❌

Reading view

Engineering inflammation-responsive proteins through nitric oxide-caged amino acids

Nature Biomedical Engineering, Published online: 31 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41551-026-01782-9

A protein engineering strategy enables nitric oxide-triggered reactivation of proteins using genetically encoded caged amino acids, allowing inflammation-localized control of protein activity, viral gene delivery and biosensing in vivo.
  •  

AgentHijack: Visual Patch Attacks on Multimodal Computer-Use Agents

arXiv:2609.09212v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents an end-to-end evaluation framework for image-triggered command injection against computer-use agents (CUAs). The goal is to test whether a local visual patch can induce verifiable environmental consequences along the full chain of screenshot input, VLM generation, action parsing, and environment execution. We train and deploy patches on author-controlled GitHub Pages pages and a locally deployed CSDN clone, and evaluate them in real environments across five open-source or publicly available GUI-agent or vision-language-model (VLM) backends. Our experiment aggregates 600 instance-level online cases, with T-ASR, TAPR, and E2E-ASR reaching 84.5%, 47.0%, and 20.3%, respectively. Trajectory analysis further shows that in some successful cases the agent first executes a malicious terminal command and then continues the original benign task. These results indicate that optimized local visual signals can affect not only VLM outputs but also propagate through the execution pipeline of open CUAs and create real environmental risk.
  •  

VLA-Precision: Asymmetric Co-Bootstrapping for Efficient Real-World Online RL of Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2609.04355v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) models enable broad manipulation but remain unreliable in tasks demanding precision and repeatability. Applying real-world online reinforcement learning (RL) to VLA post-training enables autonomous trial-and-error improvement beyond demonstrations alone, but exposes two bottlenecks: 1) unreliable value signals can induce policy drift; 2) large-VLA overhead constrains throughput and sample efficiency. To address these challenges, we present VLA-Precision, an efficient real-world online RL framework featuring the Asymmetric Co-Bootstrapping (ACoB) algorithm and the ACoB-Stream architecture. Specifically, ACoB establishes asymmetric co-bootstrapping across timescales: early intervention-guided behavioral learning rapidly improves policy performance while enhancing online experience quality. As autonomous experience accumulates, global return propagation and local preference ranking progressively calibrate value estimates, yielding relative action advantages for reference-regularized policy improvement while suppressing drift. To enable ACoB on large VLAs, we develop ACoB-Stream, a closed-loop experience--policy architecture that establishes invariant-state decoupling and on-demand streaming as design principles, delivering up to 10.9$\times$ improvements in throughput and computational efficiency. Extensive evaluations on nine high-precision chemistry tasks across four categories and four robot embodiments show that VLA-Precision achieves 98.3\% mean success rate in 45.8 min/task, with 27.6 s episodes running at 1.2$\times$ and 1.8$\times$ the speeds of VLA and RL baselines. Resources are available at https://vla-precision.github.io.
  •  

Targeting KRAS reprograms a Treg-dominant immunosuppressive microenvironment and sensitizes KRAS-mutant gastric adenocarcinoma to CTLA-4 immunotherapy

Sci China Life Sci. 2026 Sep 3. doi: 10.1007/s11427-026-3438-4. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Oncogenic KRAS mutations define a distinct molecular subset of gastric adenocarcinoma (GA), yet their impact on the tumor immune microenvironment remains incompletely understood. In this study, we established a genetically faithful and immunocompetent KRASG12D-driven mouse model of GA, together with matched organoids and cell lines, to investigate how oncogenic KRAS shapes tumor-immune interactions. KRAS-mutant tumors consistently developed an immunosuppressive microenvironment characterized by enrichment of regulatory T cells (Tregs), accompanied by reduced cytotoxic lymphocyte infiltration and intrinsic resistance to PD-1 blockade. Although pharmacologic targeting of KRAS effectively suppressed tumor growth and increased immune cell infiltration, functional immune analyses revealed persistent Treg-mediated immunosuppression that limited effective antitumor immunity. Mechanistically, TGF-Ξ² signaling was required to maintain Treg dominance and suppress effector T cell function in KRAS-driven tumors. Importantly, disruption of this suppressive axis through combined KRAS inhibition and CTLA-4 blockade attenuated TGF-Ξ² activity, impaired Treg function, and enhanced antitumor immune responses in vivo. Collectively, these findings identify oncogenic KRAS as a key regulator of TGF-Ξ²-dependent immune suppression in GA and provide mechanistic insight into immune evasion within this molecular subtype.

PMID:42714795 | DOI:10.1007/s11427-026-3438-4

  •  
❌