeline.

China also holds the largest global patient base for indications such as lung and liver cancer, diabetes and hypertension, the L.E.K. report stated. Throughout the APAC region, oncology remains the most popular therapeutic area for development, with immunology as number two, Zheng said. Metabolic diseases are coming up strong, especially due to interest in the GLP-1s and rare disease, as well cell and gene therapy and radiology candidates, she added.

Robust pharma R&D expenditure among Chinese pharmas has also sustained the underlying growth of China clinical trials in the past. Looking ahead, Chinese pharmas are enthusiastically participating in innovation, investing in first-in-class and fast-follower development, venturing into next-generation modalities including cell and gene therapies, antibody drug conjugates and bi-/multispecific antibodies, the L.E.K. report states.

The rapid pace of drug development in China is incredibly competitive, Zheng said, comparing it to a “fitness club,” with companies vying to get their best-in-class products through trial stages.

The impetus for China’s pharma and clinical trial growth started in 2017, agreed Chen and Zheng, when the country joined the International Conference for Harmonization. The country’s government also allowed the submission of international data for Chinese trials, reducing the waiting time for IND and NDA applications, Chen said. In that year, the Hong Kong stock exchange also announced it would open a prerevenue chapter for life science companies. The last move bolstered public and private investor confidence and coincided with biotech financing and capital market success globally.

At that time, hospitals increasingly became more involved in clinical trial sites and pharma provided trial protocol training programs, Zheng said. Parexel, for example, has a training academy in China for principal investigators. Many scientists returned to China after years abroad in the West and had to learn the regulatory and scientific environments inside and outside of China. Some training resources are coming from experienced personnel from Taiwan and Singapore, for example, Chen said.

Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Australia

Well-established Japanese CROs include EPS, A2 Healthcare, and M3. In terms of innovative assets, Japan is the third largest, behind China and South Korea, Zheng said.

Japan’s regulatory authorities have made drug entry easier, Chen noted. Previously, for Western companies or for drugs developed outside Japan, companies had to conduct a bioequivalence (BE) study before Phase III initiation. That BE restriction, waived last year, streamlines Japan into a global clinical trial system, she said.

South Korea and Singapore are a vital part of the CRO and clinical trial ecosystem but are comparatively smaller, said Zheng. Korean CROs are Macrogen, C&R Research, LSK Global PS, DreamCIS, and ADM Korea. Singapore-based CROs include Novotech, cited earlier, ClinActis and Credevo.

Australia has also become an attractive hub for clinical studies, and especially early stage trials, Chen said. As per a recent report by L.E.K. and MTP Connect, Australia’s life science accelerator, a total of $1.6 billion was spent on clinical trials in 2022, a figure that has grown at 5.5% per annum over the last seven years. A fast trial start-up environment, alignment with ICH Good Clinical Practice guidelines and R&D rebates are appealing.

Taken together, the surge of capital, policy support and clinical expertise across APAC signals a market entering a sustained maturity cycle. For CROs, the momentum in China and its neighboring innovation hubs suggests a long runway ahead: one defined by multiregional trial execution, global partnerships and intensified competition for first-in-class breakthroughs.

A new study from Duke University School of Medicine is challenging long-standing views on blood sugar regulation—and pointing to a surprising new ally in the fight against type 2 diabetes.

Published in Science Advances, the research reveals that pancreatic alpha cells, once thought to only produce glucagon—a hormone that raises blood sugar to maintain energy when fasting or exercising—also generate GLP-1, a powerful hormone that boosts insulin and helps regulate glucose. GLP-1 is the same hormone mimicked by blockbuster drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro.

Using mass spectrometry, Duke researchers found that human alpha cells may naturally produce far more bioactive GLP-1 than previously believed.

Led by Duke scientist Jonathan Campbell, Ph.D., the team of obesity and diabetes researchers analyzed pancreatic tissue from both mice and humans across a range of ages, body weights, and diabetes statuses. They found that human pancreatic tissue produces much higher levels of bioactive GLP-1 and that this production is directly linked to insulin secretion.

“This research shows that alpha cells are more flexible than we imagined,” said Campbell, an associate professor in the Division of Endocrinology in the Department of Medicine and a member of the Duke Molecular Physiology Institute. “They can adjust their hormone output to support beta cells and maintain blood sugar balance.”

This flexibility could change how we think about treating type 2 diabetes, where beta cells in the pancreas can’t make enough insulin to keep blood sugar at a healthy level. By boosting the body’s own GLP-1 production, it may offer a more natural way to support insulin and manage blood sugar.

