AI

This algorithm wants your mammogram

Adobe

If you have $249 on hand, you can upload a recent mammogram to a website and receive a prediction of your five-year breast cancer risk. Would you do it?

Digital health company Everlywell has launched Clairity Breast, part of a growing collection of direct-to-consumer, AI-based risk prediction algorithms for medical images. Many AI tools for X-rays and other medical images have been slow to reach patients as companies try to sell them, one by one, to practices around the country. Doctors are often uncertain of the clinical value of an early-stage technology before its real-world impact has been studied.

For more on this, check out STAT’s Katie Palmer’s excellent addition to her timely series Paying for AI, which examines how new clinical AI tools influence the affordability of health care and patients’ long-term health.

NOBEL

The Nobel boys club

Yesterday, the winners of the last of the three science Nobels were announced. (You can read about the chemistry laureates here). All six awardees in physiology or medicine, physics, and chemistry this year were men. This is not uncommon — women make up 4% of laureates since the award’s inception, though that has inched up to 12% in the past decade.

I wrote about the systemic barriers women face in conducting innovative research and getting credit for that work in 2024, when all the laureates were men. That year, furor over the gender imbalance in the Nobels reached a fever pitch because of the feeling that Rosalind Lee, the collaborator and spouse of Victor Ambros, should have also been honored.

The lack of diversity in the 2026 cohort raises the question about how quickly things are changing for female scientists. Under the Trump administration, women have had their NIH grants terminated at a higher rate and seen their odds of success fall more than men. You can revisit my stories, but I also highly recommend you read my colleague Megan Molteni’s moving profile of Lee and Ambros. — Anil Oza

NOBEL, AGAIN

Let there be light

Earlier this week, Stanford University researcher Karl Deisseroth and his colleagues won the 2026 Nobel Prize for medicine for developing optogenetics, a suite of tools that can treat conditions like chronic pain or deafness by using light to control neurons. This approach could also offer relief to some people who are blind.

Optogenetics has clinical potential for people with retinitis pigmentosa, according to a new study published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The genetic disorder causes degeneration of the light sensing cells in the retina, which can degrade peripheral and night vision so much that patients can become legally blind by young adulthood.

Roughly half of the 10 patients in the study had some vision restoration after researchers injected them with a gene to make their retina produce a light-sensing protein so that it could be manipulated. What could they see? Read Annalisa Merelli’s story.