Pulses
August 2026 — 50 pulses
FDA halts Regenxbio's Hunter syndrome gene therapy a second time
Spinal masses found on MRI in five participants treated three to six years ago led the agency to pause RGX-121 again, and the company shelved its resubmission.
United Imaging and Tianjin University put a BCI inside an MRI scanner
uMR Shenguan closes the loop between reading brain signals, stimulating the brain and measuring the effect, with the scanner acting as the perception hub.
XPeng carves out its robot unit and raises $900 million for it
A Hong Kong filing valued Dogotix at $6.3 billion post-money, with IDG Capital, Tencent and Alibaba among the outside investors and XPeng keeping about 82 percent.
A humanoid ran 100 metres in 9.32 seconds in Beijing
TianGong Ultra beat Usain Bolt's 9.58-second world record at the second World Humanoid Robot Games, and the robot record fell five times in a single two-hour session.
US lawmakers ask the FDA to stop taking Chinese trial data on trust
Two representatives want China-generated data rejected unless the trial site has had an FDA audit within twelve months, citing three deaths in gene-editing and cell-therapy trials.
Shanxi performs its first invasive brain-computer interface implant
A man paralysed for three years received a 10-micrometre flexible cortical electrode on 19 August and now drives a computer and a pneumatic glove with it.
A server rack running on living human neurons switches on in Singapore
DayOne, Cortical Labs and NUS Medicine put twenty CL1 units into a working research rack drawing 800 to 1,000 watts, the first such rack operated independently.
A miniature digger arm lets novices match expert operators on day one
MIT tested a controller shaped like the machine it commands; new operators performed at expert level immediately, where joystick trainees did not.
A snap-together electronic skin for prosthetic touch
Washington State University reports modular e-skin with ten times finer resolution than commercial glove sensors, fitted to each limb by 3D printing.
Regeneron wins approval for a drug that slows bone invading muscle
Pasatru blocks Activin A and cut new heterotopic ossification lesions by 90% or more at 56 weeks in adults with fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva.
First gene therapy approved for glycogen storage disease type Ia
Genglycos won accelerated approval on 19 August 2026, cutting daily cornstarch intake by 31% against placebo in a 48-week randomised trial.
FDA authorises a robot that draws blood without a human hand
Vitestro's Aletta cleared De Novo on 19 August 2026 as the first standalone device to perform a venous blood draw end to end, supervised but not operated.
An HIV drug reaches a Rett syndrome trial by way of orbit
Brain organoids flown to the ISS aged faster than Earth controls; the mechanism they exposed led to a clinical trial of lamivudine, now under way.
The Enhanced Games lost $61.9 million in its first public quarter
Enhanced Group reported $17.7M revenue and a $61.9M net loss for Q2 2026, most of the revenue from sponsorships tied to the May games themselves.
Nine in ten biomedical papers now show signs of LLM-assisted writing
A preprint puts LLM vocabulary markers in 89% of PubMed Central papers by late 2025, far above earlier estimates, and highest in discussion sections.
FDA fast-tracks an off-the-shelf Parkinson cell therapy
XS411, an allogeneic iPSC-derived neural progenitor injection, received Fast Track designation on 4 August 2026 with its China Phase II fully enrolled.
ABILITY records human neural signals over an optical link
A first-in-human intraoperative procedure at TU Munich in July 2026 tested an ECoG implant that sends data out by infrared laser instead of radio.
Paradromics implants its Connexus BCI in a first human participant
A Michigan woman with motor neuron disease received the wireless high-density implant in June 2026, opening the FDA-approved Connect-One feasibility study.
A Korean firm shows an EEG-driven robotic hand glove in Beijing
Dynamic Solution unveiled a non-invasive brain-computer interface glove that turns scalp EEG into individual finger movement, built on X-HAND tactile technology licensed from ETRI.
Galaxy General shows ET1 and one model driving three robot bodies
At the World Robot Conference in Beijing the company unveiled the Galbot ET1 and a World-Action Model build of AstraBrain that runs bipedal, wheeled and heavy-load machines.
Brain organoids kept for six years aged on a human schedule
Harvard cortical organoids grown for nearly six years passed postnatal developmental milestones at the cadence of a real brain, tracked by three independent age clocks.
Three of 1,357 cleared AI devices were tested on patient outcomes
A PLOS Digital Health analysis found 34 of the FDA's AI/ML-enabled devices had a registered prospective trial and three measured mortality, morbidity or readmission.
A pacemaker that runs on the heartbeat it is pacing
A triboelectric nanogenerator fitted inside a Medtronic Micra shell powered cardiac stimulation in a pig for a month, with no battery.
Cortechs.ai clears NeuroQuant PET for amyloid scan quantification
The FDA granted 510(k) clearance K261916 for software that scores amyloid PET brain scans in Centiloids without a reader drawing the regions.
FDA opens a public docket on generative AI medical devices
A CDRH discussion paper asks how to assess risk, evaluate before market and monitor after it for devices built on generative models; comments close 19 October 2026.
Alabama CHIP pays the way to a gene therapy for deafness
A child covered by Alabama ALL Kids received Otarmeni, the first FDA-approved gene therapy for OTOF-related hearing loss, at Boston Children's Hospital.
