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Moderna and Merck say their personalized mRNA melanoma vaccine significantly reduced both cancer recurrence and spread in a late-stage trial. The treatment could reach patients as soon as next year if regulators approve it. Reuters reports: Moderna developed the vaccine with Merck and tested it together with immunotherapy drug Keytruda, a widely used treatment for melanoma. [...] This is the first positive late-stage trial result for an mRNA cancer vaccine, which trains a patient's immune system to fight tumors by targeting specific mutations in those cells and the first such study to show that adding a treatment to Keytruda worked better than that therapy alone. Similar approaches are being tested against lung, breast and pancreatic cancers. [...] The cancer treatment combines Merck's Keytruda with a made-to-order mRNA vaccine from Moderna that is based on an analysis of mutations found in the patients' own tumors. The trial enrolled 1,137 high-risk patients with stage IIB-IV melanoma that had been surgically removed. Volunteers were randomized to receive up to nine doses of Keytruda plus the personalized vaccine or Keytruda alone for about one year. The companies said no new safety signals have emerged in the trial. In January, the companies announced results of a mid-stage trial of the treatment showing that it reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 49% after five years. Karen Knudsen, CEO of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, said the Moderna results could signal a new era for treating solid-tumor cancers. "The positive hit here leads us into truly this next phase in immunotherapy," Knudsen said. "This is an auspicious start -- this is where things begin." Moderna shares more than doubled on the news, adding about $30 billion to its market value.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Expedia Group is parting ways with at least eight vice presidents and senior vice presidents in a major reorganization designed to reorient its product and technology groups around AI.

In an internal memo Tuesday, obtained by GeekWire, the Seattle-based online travel giant’s top product and technology leaders said “AI has radically changed what’s possible” over the past year, and that “work that once took weeks increasingly happens in hours.”

The company must “fundamentally change how we work, how we’re organized, and the technology we build,” wrote Chief Product Officer Shilpa Ranganathan and Chief Technology Officer Ramana Thumu in the memo (full text below).

They said the company is moving to “small end-to-end squads with clear ownership” and making AI and machine learning “part of every mission.”

This comes amid the online travel industry’s broader reckoning with the implications of artificial intelligence. AI agents are emerging as a new interface for travel, with the potential to relegate booking platforms to inventory sources behind the scenes unless they keep pace.

Expedia confirmed the departures in response to an inquiry from GeekWire.

“We’re evolving our Product and Technology organization to better align engineering and product teams with the brands and businesses they support,” an Expedia Group spokesperson said via email. “By bringing teams closer to the work and decisions, we can move faster and deliver more impactful experiences for travelers and partners.”

The spokesperson described the impact as “limited,” not saying how many roles were cut. “The majority of the changes involved employees moving to different teams or changes in reporting lines to better align talent and resources with business priorities,” the spokesperson said.

Most of the changes are to leadership scope and reporting lines, according to the memo, but “in a small number of cases, we made the tough decision to eliminate some roles.”

Reorg details: The most senior departure is Sachin Singh, SVP of book-to-trip technology, a former Amazon exec who joined Expedia in 2022 and served on the CTO leadership team. The memo credits him with advancing priorities “across checkout, payments, fraud prevention, servicing, and AI.”

Singh’s portfolio is being broken up. According to his LinkedIn profile, he led checkout, payments, fraud and risk, and post-booking self-service. The memo moves fraud and risk under Chief Information Security Officer Hilik Kotler, self-service under Ryan O’Neill, and payments product, technology and operations under Reena Patil and Debashis Saha.

Seven other leaders are also leaving, according to the memo: Sara Beckmann, Ian Butcher, Matt Esler, Amitabh Ghosh, Emil Riccardi, Fiona Stevenson and Shao Xie. Their LinkedIn profiles list them as vice presidents in product and technology roles including pricing, lodging, data platform, and travel platform and fraud.

The memo also lists promotions. Saha was elevated to senior vice president of travel foundations. Four leaders were promoted to vice president: Rajat Arora, Ryan Hillman, Ashwita Kaur and Ambrish Srivastava. All four were senior directors, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

Data, AI and agentic platforms all move under Xavier Amatriain, the former Google AI executive Expedia named as its first chief AI and data officer in December.

Rick Fast, senior vice president of platform engineering, becomes chief architect.

A third disruption for travel: In a May interview marking the company’s 30th anniversary, Expedia Group CEO Ariane Gorin described artificial intelligence as the third major technology disruption in Expedia’s history, after the internet and mobile. She said the AI era was “only starting to unfold.”

The online travel industry is facing the prospect that AI assistants could do to Expedia and Booking.com what those companies once did to traditional travel agents — inserting themselves between travelers and suppliers, and pushing the incumbents into the background. Marriott’s CEO has said AI booking agents will hurt online travel agencies more than they will hotels.

Expedia has been embedding itself in the new platforms as a hedge. It was a launch partner when OpenAI opened ChatGPT to outside apps, and began buying ads inside ChatGPT this year.

