Table of Contents
Welcome to the first edition of the prototype! Every week I tell you about the latest and most interesting news in science and emerging technology. And I’ll explain how the technologies making headlines actually work. You can sign up here to receive the prototype in your inbox.
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Holoclara
Aanyone who spent their childhood playing the Oregon trail video game knows that a persistent danger during the period in which the game is set was dying of dysentery. That doesn’t happen that often anymore. Sanitation and water purification largely ensure that diseases such as typhoid and cholera, which spread through drinking water, are virtually non-existent in many parts of the world.
But as scientist Andrea Choe told me a few months ago, purifying water to make it drinkable has a trade-off: We’re not drinking enough worms. Choe’s research, which she conducted during her PhD, showed that parasitic worms secrete certain chemicals that interact beneficially with our bodies. “They can calm the immune system and they do something that can promote wound healing,” she said. If they don’t, people with autoimmune diseases like asthma and rheumatoid arthritis and food allergies see their inflammatory response become hypercharged and attack their own body.
She’s not the only one with this mindset: eight years ago The New York Times reported that there was one entire subsurface of people with autoimmune diseases who treat their illnesses by infecting themselves with parasitic worms (albeit often with some significant side effects such as stomach pain and diarrhea). There have even been small-scale clinical trials to see if worms can treat autoimmune diseases, albeit with mixed results so far. Interestingly enough, Choe notes, the same worms were found in the ‘ice man’ Otzi, a stone age mummified body found in Richard III’s body when it was uncovered in 2012. are part of our immune system.”
Choe’s crucial discovery concerns the chemical mechanism that worms use to suppress the inflammatory response in the immune system. That led her to co-found Holoclara, where she is CEO. The company is working to isolate the specific molecules that worms use to help modulate the immune system for autoimmune diseases so that they can be administered without the side effects of a parasitic worm infection. The company has already seen success in animal models, and recently raised $16 million from investors to start using these drugs in clinical trials within the coming months.
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In honor of the fundamental research behind Ozempic and its competitors
Chris Taggart courtesy of Rockefeller University
In recent years, pharmaceutical companies Lilly and Novo Nordisk have achieved huge sales thanks to GLP-1 agonists, better known by trade names such as Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro or Zepbound. The Lasker Awards (also known as “America’s Nobel Prize”) are on Thursday. three scientists honored whose research made these drugs possible: Joel Habener, Svetlana Mojsov and Lotte Bjerre Knudsen.
Habener first started studying in the 1970s, when he began studying the hormone glucagon, which is used by the body to raise blood sugar levels. He was able to clone the gene for it, he said, using “endocrine organs from the anglerfish, a trash fish” of which they had a plentiful supply because one of his colleague’s brothers was a commercial fisherman.
At about the same time, Svetlana Mojsov was working independently with glucagon and her experiments revealed GLP-1, a shorter protein encoded in the same DNA that codes for glucagon. By the late 1980s, she and Habener worked together and concluded that it was GLP-1 that releases insulin and lowers blood sugar levels, making it a candidate for diabetes drug in a seminal 1992 paper. A few years after that, Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, a researcher at Novo Nordisk, began investigating how GLP-1 might work as a drug in the human body. The first GLP-1 drug, liraglutide, was approved by the FDA in 2010. Then more GLP-1 drugs were developed, and the rest is history.
For Mojsov, one of the things that excites her about the success of her research and the drugs that came out of it is that it not only helps people with a wide range of diseases, but it also shows that proteins like GLP-1 serve as a foundation for medications across the spectrum. “That’s what a good discovery is all about,” she told me. “It opens a new frontier.”
DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK
Researchers at McGill University are developing a process creating industrial chemicals from scratch-literal. The process, described in a paper published in this week Nature communicationis inspired by the way plants convert sunlight into energy while sunbathing photosynthesis. The scientists developed a mixture of gold, palladium and gallium nitride that produces a chemical reaction when exposed sunlight: carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to which he attached himself methane in the atmosphere, creating methanol. That chemical itself has many uses and can also serve as one precursor also for a lot of other useful chemicals. If the process proves to be economically scalable (the use of gold and palladium is a challenge here), it could prove to be a two-fold process: producing useful products while greenhouse gases from the air.
OTHER INTERESTING SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL STORIES
This week, Forbes launched its first Sustainability Leaders list, highlighting 50 superstar entrepreneurs, scientists, financiers, policymakers and activists fighting the climate crisis with real, tangible impact.
Bots from AI companies such as Anthropic And OpenAI aggressively crawling the Internet – causing expensive headaches for small websites, reports Business insider.
Researchers at the University of Southampton stored in the human genome on one memory crystal That could theoretically last millions or even billions of years.
Next week Earth will have a temporary mini-moon: small asteroid coming our way and which will remain in orbit around the Earth for about two months. (You’ll need a telescope to see it, though.)
LAUNCH CALENDAR
NASA is focused a launch on Wednesday, September 25 for its Crew-9 mission. It will be the tenth time this has happened SpaceX has sent astronauts to the International Space Station for the space agency, and NASA astronaut Nick Haag and Roscosmos Cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will be on board. In the spring 2025the same Dragon capsule will return them to Earth along with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore And Suni Williamswhich were originally scheduled to return with Boeing’s Starliner capsule.
FORBES CALLED IT
Bettmann Archive
In one new report this week, energy think tank Ember says the world is ready to install significantly more solar energy this year than previously predicted, just as in previous years. The rise of solar energy would come as no surprise to long-term readers Forbes. Way back in 1929, we interviewed the then 82-year-old inventor Thomas Edisonwho told us: “the time is coming when humanity will draw electrical energy directly from the sun on a large scale.”
SCIENCE YOU CAN USE
Bad news for students: that turns out homework is good for learning. Researchers at Maynooth University studied students’ academic performance in math and science and found that daily math homework and almost daily science homework improved student performance. On the plus side for kids: the frequency is what it’s all about: short homework assignments that keep children busy 15 minutes completion seemed to work better than longer assignments.
WHAT’S BUILDING ME THIS WEEK
Watch the classic 1990s science fiction series, Babylon 5, streaming on the Roku Channel. The classic science fiction show is set on a space station that serves as a “UN in space” for the major galactic powers. Although the special effects are dated and the series shows its limited budget in countless ways, it is still a masterpiece of space opera. I follow along Keith RA DeCandidos revisit blog episode by episode on Reactor and getting ready to start season two.
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