Ohio State wraps gene therapy vectors in red blood cell membrane
Vesicles built from red blood cell lipids carried AAV past neutralising antibodies and still delivered their genetic cargo in mice.
Unitree opens 629% above its IPO price on the STAR Market
Shares priced at 150.80 yuan opened at 1,100 yuan on 19 August 2026, valuing the humanoid robot maker at about 445 billion yuan before it gave back a quarter of the gain by midday.
Xiaomi puts its humanoid on the car line and reports 98% on nuts
The next-generation bipedal robot spent four months on the production line at Xiaomi's own EV plant, where self-tapping nut installation reached a 98% success rate.
A 3D-printed membrane raises artificial-lung oxygen transfer by 88%
Hannover Medical School and RWTH Aachen printed a silicone gas-exchange membrane on a minimal-surface geometry instead of hollow fibres, reported in Advanced Materials on 18 August 2026.
Mesoblast finishes dosing its Phase 3 disc-injection cell therapy
All 350 patients in MSB-DR004 have received a single intra-discal injection of rexlemestrocel-L or a sham, with the 12-month pain endpoint reading out in mid-2027.
A Wuhan hospital reports central China's first fully invasive BCI implant
Tongji Hospital placed eight ultra-flexible electrodes in the motor cortex of a woman paralysed for two years, using a device carrying NMPA innovative-device designation.
A two-cell corneal graft improves sight in aniridia keratopathy
Nine adults received a collagen scaffold carrying both limbal epithelial stem cells and stromal keratocytes; treated eyes improved on the ocular surface score while untreated fellow eyes did not.
Sisheng Technology raises a seed-plus round for ultrasonic BCI
Tens of millions of yuan, led by Guoqi Investment, for a company betting on focused ultrasound through the skull rather than implanted electrodes.
American Airlines bars humanoid robots, completing the big four
The policy took effect on 17 August 2026 and covers cabins and checked baggage alike; Southwest, Delta and United adopted the same rule earlier this year.
Weiling Medical raises over 100 million yuan for an implantable BCI
Junzhong Capital led the round, with a STAR Market-listed manufacturer as core industrial investor, to fund clinical verification and device registration.
Humanoids fought a real fire in Beijing and three of twelve finished
The emergency-response final of the second World Humanoid Robot Games ran at a working fire brigade, with 30 minutes to find hazards, shut valves and put out a fire.
NCNP and Waseda train a caregiving humanoid on prediction error
A predictive-processing network learned repositioning and wiping from 32,256-dimensional vision, and brain-like traits emerged without being programmed.
A wearable patch taps out which hazard it has just detected
NC State's solar-assisted patch senses six environmental hazards and tells the wearer which one through a distinct vibration pattern for each.
Science Corp's PRIMA retinal implant goes on sale across Europe
A subretinal photovoltaic chip received a CE mark covering 30 countries after a 38-patient trial reported a mean gain of 25.5 letters.
A spinal implant reads movement, sensation and organ signals at once
A flexible array wrapped around the spinal cord of freely moving rats decoded intended movement, sensory type and autonomic traffic in a single device.
Brain recordings show goals are blended, not chosen one at a time
Intracranial recordings in 19 epilepsy patients indicate the brain runs a weighted mixture of goal-specific controllers rather than switching between goals.
A robot hand with two air lines out-turns the human wrist
BioflexBot pinches, rotates, hooks and grasps from a coiled spring and two pneumatic inputs, turning a bottle cap nearly four times further than a human hand.
IASO Bio buys Singapore cell-therapy company MediSix
The Nanjing CAR-T maker completed its acquisition of MediSix Therapeutics on 13 August 2026, taking over its PEBL platform and the IASO107 programme.
The FDA clears Samsung Galaxy Buds to work as hearing aids
Galaxy Buds3 Pro and Buds4 Pro get over-the-counter hearing-aid clearance for adults with mild to moderate hearing loss, shipping in Q4 2026.
A CRISPR-armed phage clears a drug-resistant infection in one patient
A kidney transplant recipient's malakoplakia mass fell from 745 cm3 to 82 cm3 over a year after SNIPR001 was added to antibiotics under an emergency IND.
Base editing cuts toxic huntingtin in mice and holds for a year
AAV9-delivered adenine base editors skipped HTT exon 13 in YAC128 mice, cutting toxic huntingtin fragments 60% and improving grip and rotarod at 12 months.
An off-the-shelf CAR T therapy is dosed as a same-day outpatient treatment
Fate Therapeutics dosed the first patient in RECLAIM-LN, a Phase 2 trial of the iPSC-derived CAR T cell FT819 in lupus nephritis, and discharged them the same day.
A cognition drug platform changes hands for $12 million down
AlzeCure Pharma received the full USD 12 million upfront and closed the initial transaction licensing its NeuroRestore platform and ACD856 to QuantumCell of Denmark.
A youth-associated blood protein restored debris clearance in old brains
Mount Sinai researchers report in Nature Communications that TIMP2 governs microglial state, and that giving it to aged mice restored their capacity to clear debris.