A possible urine test could predict bladder cancer up to a decade before other clinical signs appear, a new research project suggests. While it still needs to be verified in additional tests involving larger numbers of patients, this discovery could be a breakthrough when it comes to non-invasively spotting a disease that can be challenging to identify in its early stages.
The potential breakthrough involves a biomarker found by researchers from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in collaboration with a variety of international research partners. They showed that bladder cancer mutations in a specific gene can be detected in the urine of individuals up to 10 years before clinical diagnosis of the disease. This opens up the possibility of scientists creating a simple, publicly available urine DNA test that could act as a low-cost, non-invasive screening tool to alert potential patients to the onset of bladder cancer.
The innovative test developed by the researchers is based on the detection of mutations in the telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) gene. The researchers analyzed urine samples that were collected up to 10 years before clinical diagnosis from 38 otherwise asymptomatic individuals who later developed bladder cancer, along with 152 cancer-free control samples.
They found that the the TERT promoter mutations could be detected a decade prior to clinical diagnosis in 46.7% of the asymptomatic individuals who later developed the disease. More importantly, they found that the mutations occurred in zero of the matched control samples. While that still leaves room for error, it’s nonetheless promising as grounds upon which to proceed with later tests and research.
“Our results provide the first evidence from a population-based prospective cohort study of the potential of urinary TERT promoter mutations as promising non-invasive biomarkers for early detection of [bladder cancer],” the researchers write in an abstract describing their work. “Further studies should validate this finding and assess their clinical utility in other longitudinal cohorts.”
A paper describing the work, titled “Urinary TERT promoter mutations are detectable up to 10 years prior to clinical diagnosis of bladder cancer: Evidence from the Golestan Cohort Study,” was recently published in the journal EbioMedicine.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.