For the first time, scientists have reconstructed ancient genomes of Human betaherpesvirus 6A and 6B (HHV-6A/B) from archaeological human remains more than two millennia old. The study, led by the University of Vienna and University of Tartu (Estonia) and published in Science Advances, confirms that these viruses have been evolving with and within humans since at least the Iron Age. The findings trace the long history of HHV-6 integration into human chromosomes and suggest that HHV-6A lost this ability early on.

All Norwegian women who have given birth will be offered a postnatal check-up by their GP or midwife six weeks after giving birth. Most of those who participate experience this as an important offer. Nevertheless, one in four women does not attend the postnatal check-up.

Why does cancer sometimes recur after chemotherapy? Why do some bacteria survive antibiotic treatment? In many cases, the answer appears to lie not in genetic differences, but in biological noise — random fluctuations in molecular activity that occur even among genetically identical cells.

Biological systems are inherently noisy, as molecules inside living cells are produced, degraded, and interact through fundamentally random processes. Understanding how biological systems cope with such fluctuations — and how they might be controlled — has been a long-standing challenge in systems and synthetic biology.

Although modern biology can regulate the average behavior of a cell population, controlling the unpredictable fluctuations of individual cells has remained a major challenge. These rare “outlier” cells, driven by stochastic variation, can behave differently from the majority and influence system-level outcomes.

This longstanding problem has been answered by a joint research team led by Professor KIM Jae Kyoung (KAIST, IBS Biomedical Mathematics Group), KIM Jinsu (POSTECH), and Professor CHO Byung-Kwan (KAIST), which has developed a novel mathematical framework called the “Noise Controller” (NC). This achievement establishes a level of single-cell precision control previously thought impossible, and it is expected to provide a key breakthrough for longstanding challenges in cancer therapy and synthetic biology.

Within tumors in the human body, there are immune cells (macrophages) capable of fighting cancer, but they have been unable to perform their roles properly due to suppression by the tumor. KAIST researchers have overcome this limitation by developing a new therapeutic approach that directly converts immune cells inside tumors into anticancer cell therapies.