Latest news with #Centivax
Fox News
6 days ago
- Health
- Fox News
ChatGPT dietary advice sends man to hospital with dangerous chemical poisoning
A man who used ChatGPT for dietary advice ended up poisoning himself — and wound up in the hospital. The 60-year-old man, who was looking to eliminate table salt from his diet for health reasons, used the large language model (LLM) to get suggestions for what to replace it with, according to a case study published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine. When ChatGPT suggested swapping sodium chloride (table salt) for sodium bromide, the man made the replacement for a three-month period — although, the journal article noted, the recommendation was likely referring to it for other purposes, such as cleaning. Sodium bromide is a chemical compound that resembles salt, but is toxic for human consumption. It was once used as an anticonvulsant and sedative, but today is primarily used for cleaning, manufacturing and agricultural purposes, according to the National Institutes of Health. When the man arrived at the hospital, he reported experiencing fatigue, insomnia, poor coordination, facial acne, cherry angiomas (red bumps on the skin) and excessive thirst — all symptoms of bromism, a condition caused by long-term exposure to sodium bromide. The man also showed signs of paranoia, the case study noted, as he claimed that his neighbor was trying to poison him. He was also found to have auditory and visual hallucinations, and was ultimately placed on a psychiatric hold after attempting to escape. The man was treated with intravenous fluids and electrolytes, and was also put on anti-psychotic medication. He was released from the hospital after three weeks of monitoring. "This case also highlights how the use of artificial intelligence (AI) can potentially contribute to the development of preventable adverse health outcomes," the researchers wrote in the case study. "These are language prediction tools — they lack common sense and will give rise to terrible results if the human user does not apply their own common sense." "Unfortunately, we do not have access to his ChatGPT conversation log and we will never be able to know with certainty what exactly the output he received was, since individual responses are unique and build from previous inputs." It is "highly unlikely" that a human doctor would have mentioned sodium bromide when speaking with a patient seeking a substitute for sodium chloride, they noted. "It is important to consider that ChatGPT and other AI systems can generate scientific inaccuracies, lack the ability to critically discuss results and ultimately fuel the spread of misinformation," the researchers concluded. Dr. Jacob Glanville, CEO of Centivax, a San Francisco biotechnology company, emphasized that people should not use ChatGPT as a substitute for a doctor. "These are language prediction tools — they lack common sense and will give rise to terrible results if the human user does not apply their own common sense when deciding what to ask these systems and whether to heed their recommendations," Glanville, who was not involved in the case study, told Fox News Digital. "This is a classic example of the problem: The system essentially went, 'You want a salt alternative? Sodium bromide is often listed as a replacement for sodium chloride in chemistry reactions, so therefore it's the highest-scoring replacement here.'" Dr. Harvey Castro, a board-certified emergency medicine physician and national speaker on artificial intelligence based in Dallas, confirmed that AI is a tool and not a doctor. "Large language models generate text by predicting the most statistically likely sequence of words, not by fact-checking," he told Fox News Digital. "ChatGPT's bromide blunder shows why context is king in health advice," Castro went on. "AI is not a replacement for professional medical judgment, aligning with OpenAI's disclaimers." Castro also cautioned that there is a "regulation gap" when it comes to using LLMs to get medical information. "Our terms say that ChatGPT is not intended for use in the treatment of any health condition, and is not a substitute for professional advice." "FDA bans on bromide don't extend to AI advice — global health AI oversight remains undefined," he said. There is also the risk that LLMs could have data bias and a lack of verification, leading to hallucinated information. "If training data includes outdated, rare or chemically focused references, the model may surface them in inappropriate contexts, such as bromide as a salt substitute," Castro noted. "Also, current LLMs don't have built-in cross-checking against up-to-date medical databases unless explicitly integrated." To prevent cases like this one, Castro called for more safeguards for LLMs, such as integrated medical knowledge bases, automated risk flags, contextual prompting and a combination of human and AI oversight. The expert added, "With targeted safeguards, LLMs can evolve from risky generalists into safer, specialized tools; however, without regulation and oversight, rare cases like this will likely recur." For more health articles, visit OpenAI, the San Francisco-based maker of ChatGPT, provided the following statement to Fox News Digital. "Our terms say that ChatGPT is not intended for use in the treatment of any health condition, and is not a substitute for professional advice. We have safety teams working on reducing risks and have trained our AI systems to encourage people to seek professional guidance."