Switching gears

In mouse studies, when scientists blocked glucagon production, they expected insulin levels to drop. Instead, alpha cells switched gears—ramping up GLP-1 production, improving glucose control, and triggering stronger insulin release.

“We thought that removing glucagon would impair insulin secretion by disrupting alpha-to-beta cell signaling,” Campbell said. “Instead, it improved it. GLP-1 took over, and it turns out, it’s an even better stimulator of insulin than glucagon.”

To test this further, researchers manipulated two enzymes: PC2, which drives glucagon production, and PC1, which produces GLP-1. Blocking PC2 boosted PC1 activity and improved glucose control. But when both enzymes were removed, insulin secretion dropped and blood sugar spiked—confirming the critical role of GLP-1.

Implications for diabetes treatment

While GLP-1 is typically made in the gut, the study confirms that alpha cells in the pancreas can also release GLP-1 into the bloodstream after eating, helping to lower blood sugar by increasing insulin and reducing glucagon levels.

Common metabolic stressors, like a high-fat diet, can increase GLP-1 production in alpha cells—but only modestly. That opens the door to future research: If scientists can find ways to safely boost GLP-1 output from alpha cells, they may be able to naturally enhance insulin secretion in people with diabetes.

But measuring GLP-1 accurately hasn’t been easy. The team developed a high-specificity mass spectrometry assay that detects only the bioactive form of GLP-1—the version that actually stimulates insulin—not the inactive fragments that often muddy results.

“This discovery shows that the body has a built-in backup plan,” Campbell said. “GLP-1 is simply a much more powerful signal for beta cells than glucagon. The ability to switch from glucagon to GLP-1 in times of metabolic stress may be a critical way the body maintains blood sugar control.”

If you’re looking to reduce your chances of developing lung disease, say experts at UC San Francisco, then it may be smart to avoid inhaling cannabis.

A new study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that inhaling marijuana every day is associated with a 44% increased chance of developing asthma. It also increased the odds of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) by 27%.

The COPD risk may be understated, since the disease takes decades to develop, and the researchers did not have detailed information on how long people in the study had been using cannabis.

In defining the concept of inhaling, the researchers included smoking, vaping, and so-called “dabbing,” which involves breathing in the vapors of concentrated marijuana.

The study found an association between elevated risks to a person’s lungs and doing any of those things with cannabis even for those who had never smoked cigarettes.

For this group, inhaling marijuana every day was linked to a 51% increased likelihood of developing asthma. The association with COPD was also elevated, but it was not statistically significant.

The study is the largest yet to examine the association between inhaling cannabis and risks to respiratory health among people who have not smoked cigarettes. Of the 380,000 adult participants, nearly 222,000 had never smoked tobacco. The data comes from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a national survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Experts say the broad legalization of marijuana across much of the country and the perception that it is healthier than tobacco has led people to minimize the risks.

“The message about smoking tobacco being bad for you has gotten out there, but for cannabis, it’s much less clear,” said Alison Rustagi, MD, Ph.D., assistant professor at UCSF and first author of the paper.

“If people are looking to reduce their likelihood of developing a chronic lung disease, they should not start using cannabis,” she said. “And if they already smoke cannabis, they should do it less often.”

Researchers, including those from the University of Tokyo, have successfully grown large tomatoes and cherry tomatoes, both rich in nutrients, in tightly controlled environments where the light source was energy-efficient LEDs. Such methods were often limited by the types or sizes of plants that could thrive in such conditions.

A feasibility study, published in HortScience, demonstrates the researchers’ method is suitable for urban environments, potentially even in space, and can offer food security in the face of climate change or extreme weather conditions.

Pizza, pasta, soup, salad, the tomato really is a versatile and delicious food crop. Its delicious and nutritious nature comes with a cost though; it has a very high demand for light, as well as water.

While tomatoes grow well in some parts of the world, there are many regions where the local climate is not ideally suited to them, and with climate change exacerbating weather and the environment, having a way to improve yields or enable cultivation at all has long been sought.

Greenhouses are the main method for creating a controlled environment suitable for growing crops, including tomatoes, but they have drawbacks and still rely on natural sunlight, which can be a limiting factor in some areas. If you’ve ever bought greenhouse-grown tomato soup in Iceland, for example, you may have realized this all too well.

There has been some research and even agricultural use of artificial light plant factories (ALPFs), which are exactly what they sound like: fully controlled environments tailored to specific crops to maximize yields without compromising on other factors. These have a proven track record but require a lot of power to operate due in part to the lighting they require.