So far the disruption has moved slower than feared. When OpenAI pulled its Instant Checkout button from ChatGPT’s main interface in March and stepped back from processing travel transactions directly, shares of Expedia and Booking Holdings jumped significantly.

Expedia Group’s brands include Expedia, Hotels.com and Vrbo, along with Orbitz, Travelocity, ebookers and Wotif, plus its majority-owned hotel metasearch subsidiary, trivago.

The company ended 2025 with about 16,000 employees across nearly 50 countries, according to its most recent annual report, and said “approximately one half of our people work in technology roles” — putting the organization at the center of Tuesday’s memo at roughly 8,000 people.

Employment peaked above 25,000 in 2019, fell to 14,800 during the pandemic, and rebounded to 17,100 by the end of 2023, before a series of restructurings and layoffs in recent years.

Here’s the full text of the memo:

Hi Product and Technology teams,

We’re making some organizational changes to bring our teams closer together.

Our mission is to grow our business and build a platform that propels both our consumer and B2B businesses forward. To do this, we need to move a lot faster, and, over the past year, AI has radically changed what’s possible. Work that once took weeks increasingly happens in hours. To fully realize that opportunity, we must fundamentally change how we work, how we’re organized, and the technology we build. As we work differently, we will move faster from idea to outcome, organize into small end-to-end squads with clear ownership, make AI and Machine Learning part of every mission, and build products that scale.

Several teams have been piloting a different way of working that removes the usual constraints and provides squads and smaller cross-functional teams clear ownership. Our new structure considers what these teams have learned, that:

• A lot of speed blockers are structural.
• Decisions and accountability work best when teams are close to the work and have greater autonomy.
• When used well, AI bridges gaps and scales knowledge in real-time.

Going forward, you should expect less time coordinating and waiting, and more time working together to build great experiences for travelers and partners.

What this means for you

Most changes are to leadership scope and reporting lines, bringing teams closer and simplifying our organization. In a small number of cases, we made the tough decision to eliminate some roles. Anyone experiencing a change directly has been informed.

Detailed placemats are posted on Basecamp, but some of the key changes are:

• Dedicated Technology teams will be moved under each Brand Product leader: CJ Allen, Ritcha Ranjan and Eric Moore.
• The Product & Technology team for Supply will be consolidated under Jonathan Holland.
• The Product & Technology team for Fraud & Risk will be consolidated under Hilik Kotler.
• Rick Fast is becoming Chief Architect.
• Data, AI, and Agentic platforms are consolidated under Xavi Amatriain.
• Product & Technology team for Self Service will be consolidated under Ryan O’Neill.
• CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is moving from Marketing into Product & Technology under Reena Patil and Debashis Saha, respectively.
• Payments Product, Tech & Ops will also be moving under Reena Patil and Debashis Saha, respectively.
• Strategic Payment Partnerships is moving to Finance.

Experience Design under Rachel Been has made some adjustments to enable tighter alignment with our Product and Technology teams.

With this, Sachin Singh will be leaving Expedia Group. During his time on the CTO Leadership Team, we advanced key priorities across checkout, payments, fraud prevention, servicing, and AI that have had a real impact for travelers and the business.

We also want to recognize Sara Beckmann, Ian Butcher, Matt Esler, Amitabh Ghosh, Emil Riccardi, Fiona Stevenson, and Shao Xie, who will be leaving Expedia Group, and thank them for their leadership and contributions.

Additionally, Debashis Saha has been promoted to SVP, Travel Foundations and the following leaders have been promoted to Vice President: Rajat Arora, Ryan Hillman, Ashwita Kaur and Ambrish Srivastava.

Next Steps

Your leaders will be reaching out and hosting team meetings soon to walk through more context, org charts, and questions. In the meantime, head to Basecamp for more, including domain placemats, team charters, and more details.

This new structure is one step. The real work is in how we operate within it. It’s a new chapter for our teams as we deepen the partnership between Product and Technology and go after our big bets with speed and focus. We’re excited about what’s ahead, and we hope you will be too as you learn more about what this means for your day-to-day,

Thank you,

Shilpa & Ramana

Meta is launching a new Mac app dedicated to its AI chatbot. In an announcement on Wednesday, Meta says you can share your window with its AI chatbot, which can provide suggestions, answer questions, or create content based on what's on your screen. Meta AI on the Mac also supports dictation across all apps.

The launch comes as Meta makes its AI chatbot more like a productivity-focused assistant to better compete with its AI rivals - many of which already have desktop apps. You can share your window with Google's Gemini AI app, while OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude apps take things a step further by allowing the chatbots to take con …

Read the full story at The Verge.

TikTok is laying off 75 workers in the Seattle region, focused largely on the company’s e-commerce business, according to a notice filed Tuesday with Washington state.

Job titles listed in the notice are almost entirely TikTok Shop and Global E-Commerce roles in Bellevue, Wash., including anti-fraud and governance program managers, seller and creator operations staff, campaign managers, data scientists, and backend and frontend engineers.

