Growing up, I’ve heard about ovarian cancer: a “silent killer”, often hard to detect – with the current standard for detection being routine abdominal ultrasounds. In 2025, 20,890 new women received a diagnosis and 12,730 women passed away. But hearing…

Recently, I came across this news release from the FDA, where as of April 2025, the agency declared it would be phasing out animal testing for monoclonal antibodies (man-made proteins meant to stimulate the immune system) and other drugs.

I’m writing this post after reading this article from the Harvard Gazette, which discussed how the first personalized gene therapy was developed for a newborn baby with severe CPS1 deficiency, a rare genetic disorder that causes buildup of ammonia in…

10¹⁴. It’s a large number – one hundred trillion to be exact. To put that into perspective, one year contains approximately 3.15 × 10⁷ seconds, so to get to 10¹⁴ seconds, that would take about three million years.

The result of protein production is probably the most important part of the story, which I started telling in this post. Proteins govern all our body processes, from digestion to oxygen transport. So, what happens when the result – or…