Crispr gene-editing technology has demonstrated its revolutionary potential in recent years: It has been used to treat rare diseases, to adapt crops to withstand the extremes of climate change, or even to change the color of a spider’s web. But the greatest hope is that this technology will help find a cure for a global disease, such as diabetes. A new study points in that direction.

For the first time, researchers succeeded in implanting Crispr-edited pancreatic cells in a man with type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease where the immune system attacks insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. Without insulin, the body is then unable to regulate blood sugar. If steps aren’t taken to manage glucose levels by other means (typically, by injecting insulin), this can lead to damage to the nerves and organs—particularly the heart, kidneys, and eyes. Roughly 9.5 million people worldwide have type 1 diabetes.

In this experiment, edited cells produced insulin for months after being implanted, without the need for the recipient to take any immunosuppressive drugs to stop their body attacking the cells. The Crispr technology allowed the researchers to endow the genetically modified cells with camouflage to evade detection.

The study, published last month in The New England Journal of Medicine, details the step-by-step procedure. First, pancreatic islet cells were taken from a deceased donor without diabetes, and then altered with the gene-editing technique Crispr-Cas12b to allow them to evade the immune response of the diabetes patient. Cells altered like this are said to be “hypoimmune,” explains Sonja Schrepfer, a professor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in California and the scientific cofounder of Sana Biotechnology, the company that developed this treatment.

The edited cells were then implanted into the forearm muscle of the patient, and after 12 weeks, no signs of rejection were detected. (A subsequent report from Sana Biotechnology notes that the implanted cells were still evading the patient’s immune system after six months.)

Tests run as part of the study recorded that the cells were functional: The implanted cells secreted insulin in response to glucose levels, representing a key step toward controlling diabetes without the need for insulin injections. Four adverse events were recorded during follow-ups with the patient, but none of them were serious or directly linked to the modified cells.

The researchers’ ultimate goal is to apply immune-camouflaging gene edits to stem cells—which have the ability to reproduce and differentiate themselves into other cell types inside the body—and then to direct their development into insulin-secreting islet cells. “The advantage of engineering hypoimmune stem cells is that when these stem cells proliferate and create new cells, the new cells are also hypoimmune,” Schrepfer explained in a Cedars-Sinai Q+A earlier this year.

Traditionally, transplanting foreign cells into a patient has required suppressing the patient’s immune system to avoid them being rejected. This carries significant risks: infections, toxicity, and long-term complications. “Seeing patients die from rejection or severe complications from immunosuppression was frustrating to me, and I decided to focus my career on developing strategies to overcome immune rejection without immunosuppressive drugs,” Schrepfer told Cedars-Sinai.

Although the research marks a milestone in the search for treatments of type 1 diabetes, it’s important to note that the study involved one one participant, who received a low dose of cells for a short period—not enough for the patient to no longer need to control their blood sugar with injected insulin. An editorial by the journal Nature also says that some independent research groups have failed in their efforts to confirm that Sana’s method provides edited cells with the ability to evade the immune system.

Sana will be looking to conduct more clinical trials starting next year. Without overlooking the criticisms and limitations of the current study, the possibility of transplanting cells modified to be invisible to the immune system opens up a very promising horizon in regenerative medicine.

This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

Children under 15 in France should be banned entirely from using social media, and those aged between 15 and 18 should face a nighttime “digital curfew,” a French parliamentary committee urged on Thursday.

The recommendations were put forward in a report by the committee’s lawmakers after months of testimony from families, social media executives, and from influencers.

President Emmanuel Macron’s office has already indicated it wants to see a ban for children and young adolescents, after Australia last year started drafting its own landmark law with a prohibition for those under 16.

The committee had been set up in March, initially to examine TikTok and its psychological effects on minors after a 2024 lawsuit against the platform by seven families accusing the platform of exposing their children to content pushing them towards suicide.

Its lead report writer, Laure Miller, said the addictive design of TikTok and its algorithm “has been copied by other social media.”

TikTok has stressed that the safety of young users of its app is its “top priority.”

