Genetically-edited'mighty mice' are being sent up to the International Space Station today as experts investigate how to limit muscle and bone loss in low gravity. Tweaked to have enhanced muscle growth, the ripped rodents will ride on-board a ship being launched by Elon Musk's rocket company, SpaceX. The mission had been scheduled to launch yesterday, but rough winds detected in the upper atmosphere forced a one-day delay for safety reasons. Lift-off of the Falcon 9 rocket is now expected to take place at 12:29 EST (19:29 GMT) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It's'Dragon' capsule will go on to dock with the space station on Sunday.

As part of Microsoft's Project Hanover, biomedical researchers from the Jackson Laboratory are refining an artificial intelligence tool that "reads" medical documents to inform the development of precision cancer treatments, per an Oct. 27 Microsoft blog post. The Bar Harbor, Maine-based Jackson Laboratory developed a searchable database of complex genomic information that can be sorted and interpreted to improve outcomes and share information about clinical trials and treatments. To speed this process, the lab's researchers are applying Microsoft's machine reading AI, which automatically extracts from thousands of medical and research documents only the most relevant information about cancer mutations, drugs and patient responses. The partnership is mutually beneficial: Microsoft's AI tool is increasing the lab team's efficiency in curating their Clinical Knowledgebase, while their usage is simultaneously validating the AI's accuracy and effectiveness in "reading" documents. "Our goal is to make the human curators superpowered," said Hoifung Poon, Project Hanover's lead researcher and director of precision health natural language processing with Microsoft's research organization.

Biomedical researchers are embracing artificial intelligence to accelerate the implementation of cancer treatments that target patients' specific genomic profiles, a type of precision medicine that in some cases is more effective than traditional chemotherapy and has fewer side effects. The potential for this new era of cancer treatment stems from advances in genome sequencing technology that enables researchers to more efficiently discover the specific genomic mutations that drive cancer, and an explosion of research on the development of new drugs that target those mutations. To harness this potential, researchers at The Jackson Laboratory, an independent, nonprofit biomedical research institution also known as JAX and headquartered in Bar Harbor, Maine, developed a tool to help the global medical and scientific communities stay on top of the continuously growing volume of data generated by advances in genomic research. The tool, called the Clinical Knowledgebase, or CKB, is a searchable database where subject matter experts store, sort and interpret complex genomic data to improve patient outcomes and share information about clinical trials and treatment options. The challenge is to find the most relevant cancer-related information from the 4,000 or so biomedical research papers published each day, according to Susan Mockus, the associate director of clinical genomic market development with JAX's genomic medicine institute in Farmington, Connecticut.