Axios
09-07-2025
- Health
- Axios
Vaccine startup nets $45 million in funding despite wider skepticism
Not too long ago, mRNA vaccines were viewed as one of the country's most significant biotech breakthroughs. Safe, effective, and well-funded. Today, they're viewed with skepticism — if not outright fear — by many Americans, including HHS chief RFK Jr. So it seems like an unlikely time to raise $45 million in venture capital funding for an mRNA vax startup, let alone one working on a universal flu vaccine. But that's just what Silicon Valley-based Centivax did yesterday, led by Steve Jurvetson's Future Ventures. Centivax is the second startup from Jake Glanville, who many may recall as the curly-haired guy featured on Netflix's "Pandemic" documentary series — filmed before COVID but airing right as it exploded. His first was an antibody developer called Distributed Bio, which sold to Charles River Labs in 2021 but let Glanville keep the underlying tech. Centivax initially raised some seed capital from NFX and Global Health Investment Fund, plus non-dilutive funding from The Gates Foundation, U.S. Army and U.S. Navy. It's already begun manufacturing, done a variety of animal tests (including on pigs, which get the flu), and on human immune organoids. Phase 1 clinical trials come next, with expectations that they could go quicker than usual given the ubiquity of influenza in both hemispheres. Glanville acknowledges the fraught political climate, but argues that "it's not as bad as some news articles would lead you to believe." He believes that confusing vaccine messaging during the pandemic is partially to blame for mRNA hesitancy. Plus the spate of myocarditis cases for young men, which Glanville attributes to coronavirus' unique "spike" — something he thinks would normally have been engineered out of a vaccine, but wasn't given the time constraints. "This FDA already has fast-tracked a couple of mRNA vaccines," Glanville says, adding that both President Trump and FDA chief Marty Makary have said they want a universal flu vaccine. "They just put $500 million toward a universal flu shot effort — not ours, but they think mRNA needs more study and we're here to do more study." Centivax believes that its tech eventually could apply to universal coronavirus, malaria, HIV and herpes viruses that may be linked to Alzheimer's disease.
Business Wire
12-06-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Parallel Bio Secures $21 Million in Series A to Advance Human-First Drug Discovery
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Parallel Bio, a biotech company pioneering human-first drug discovery, today announced it has raised $21 million Series A funding, led by AIX Ventures. The round attracted prominent leaders in AI and biotech, including new investors Amplo and Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, and existing investors Metaplanet, Humba Ventures, Atypical Ventures, Undeterred Capital, and Jeff Dean. 'Parallel Bio is redefining drug development by turning the conventional model upside down—transforming today's 95% failure rate into a pathway for 95% success." Share The company also revealed that 8 pharmaceutical partners, including three Fortune 500 companies, are testing more than 50 drugs and immunotherapies using its organoid-based immune system platform—including Centivax, which completed the first preclinical testing on the platform for its universal flu vaccine candidate. 'With these milestones, we are closer to making human-first drug discovery the new industry standard,' said Robert DiFazio, CEO and co-founder at Parallel Bio. 'For too long, the reliance on lab mice to model human biology has come at a high cost: 95% of drugs fail in human trials even after succeeding in animal studies. We're turning that on its head by using organoids and AI to discover drugs in true-to-life human models from the start.' Parallel Bio will use the new capital to scale the AI and automation capabilities of its organoid-based immune system platform, expand its team of scientists and engineers, and support growing pharmaceutical partnerships. To date, Parallel Bio has raised a total of nearly $30 million, including this Series A and previous seed rounds. Parallel Bio's platform combines lymph-node organoids with AI and robotics to replicate the human immune system at scale across diverse populations. Organoids are 3D, self-assembling models of human biology. These miniature organs mimic an organ's structure and function and the body's response to disease or treatment, as if the organoids were individual patients. AIX Ventures partner Krish Ramadurai, who joined the company's board of directors as part of the round, commented: 'Parallel Bio is redefining drug development by turning the conventional model upside down—transforming today's 95% failure rate into a pathway for 95% success. Their groundbreaking human-first platform unlocks biological insights previously impossible to capture, accelerating the development of effective treatments that reach patients faster while generating de novo biological data to power the next generation of AI-driven therapeutics. We're thrilled to partner with the Parallel Bio team in setting a new gold standard for the future of medicine.' Since launching Clinical Trial in a Dish last year, Parallel Bio has seen growing demand from pharmaceutical companies. This first commercial application accurately predicts the safest and most effective drug candidates for human trials. 