Synopsis of Good News Medical Advances in November 2025
- Editor OGN Daily
- 34 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Global round up of all the best news about medicine and treatments that OGN has spotted this month.
Healing Hearts: MIT engineers have designed a programmable drug-delivery patch that could help the heart heal after a heart attack, no open-heart surgery required. The flexible hydrogel patch, applied directly to the heart, releases three drugs in sequence over two weeks: one prevents cell death, another spurs blood vessel growth and a third blocks scarring. The approach mimics the body’s own healing timeline, restoring heart function far more effectively than traditional treatments.
Nutrient Linked to Anxiety: Scientists have identified a significant link between low levels of choline and the prevalence of anxiety disorders. Apparently almost all of us aren't getting enough. Happily, there's a simple fix.
Organ Transplant AI: Researchers at Stanford University have created an AI tool that could dramatically boost the efficiency of organ transplants. Trained on data from more than 2,000 donors, the tool outperforms top surgeons and helps ensure that more viable livers reach patients - and should give more people a chance at life.
Repurposing Drugs: Dr. David Fajgenbaum, associate professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, is founder of Every Cure, a nonprofit that employs artificial intelligence to find safe, new applications for existing medications. It uses 'computational pharmacophenomics' to look for shared connections between the approximately 18,500 globally recognized diseases and the 4,000 FDA-approved existing treatments. Since, 2022, his team says it’s already saved thousands of lives via 14 repurposed drugs and Fajgenbaum aims to ensure “that no patient suffers when there’s a lifesaving cure sitting on the pharmacy shelf,” he said in the TED Talk. “And instead of hearing ‘we’ve tried everything,’ they can hear ‘we have something.’”
Medical AI: In another example of the power of artificial intelligence in the medical field, the world’s deadliest infectious disease, tuberculosis, is now being fought with AI across more than 80 low- and middle-income countries. NPR reports that trained health workers use mobile x-ray units that send images to an AI program, which instantly analyses them and highlights possible signs of TB in vivid, heat map-like scans, filling a life-saving gap and catching cases that would otherwise go unseen.
Vision Restored: More than 5 million people worldwide are impacted by age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness. There’s never been a treatment for this - until now. It’s all thanks to PRIMA, a tiny eye implant half as thick as a human hair. When paired with augmented-reality glasses, the pioneering device is the first to enable people to read letters, numbers, and words with an eye that had lost its sight. “In the history of artificial vision, this represents a new era,” said Mahi Muqit, who led the U.K. arm of the trial. “Blind patients are actually able to have meaningful central vision restoration, which has never been done before. It improves "their quality of life, lifts their mood, and helps to restore their confidence and independence.”
First Advance in Ages: Scientists have developed a new anti-malaria drug to help fight rising drug resistance. Called GanLum, the drug was more than 97 percent effective at treating malaria in the final-stage trial results. While existing treatments work against malaria, there has been growing resistance to one of the key drugs used. This new treatment option is the first major advancement in treating malaria in decades, and it works differently from previous antimalarial drugs.
'Femtech': Several largely female-led 'femtech' startups and a handful of academic research teams are looking at how period blood - collected non-invasively - can be used to help test for a range of women’s health conditions, including endometriosis, traditionally diagnosed through surgery. Some are wondering if it could be “the most overlooked opportunity” in women’s health. Much of the research focuses on using menstrual effluent to help diagnose gynaecological and reproduction health conditions. It also might be used to screen for cancers, track hormones and monitor diabetes, and one group is investigating its potential in stem cell research. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, meanwhile, is so interested in the area that it has launched a $10m menstruation science initiative in early 2025. As MIT’s Linda Griffith put it: “This is frontier science.”