Geraldine, the mother of an 18-year-old woman who committed suicide, told AFP that, after her daughter’s death last year, she had discovered videos of self-harm her daughter had published and looked at on TikTok.

“TikTok didn’t kill our little girl, because she wasn’t well in any case,” said Geraldine, 52, who declined to be identified by her last name.

But she accused TikTok of falling short in its online moderation, and plunging her daughter deeper into her dark impulses.

TikTok testimony

Executives for TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDace, told the parliamentary committee that the app used AI-enhanced moderation that last year caught 98% of content infringing its terms of service in France.

But for the lawmakers, those efforts were deemed insufficient, and TikTok’s rules were “very easy to circumvent.”

It also found that harmful content continued to proliferate on the app, and TikTok’s algorithm was effective in drawing young users into loops reinforcing such content.

The committee’s report suggested that the ban on children under 15 using social media could be broadened to everyone under 18 if, within the next three years, the platforms did not respect European laws.

Its recommendation for a “digital curfew” for users aged 15 to 18 was for social media to be made unavailable to them between the hours of 10 pm and 8 am.

© 2025 AFP

EE has deployed a technology from Ericsson, advanced radio access network (RAN) coordination (ARC), that it says will give millions of 5G users across the UK a significant boost to their connectivity.

Fundamentally, ARC technology is designed to allow nearby mobile sites to remotely pair up and share capacity, with the result of “dramatically” boosting network performance – especially in busy areas at peak times – without the need for additional masts.

EE claims to be the first mobile operator globally to use ARC in its distributed mobile network. It has been able to roll out inter-site 5G downlink carrier aggregation in its distributed RAN to combine spare capacity from multiple independent cell sites, and is said to have had the result of increasing downlink data performance by approximately 20% on average, more than doubling performance under ideal conditions.

The operator believes the deployment represents smarter infrastructure, not just more equipment. Indeed, it noted that instead of installing new radio equipment, it was using a small optical pluggable device in each baseband unit to enable this capacity sharing. The software-driven approach is said to allow it to scale performance efficiently, keeping infrastructure costs low while delivering high-impact results for customers where it’s needed most.

The technology is further enabled by EE’s parent BT Group’s fibre infrastructure, which connects cell sites, regarded as crucial for enabling real-time coordination between sites – with less than a half a millisecond delay – and which is needed to unlock the full benefits of 5G carrier aggregation.

Initially trialled in Bristol, the technology has already gone live on EE’s network in major cities including Manchester and Edinburgh to deliver faster and more reliable 5G connectivity for customers in busy locations such as train stations, high streets and city centres. In Edinburgh, for example, sites supporting the city’s Waverley Station have been boosted, while in Manchester it has been deployed in sites across the city centre.

Throughout the next year, EE plans to deploy the technology across some of the UK’s busiest cities, boosting 5G performance for customers in London, Leeds, Glasgow, Liverpool, Belfast, Cardiff, Newcastle, Sheffield and Sunderland. Customers in these places using the latest 5G standalone (5G SA) compatible devices – on both iOS and Android – will see the biggest performance gains.

EE launched 5G SA networks in 15 cities across the UK in September 2024, and is currently embarking on a plan to roll out 5G standalone to a further 17 towns and cities by the end of December 2025, making 5G standalone available to more than 41 million people by spring 2026.

The locations set to benefit next include: Basildon, Bolton, Brighton and Hove, Colchester, Gloucester, Lincoln, Maidstone, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Northampton, Oxford, Plymouth, Poole, Portsmouth, Reading, Southampton, Southend-on-Sea, and Telford.

Greg McCall, chief networks officer at BT Group, said: “EE customers are the first in the world to benefit from this technology, with millions of them getting a huge boost to the 5G connectivity they rely on every day.

“By increasing capacity in this way, our customers will get faster speeds and an even more reliable experience instantly. It is a real game-changer, and yet another example of how the nation gets a better network experience on EE. We are building our 5G standalone network at an unprecedented pace to connect customers, communities and the country to the most reliable and powerful mobile experiences.”