'Starting with human models enables new drugs to reach the market at a pace never possible before,' said Juliana Hilliard, Parallel Bio co-founder and chief scientific officer. 'We aim to slash $2 billion and 9 years from each drug candidate in development by predicting success at the earliest stages of discovery.' Centivax Validates Broad Immune Response in Organoid Trial Parallel Bio partnered with Centivax, a universal immunity biotechnology company, to generate human-first data to validate Centivax's first program: a universal flu vaccine called Centi-Flu that is now in manufacturing for human clinical trials, with the first patient expected to be dosed early next year. 'Parallel Bio enables us to derisk the single biggest source of failure in vaccine development: making sure the vaccines work in humans before the human trials have even begun,' said Jacob Glanville, president and CEO at Centivax. 'Even though we have validated our pan-influenza responses in mice, rats, pigs, and ferrets, ultimately we are making a universal vaccine for humans. Parallel Bio's platform is transformative by allowing us to directly validate our results in immune organoids derived from adult humans.' The organoid study revealed the power of the Centi-Flu technology: by effectively targeting common features of the virus shared by many different influenza strains, Centi-Flu even produces strong immune responses against strains not included in the vaccine. Human immune organoids were 'vaccinated' with Centi-Flu, leading to the production of B cells capable of reacting to a wide variety of flu strains. The immune organoids were derived from patients with prior flu exposure, proving that Centi-Flu could trigger broad humoral responses in flu-exposed individuals. The organoid model also showed activation of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells, which are important for fighting infections, suggesting that Centi-Flu helps stimulate both antibody production and T cell immunity. This combination is particularly valuable for protecting against severe flu, including hospitalization and death. About Parallel Bio Parallel Bio is pioneering human-first drug discovery by combining organoids and AI to create true-to-life models of human biology. The company developed the first platform that replicates the human immune system across diverse populations, predicting drug success and identifying disease targets with accuracy and speed far beyond the limits of traditional animal models. Pharmaceutical partners, including three Fortune 500 companies, are using its Clinical Trial in a Dish to test the safety and efficacy of immunotherapies. Based in Cambridge, Mass., Parallel Bio was founded in 2021 by two scientists behind the world's first scalable human immune organoid.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Parallel Bio Secures $21 Million in Series A to Advance Human-First Drug Discovery
Signs on Eight Pharmaceutical Partners and Completes First Preclinical Study from Immune Organoid Platform with Centivax CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 12, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Parallel Bio, a biotech company pioneering human-first drug discovery, today announced it has raised $21 million Series A funding, led by AIX Ventures. The round attracted prominent leaders in AI and biotech, including new investors Amplo and Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, and existing investors Metaplanet, Humba Ventures, Atypical Ventures, Undeterred Capital, and Jeff Dean. The company also revealed that 8 pharmaceutical partners, including three Fortune 500 companies, are testing more than 50 drugs and immunotherapies using its organoid-based immune system platform—including Centivax, which completed the first preclinical testing on the platform for its universal flu vaccine candidate. "With these milestones, we are closer to making human-first drug discovery the new industry standard," said Robert DiFazio, CEO and co-founder at Parallel Bio. "For too long, the reliance on lab mice to model human biology has come at a high cost: 95% of drugs fail in human trials even after succeeding in animal studies. We're turning that on its head by using organoids and AI to discover drugs in true-to-life human models from the start." Parallel Bio will use the new capital to scale the AI and automation capabilities of its organoid-based immune system platform, expand its team of scientists and engineers, and support growing pharmaceutical partnerships. To date, Parallel Bio has raised a total of nearly $30 million, including this Series A and previous seed rounds. Parallel Bio's platform combines lymph-node organoids with AI and robotics to replicate the human immune system at scale across diverse populations. Organoids are 3D, self-assembling models of human biology. These miniature organs mimic an organ's structure and