Haggenmüller et al. evaluate the performance of a smartphone app for non-invasive hemoglobin estimation that was developed in the USA in rural India. Performance improved when the app was retrained on the data collected in India.

Today is Global Recycling Day. All medical practices and disciplines face sustainability issues and there is a huge focus in the UK on minimising the environmental effects of medicine. Here we speak to Dr Daniel Lake about ‘Project Greener Anaesthesia’, which aims to do just that for Anaesthetics.

Griffith et al. report COVID-19 symptom persistence in a national population-based cohort over 50 years old in Canada. These data allow the authors to estimate the background symptom prevalence in the cohort, given not everyone had COVID-19, but also to explore a broader range of pre-pandemic risk factors for post-acute COVID-19 symptom persistence.

Chang et al. classify people with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE), Alzheimer’s disease and healthy controls using a convolutional neural network algorithm applied to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. People with TLE can be distinguished, including those without easily identifiable TLE-associated MRI features.

Chitalia, Miliotis et al. evaluate radiomic predictors of outcome in patients with breast cancer treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy. The authors identify radiomic phenotypes related to changes in tumor heterogeneity that improve progression-free survival prediction when added to clinicopathological and molecular factors.

Tangirala et al. evaluate changes in the associations between various exposures and COVID-19 positivity and hospitalization across two non-consecutive waves of the pandemic in participants of the UK Biobank. They find that the strength of the association between certain risk factors, such as age and household-related factors, change over time.

Kiyasseh et al. compare the quality of feedback provided to surgeons by artificial intelligence (AI) to that provided by human experts. Teaching an AI system to explicitly follow human explanations improves the reliability and reduces the bias of AI-based feedback.

Steyaert, Qiu et al. develop a deep learning framework for multimodal data fusion for adult and pediatric brain tumors. Multimodal data models combining histopathology imaging and gene expression data outperform single data models in predicting prognosis.

Mintz et al. develop machine learning models to predict the probability of ciprofloxacin resistance in hospitalized patients. Resistance of previous infections, prior location of patients, sex and recent resistance frequencies in the hospital impact the probability of ciprofloxacin resistance in each patient.

Fukuhara et al. evaluate different methods to express IL-12 as an immunostimulatory payload of oncolytic HSV-1 using G47∆ as the backbone. They find that expressing the two IL-12 subunits as a fusion peptide leads to superior efficacy of the oncolytic virus in tumor models, compared with a virus in which the subunits have been co-expressed.

Today is Global Recycling Day. All medical practices and disciplines face sustainability issues and there is a huge focus in the UK on minimising the environmental effects of medicine. Here we speak to Dr Daniel Lake about ‘Project Greener Anaesthesia’, which aims to do just that for Anaesthetics.

Professor Bobby Gaspar is a distinguished physician-scientist who is a thought leader in translating basic research from bench-to-bedside and strategic work that facilitated bringing life-saving therapies to patients with rare diseases. He has over 30 years of experience in pediatric medicine working in the NHS and the biotechnology sector, and is the founding member of Orchard Therapeutics, where he serves as Chief Executive Officer. In this Q&A, Professor Gaspar provides insight into the regulatory approval and policy considerations for bringing novel therapies for rare diseases from discovery through to clinical application.

Annemieke Aartsma-Rus is a Professor of Translational Genetics at the Leiden University Medical Center. She was one of the pioneers of antisense oligonucleotide (ASO)-mediated exon skipping therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Her work focuses on the personalized approach to delivering exon skipping therapy for patients with rare genetic diseases within the setting of the Dutch Center for RNA Therapeutics, which she co-founded in 2020 and is on the Board of Directors. Currently, four exon skipping drugs have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for DMD, three of which are based on the IP generated by Aartsma-Rus’ institute. She is also involved in patient education in collaboration with the Duchenne Patient Academy and the European Organisation for Rare Diseases (Eurordis). In this Q&A, we ask Prof. Aartsma-Rus a series of questions on the latest developments in therapies for rare diseases and how best to overcome some of the existing challenges with this endeavour.

Megan O’Boyle is the parent of a 22-year-old daughter with a rare neurodevelopmental disease. She is currently the Patient Engagement Lead of the RARE-X Data Collection Program at Global Genes, a collaborative platform for global data sharing and analysis created to accelerate treatments for rare diseases. In this Q&A, we ask Megan a series of questions on patient engagement and involvement in rare disease research.

Dr. Stephen Kingsmore is President/CEO of Rady Children’s Hospital. His career as a physician-scientist has covered the implementation of genomic medicine approaches for rare genetic disorders. This has furthered the field of genomic medicine, in which genomic information about an individual is used as part of their clinical care to facilitate diagnosis or improve treatment. In this Q&A, we ask Dr. Kingsmore a series of questions about the challenges in diagnosing rare diseases and how diagnosis could be improved in the future.

Schattenberg et al. outline discussions from a recent workshop on NAFLD care and advocate for a multidisciplinary approach to managing this complex and multifactorial disease. The authors highlight gaps in current models of care and make recommendations on optimising a multistakeholder approach in steatotic liver diseases.