Some women with severe anorexia (厌食症) have returned to a healthy weight and feel less anxious after having electrical devices implanted into their brains, which is based on a small study. But more research is needed.

About one in five people with anorexia die of the illness and there is a lack of effective treatments. Imaging studies suggest that certain brain circuits (回路) may underlie the fear of gaining weight and compulsion (强迫) to self-starve.

Bomin Sun at Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in China and his colleagues wondered whether they could harm these circuits by electrically affecting a part of the brain known as the nucleus accumbens (伏隔核). This brain region helps us to learn from experience, but in people with anorexia it seems to form abnormal connections with other brain regions.

The team took in 28 women with at least a three-year history of anorexia who hadn’t improved following standard treatment. The women had an average body mass index (BMD) of 13; a BMI of less than 18.5 is considered underweight. A BMI between 18.5 and 24.9 is considered normal. A BMI between 25 and 29.9 is considered overweight. The researchers surgically implanted electrodes (电极) into the nucleus accumbens on women’s brains. They connected the electrodes by wires to a battery, to continuously affect the nucleus accumbens.

Over the next two years, the average BMI of the participants increased to 18 and almost half regained a BMI of 18.5 or above. They also reported feeling less anxious.

“This is a very promising result,” says Philip Mosley, a research from Australia. But the study didn’t include a placebo (安慰剂) group for comparison, meaning it isn’t possible to rule out that the participants’ improvement was simply because they expected the treatment to work, says Mosley.

Mosley and his colleagues are about to start a trial of the same treatment in which they will control for the placebo effect. Brain surgery may seem like an extreme treatment, but for people with severe anorexia, it may be better than the alternative, which is often death, says Mosley.

Lifesaving heart operation

When Tal Golesworthy was told he needed lifesaving heart operation in 1993, he said no. Golesworthy has Marfan syndrome （马凡氏综合症）.

Back in 1993, when he was living in the west of England, his doctor told him that the aorta（主动脉）in his heart was so enlarged that it would unavoidable burst unless he underwent major operation.

“They talked through the options,” says Golesworthy, “and I was not interested. The operation really didn’t look attractive.” What he particularly didn't like was having to be on blood thinners after the operation, something that would prevent blood clots（血栓）but presented its own risks: “I was riding motorbikes then, and skiing, so my whole lifestyle would have been affected.” By 2000, however, his condition had worsened. Realizing something had to be done. Golesworthy put his years of experience as research — and — development engineer to good use. He decided he would fix himself. “Learning new stuff and developing new ideas, that was my job,” Golesworthy says.

The aorta, he thought, needed support on the outside. And wrapping something around the outside of the aorta would require a special operation. So Golesworthy subjected himself to 30 hours in an MRI scanner; used 3D printing to create a physical exact copy of the part of his heart. “Luckily, I’d done a lot of work with technical materials,” he says.

Strong determination coupled with an original yet practical solution won him the support of two leading surgeons and helped him raise the money to develop his idea. In May 2004, at the age of 47, he became the guinea pig for his own invention. The operation was a success.

Pioneers of the research that led to one of the first COVID-19 vaccines (疫苗) say breakthroughs obtained in their studies could point the way toward developing a potential vaccine against cancer before the end of the decade.

Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, co-founders of BioNTech said technology they had developed could aid the immune (免疫) system respond to cancer cells. The mRNA COVID-19 vaccine stimulates cells to generate spike proteins, which warn the body’s immune system about things to look out for and to attack.

It is hoped that this could be reworked using proteins found in cancer tumor (肿瘤) cells, causing a similar bodily defensive action.

BioNTech was founded in 2008 specifically to work on cancer treatments. “Our focus has always been on achieving the full potential of the body’s immune system to successfully help handle cancer and infectious diseases,” says the company website.

Some of those earlier cancer vaccine developments have reached the clinical trial stage. “As scientists we are always hesitant to say we will have a cure for cancer,” said Tureci. “We have gained a mass of breakthroughs and we will continue to work on them. . . this will definitely quicken also our cancer vaccine.”

Luke O’Neill, professor of biochemistry at Trinity College Dublin, said that such a breakthrough would be “the Holy Grail” of cancer research, He added that it enabled the body to recognize a cancer tumor as a foreign element, in the same way it had done with COVID-19, and to respond accordingly, so that the immune system could be “trained” to “hunt down” the abnormal presence.

What made the potential breakthrough even more inspiring, he said, was that any treatment could be personalized to work on an individual cancer patient’s specific circumstances. “You can take someone who’s got cancer, take their own tumor and make an RNA vaccine out of that and improve their own immune system specifically against their own tumor. That’s a really awesome thing to see,” he added.