function and the body's response to disease or treatment, as if the organoids were individual patients. AIX Ventures partner Krish Ramadurai, who joined the company's board of directors as part of the round, commented: "Parallel Bio is redefining drug development by turning the conventional model upside down—transforming today's 95% failure rate into a pathway for 95% success. Their groundbreaking human-first platform unlocks biological insights previously impossible to capture, accelerating the development of effective treatments that reach patients faster while generating de novo biological data to power the next generation of AI-driven therapeutics. We're thrilled to partner with the Parallel Bio team in setting a new gold standard for the future of medicine." Since launching Clinical Trial in a Dish last year, Parallel Bio has seen growing demand from pharmaceutical companies. This first commercial application accurately predicts the safest and most effective drug candidates for human trials. "Starting with human models enables new drugs to reach the market at a pace never possible before," said Juliana Hilliard, Parallel Bio co-founder and chief scientific officer. "We aim to slash $2 billion and 9 years from each drug candidate in development by predicting success at the earliest stages of discovery." Centivax Validates Broad Immune Response in Organoid Trial Parallel Bio partnered with Centivax, a universal immunity biotechnology company, to generate human-first data to validate Centivax's first program: a universal flu vaccine called Centi-Flu that is now in manufacturing for human clinical trials, with the first patient expected to be dosed early next year. "Parallel Bio enables us to derisk the single biggest source of failure in vaccine development: making sure the vaccines work in humans before the human trials have even begun," said Jacob Glanville, president and CEO at Centivax. "Even though we have validated our pan-influenza responses in mice, rats, pigs, and ferrets, ultimately we are making a universal vaccine for humans. Parallel Bio's platform is transformative by allowing us to directly validate our results in immune organoids derived from adult humans." The organoid study revealed the power of the Centi-Flu technology: by effectively targeting common features of the virus shared by many different influenza strains, Centi-Flu even produces strong immune responses against strains not included in the vaccine. Human immune organoids were "vaccinated" with Centi-Flu, leading to the production of B cells capable of reacting to a wide variety of flu strains. The immune organoids were derived from patients with prior flu exposure, proving that Centi-Flu could trigger broad humoral responses in flu-exposed individuals. The organoid model also showed activation of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells, which are important for fighting infections, suggesting that Centi-Flu helps stimulate both antibody production and T cell immunity. This combination is particularly valuable for protecting against severe flu, including hospitalization and death. About Parallel Bio Parallel Bio is pioneering human-first drug discovery by combining organoids and AI to create true-to-life models of human biology. The company developed the first platform that replicates the human immune system across diverse populations, predicting drug success and identifying disease targets with accuracy and speed far beyond the limits of traditional animal models. Pharmaceutical partners, including three Fortune 500 companies, are using its Clinical Trial in a Dish to test the safety and efficacy of immunotherapies. Based in Cambridge, Mass., Parallel Bio was founded in 2021 by two scientists behind the world's first scalable human immune organoid. View source version on Contacts Media contactMatt Hickspress@ Business contactRobert DiFaziobd@
7NEWS
11-05-2025
- Health
- 7NEWS
Tim injected himself with snake venom hundreds of times. Now, his blood could save lives
Immunologist Jacob Glanville came across media reports in 2017 of a man who had injected himself hundreds of times with the venom of some of the world's deadliest snakes, including cobras, mambas, and rattlesnakes — and allowed himself to be bitten. 'The news articles were kind of flashy. 'Crazy guy gets bit by snakes',' Glanville said. 'But I looked, and I was like there's a diamond in the rough here.' Glanville's diamond was Tim Friede, a self-taught snake expert based in California who exposed himself to the venom of snakes over the course of nearly 18 years, effectively gaining immunity to several neurotoxins. 'We had this conversation. And I said, I know it's awkward, but I'm really interested in looking at some of your blood,' Glanville recalled. 'He said 'finally, I've been waiting for this call'.' The pair agreed to work together, and Friede donated a 40-milliliter blood sample to Glanville and his colleagues. Eight years later, Glanville and Peter Kwong, Richard J. Stock Professor of medical sciences at Columbia University's Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, have published details of an antivenom that can protect against bites from 19 species of venomous snake — at least in mice — based on antibodies in Friede's blood and a venom-blocking drug. 