A logical step is to use energy-efficient LED lights, which have been successful for certain crops such as leafy greens, but nothing more substantial. Spinach and lettuce are nice, but they’re no slice of pizza.

Realizing this limitation, Associate Professor Wataru Yamori from the Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences at the University of Tokyo and his team decided to refine this concept to make it bear fruit.

“Plant factories are resilient to climate extremes such as droughts, floods and heat waves that increasingly disrupt traditional farming. They can be built in deserts, cities, or one day even in space. By bringing production closer to consumption, they help reduce both climate risk and food transport needs,” said Yamori.

“For many years, people assumed that crops with relatively long cultivation periods that require high light intensity, such as large-fruited tomatoes, could not thrive under LEDs. Our earlier work proved that cherry tomatoes, and even edamame, could be grown in such systems. Testing large tomatoes was the next logical challenge, pushing the boundaries of what plant factories can do.”

The team did more than just change a few lightbulbs for LEDs though. They first fit an enclosed factory space with the standard materials necessary for growing tomatoes, but introduced different lighting setups, both using high-efficiency LEDs, depending on which variety of tomatoes they were growing.

Over the course of a year, they lit large-fruited tomato plants from above, coaxing them to grow straight upwards as you’d expect. But the second setup involved lighting smaller cherry tomato plants from either above or from the sides, in such a way that they grew upwards in an S-shaped series of bends.

A research team led by scientists from the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI) has introduced a new way to fine-tune genetic material. Their study, published in Nature Biotechnology, describes an innovative technique in which chemical tags are attached directly to DNA, opening the door to new approaches in medicine, agriculture, and biotechnology.

Targeted editing of genetic information has advanced at an extraordinary pace in recent years. Tools such as the CRISPR-Cas9 “gene scissors” and base editing—a technique that makes precise, single-letter changes to DNA without cutting it—have already become standard in research and clinical development. These technologies are being used to treat genetic disorders, enhance crop resistance, and engineer bacteria for biotechnological purposes.

Researchers at the HIRI, a site of the Braunschweig Helmholtz Center for Infection Research (HZI), in cooperation with the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU), have developed a new method for precisely editing DNA. The HIRI team also cooperated with North Carolina State University in the U.S. and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Their aim was to make genetic changes in bacteria, plants, and human cells even more accurate and gentle.

The team took inspiration from a natural bacterial defense system against viruses known as bacteriophages. To fight off these invaders, bacteria use two enzymes, DarT2 and DarG. During a viral infection, DarT2 attaches a chemical marker to the DNA, blocking replication and halting viral spread.

In the absence of a threat, DarG shuts down DarT2 and actively removes the marker. This finely tuned mechanism helps prevent the virus from spreading—and now serves as the foundation for a new genome editing approach.

This newly developed form of attachment has been named “append editing” by the researchers. “For the first time, this allows us to achieve new types of genetic modifications not possible with previous methods,” the scientists explain.

To understand the mechanism, DNA can be imagined as a notebook in which each page consists of a long chain of letters. While traditional gene-editing techniques typically remove or replace individual letters within this chain, append editing introduces a small chemical group—ADP-ribose molecules—at a specific site.

This addition functions like a “sticky note” affixed to a particular letter. The chemical marker convinces the cell to change this DNA with high precision and minimal disruption. The type of change, however, depended on the organism in which it was introduced.

‘DarT2’—pioneering a new era of genome editing

Unlike previous technologies, where the same tools produce similar results across all organisms, the effects of the append editing method were different between bacteria and eukaryotes, such as fungi, plants, and human cells.

“We observed that append editing led to the incorporation of large edits in bacteria based on a provided template, while in eukaryotic cells, the modified DNA base changed identity,” explains Chase Beisel, affiliated department head at HIRI.

“This was one of the most surprising findings—that the outcome of DNA repair could be very different between organisms,” adds Constantinos Patinios, a former postdoc in Beisel’s lab.

Researchers see numerous potential applications for this tool. “Our append editing method greatly expands the toolkit of genome research and opens new doors for precision biotechnology and medical therapy development,” says Darshana Gupta, a doctoral student at HIRI.

Specifically, microbes could be modified in a targeted manner—for example, to optimize naturally beneficial bacteria in the human body or to study pathogens more effectively. In human cells, precise editing could one day help to gently correct inherited diseases and provide new insights into DNA repair processes.

Further research is still needed before such applications can reach clinical practice. However, the scientists are confident. “DarT2 is another great example of the use of bacterial defenses in genome research,” says Harris Bassett, who is completing his Ph.D. in Beisel’s lab.