Immunotherapies such as CAR T-cell therapy are used primarily to treat cancer. In the future, these patient-specific therapies, manufactured from patients' own immune cells, could also help cure autoimmune diseases. Six patients with particularly severe rheumatoid arthritis have now received this treatment at Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin. In the journal Nature Medicine, the researchers report the results from the world's first clinical trial of its kind: Disease activity decreased substantially in all participants. By the end of the observation period, three of the patients no longer required any medication for rheumatoid arthritis.

Exercise does more than keep our minds and bodies healthy. It also protects us against the effects of aging. Scientists have developed self-contracting mini-muscle implants that grow their own blood supply and mimic the biological benefits of exercise, giving people unable to work out because of physical limitations a way to reap the same rewards.

The number of people who need prescription glasses to correct their vision is increasing each year as nearsightedness, or myopia, becomes more common worldwide. Current projections suggest cases could reach 50% by 2050, affecting nearly 5 billion people.

Researchers at the University of Toronto have developed a next-generation RNA therapeutic approach with the potential to treat a wide range of genetic diseases that share certain disease-causing mutations. The work advances an emerging platform in genetic medicine centered on transfer RNA, or tRNA. The team engineered tRNA to help cells read through premature stop signals and complete production of full-length proteins that would otherwise be truncated or absent.

A diet that severely limits carbohydrates but is high in fat has the greatest health benefits for people with obesity compared with a Mediterranean diet or a low-fat diet, according to a clinical trial published Aug. 27 in the journal Cell Metabolism. After following a ketogenic (or "Keto") diet for four to five months, about 50% of a group of participants with obesity and prediabetes no longer met the criteria for prediabetes.