21 September 2026

A lipid-nanoparticle mRNA drug, ABO2203, encodes a CD19-targeting T cell engager made inside the body; in three patients with refractory immune thrombocytopenia it produced complete B cell depletion and durable platelet recovery through six months, with no cytokine release syndrome.

Cell · doi:10.1016/j.cell.2026.08.039

A pair of plant kinases, RAF3 and RAF6, move into chloroplasts under cold stress and phosphorylate photosystem II proteins to dial down photosynthesis while also triggering a nuclear stress response, balancing energy production against damage.

Cell · doi:10.1016/j.cell.2026.08.041

A man with a slowly progressing, CHCHD10-mutation form of motor-neuron disease became the first person treated with a targeted antisense oligonucleotide for this mutation; a year later his neurofilament light chain levels, a marker of nerve damage, had returned to normal.

Nature · doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02945-z

Following 3,119 older adults for a median of 13.7 years, researchers scored both Alzheimer's pathology and a separate 'cognitive resilience' measure, finding dementia risk depends on both: high resilience lowers risk even at the same pathology burden.

Nature · doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02897-4

Staining and RNA sequencing of mouse embryos 7.5 days after conception show the brain does not arise from one universal progenitor cell type as long assumed: one precursor builds the hindbrain, a second builds the forebrain and midbrain, and researchers also found a way to grow hindbrain cells from stem cells.

Nature · doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02943-1

Researchers built 38 sex-specific biological aging clocks across 15 organ systems, finding female and male aging trajectories diverge in genetic drivers and in how organ aging relates to cardiometabolic, endocrine and mental-health traits, a departure from clocks trained on sex-pooled data.

Nature Medicine · doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04662-6

A phase 1 trial gave AAV-delivered Factor IX Padua gene therapy to 11 adolescents with severe hemophilia B in China; no dose-limiting toxicity occurred over 52 weeks of follow-up, extending results previously seen only in adults to this age group.

Nature Medicine · doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04636-8

A blood-based microRNA panel combined with the existing CA19-9 marker, tested in 1,785 people across four countries, detected early-stage pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma with 88.6% accuracy (AUC) in the testing cohort, a cancer that currently has no clinical blood test for early detection.

Nature Medicine · doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04625-x

Nature surveys AI systems now being built to estimate 'biological age' from omics and clinical data, including efforts to adapt large language models for longevity research and to standardize how different aging clocks are validated against each other.

Nature · doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02913-7

FoldaVirus is a web tool that combines AlphaFold's coat-protein structure predictions with known icosahedral capsid architectures to assemble full virus capsid models, then relaxes the structure to remove steric clashes and validates it statistically against known virus families.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2613741123

Fruit flies carry three genetically distinct clades of their gut symbiont Lactiplantibacillus plantarum; tracked for over 10 years at two temperatures, the clades showed sharply different population dynamics depending on temperature, showing that strain-level diversity, not just which species is present, shapes a microbiome's response to environment.

eLife · doi:10.7554/eLife.110808

A researcher describes how winning two large grants pulled her out of bench work and into managing a team, reflecting on what counts as a scientific contribution once a career shifts from doing research to directing it.

Nature · doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02184-2

A study of early-career scientists finds those with larger networks of mentors, rather than a single mentor, were more likely to succeed, with the benefit especially pronounced for researchers from under-represented groups.

Nature · doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02827-4

The Open Science Framework, a widely used platform for hosting research data and code, will cut back some of its most popular free features starting in November because of funding uncertainty, a reminder that open-science infrastructure needs its own sustained funding, not just mandates.

Nature · doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02598-y

After the US discouraged SpaceX and Blue Origin from attending a Paris space summit and NASA withdrew an instrument it had promised for the ESA's Envision mission to Venus, French president Emmanuel Macron and European space officials called for Europe to develop independent human spaceflight capability.

Nature · doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02919-1

An analysis of patents and publications finds Chinese companies placed on the US Entity List responded by citing more scientific papers in their patents and publishing more research themselves than comparable non-sanctioned firms, an unintended effect of the export restrictions.

Nature · doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02946-y

Mathematicians Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge, working with AI tools from OpenAI and Anthropic, announced a partial solution to a version of the Navier-Stokes turbulence problem, one of mathematics' hardest open questions, sparking debate over how such AI-assisted results should be credited.

Nature · doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02922-6

CERN transported antiprotons by road for the first time, moving trapped antimatter outside the accelerator site itself, a step that could eventually let laboratories elsewhere run antimatter experiments without a particle accelerator on-site.

Nature · doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02647-6