'Tim, to my knowledge, he has an unparalleled history. It was different, very diverse species from every continent that has snakes, and ... he kept rotating between (the snake venoms) over a 17-year, nine-month history, and he took meticulous records the entire time,' Glanville said. 'However, we strongly discourage anyone from trying to do what Tim did,' Glanville added. 'Snake venom is dangerous.' Friede gave up immunising himself with snake venom in 2018 after some close calls, and he is now employed by Glanville's biotechnology company Centivax, Glanville said. Glanville is CEO and chairman of Centivax. The research was published Friday in the scientific journal Cell. CNN contacted Friede, but he did not respond to an interview request. The snakebite problem If you're unlucky enough to have a venomous snake sink its fangs into you, your best hope is an antivenom, which for the most part has been made in the same way since Victorian times. Traditionally, the process involves milking snake venom by hand and injecting it into horses or other animals in small doses to evoke an immune response. The animal's blood is drawn and purified to obtain antibodies that act against the venom. Producing antivenom in this way can get messy, not to mention dangerous. The process is prone to errors and laborious, and the finished serum can result in serious side effects. Experts have long called for better ways to treat snakebites, which kill some 200 people a day, mainly in the developing world, and leave 400,000 people a year with disabilities. The World Health Organization added snakebite to its list of neglected tropical diseases in 2017. Glanville, who grew up in rural Guatemala, said he had long been aware of the health problems posed by snakebites and immediately recognised that Friede's experience presented a unique opportunity. Exposing himself to the venom of snakes for nearly two decades, by injecting venom and allowing himself to be bitten, Friede had generated antibodies that were effective against several snake neurotoxins at once. 'Revolutionary' potential The researchers isolated antibodies from Friede's blood that reacted with neurotoxins found within the 19 snake species tested in the study, which included coral snakes, mambas, cobras, taipans, kraits and others. These antibodies were then tested one by one in mice poisoned by venom from each of the 19 species, allowing scientists to understand systematically the minimum number of components that would neutralise all the venoms. The drug cocktail the team created ultimately included three things: two antibodies isolated from Friede and the small-molecule drug varespladib, which inhibits an enzyme that is present in 95% of all snakebites. The drug is currently in human clinical trials as a standalone treatment. The first antibody, known as LNX-D09, protected mice from a lethal dose of whole venom from six of the snake species. The addition of varespladib granted protection against an additional three species. Finally, researchers added a second antibody isolated from Friede's blood, called SNX-B03, which extended protection across 19 species. The antivenom offered the mice 100% protection against the venom for 13 species and partial protection (20% to 40%) for the remaining six, the researchers noted in the study. Steven Hall, a snakebite pharmacologist at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, called it a 'very clever and creative way' to develop an antivenom. Hall wasn't involved in the research. And while the cocktail has not been tested in humans, should it be approved for clinical use, Hall said the human origin of the antibodies would likely mean fewer side effects than antivenoms made the traditional way using horses or other animals, which can often result in allergic reactions. 'It's impressive for the fact that this is done with one or two antibodies, plus a small-molecule drug, and that increases the number of species, versus a regular antidote. And I think it does a good job of highlighting the potential utility of combining a small-molecule drug with an antibody,' Hall added. 'If it makes it into clinic, makes it into people in the long run, it would be revolutionary. It actually would completely change the field in terms of snakebite (treatment),' he said. Columbia's Kwong said that the published research focused on a class of snakes known as elapids. It did not include viperids, the other major group of venomous snakes that includes rattlesnakes, saw-scaled vipers and additional species. However, the team is investigating whether additional antibodies identified in Friede's blood or other agents might offer protection against this viperid family of snakes. 'The final contemplated product would be a single, pan-antivenom cocktail or we potentially would make two: one that is for the elapids and another that is for the viperids because some areas of the world only have one or the other,' Kwong said. The team also wants to start field research in Australia, where there are only elapid snakes, allowing vets to use the antivenom on dogs bitten by snakes.