It’s part of a steady stream of tech layoffs this year. Zillow cut more than 500 jobs this month, including 91 in Washington state. Microsoft eliminated 605 positions in the state in July as part of a broader reduction of 4,800. Google cut 52 jobs and Salesforce cut 59 locally this month.

The notice Tuesday was filed by TT Commerce & Global Services LLC on TikTok letterhead, and lists two ByteDance employees as contacts. It gives the affected facility as Lincoln Square North at 700 Bellevue Way NE, with a separation date of Oct. 19.

TikTok Shop is the company’s in-app shopping business, which lets brands and creators sell products directly in TikTok videos and livestreams. The company has used the Seattle region as a base for the e-commerce push, expanding its Bellevue offices as it built out the business.

GeekWire has contacted TikTok representatives for comment, and asked for details on the size of the company’s remaining workforce in Bellevue and the Seattle region.

The cuts follow TikTok’s announcement on Aug. 6 that it will close its Nashville office and lay off all 250 workers there, most of them on content moderation teams.

The company last year cut 65 Seattle-area jobs, including 38 at TikTok and 27 at ByteDance.

This is the third post in our GitHub Copilot app for Beginners series. If you’re just joining us, check out, GitHub Copilot app for beginners: Getting started, where we introduced the app and how it helps you work across multiple agent sessions. Our second post goes deeper on working within a session. Here, we’ll look at how to keep all of the requests and work being done on a project organized in one place.

If you’ve been following along in this series, you know that real development is rarely a straight line. You fix a bug here, review a pull request there, and chase down a new idea somewhere in between. As you continue to assign tasks to Copilot and create new pull requests, you’ll quickly find yourself with several proverbial balls in the air.

Being able to manage everything from one centralized location is key, and that’s exactly why the My work pane exists. Below, we’ll cover how you can use it to manage what’s currently in flight, what’s completed, and what’s next.

Exploring the default views for pull requests and issues

When you open the My work tab, you’ll see three tabs waiting for you. The first is All, which shows all of your pull requests and issues in one place.

This list is automatically filtered based on the projects you’ve touched inside the Copilot app. It’s not every repo you have access to. If there’s a repo you’d like to see here, just create a quick session pointing to that repo, and it’ll show up.

Alongside All, you’ll find three more built-in views:

• Active shows all of your open pull requests and issues.
• Review requests shows the pull requests where someone has requested your review.
• Done shows everything that’s been closed.

These give you an at-a-glance sense of what needs your attention right now versus what’s already wrapped up.

Creating your own views and filters

The built-in views are a great start, but you can also create your own. Select New view, and you’ll get the familiar “New view” placeholder name, which you can rename to something like “My issues.”

From here, you can build your filter. You can type it out using the angle-bracket syntax you might recognize from GitHub, or use the UI, which is often the friendlier option when you’re getting started.

For your My issues view, you can add a filter for Is: Issue to grab all issues, then add one more filter for Assignee: Me. Select Save, and now this view shows every issue that’s been assigned to you.

You can also do some quick filtering. Select the filter at the top and you’ll get the same interface. Maybe instead of sorting by Recently updated, you’d rather flip it to Ascending so the oldest items float to the top. From there, save your changes to a brand-new view, update the view you’re currently on, or discard the changes to revert back.

Customizing your list and table layouts

By default, your items show up in a list view, which feels a bit like a set of cards. It’s a clean, approachable way to scan through your work.

If you’d like a little more control, switch to the table view. The table unlocks a few extra features you won’t find in the list: choose which columns to display, move them around, and resize them to fit how you like to work.

And don’t worry about experimenting: you can always reset everything back to the way it was before, and switch right back to the list view whenever you’d like.

Starting agent sessions from issues and pull requests

Here’s where things really come together. You can bring up any item by selecting it, and from there, start a brand-new session on it. Just tell Copilot, “Hey, let’s get to work on this,” it’ll get to work, using the issue as its context.

Back in the list view, you can select multiple items at once, choose Actions, and create new sessions from them. This is useful in a couple of ways:

• If you have several independent feature requests, you can spin up an individual session for each one.
• If you have a series of bug reports that all point to the same feature, you can bundle them into a single session by selecting New session.

In either case, you can change the repo that the Copilot app uses for its session, which is perfect for those situations where the repo hosting the issue is separate from the one hosting the code.

Creating issues and changing your repository scope

Near the top of the pane, you’ll find two more helpful buttons.

The first is your repository filter, which is set to All Repositories by default. Remember, even “all” here is automatically scoped to the repos you’ve touched inside the Copilot app.

The second is New issue, which lets you create an issue right on the spot. For example, if you want to add a light mode toggle, select Create and you can kick off a brand-new session that starts with that issue as its context.

Take this with you

The My work pane gives you a single, centralized place to manage all of your pull requests and issues. You can create custom views, search to find exactly what you need, and quickly assign tasks to Copilot, so you can stay organized and focus your attention where it’s needed most.

Learn more by exploring the rest of the videos in this series, or by visiting gh.io/app. We’ll see you in the next post!

The post GitHub Copilot app for Beginners: Managing your work appeared first on The GitHub Blog.