Tag: science

2020 -98% flu

In 2019, during the third week of December, the CDC reported that 16% of samples were positive for influenza A. During the same week in 2020, the rate was 0.3%.The question, of course, is why SARS-CoV-2 continues to spread like wildfire when so many other viruses have been crushed. Viruses that have circulated for years are endemic. Because many of us have previously been exposed and therefore have developed immunity to them, social distancing can more easily cut the chain of transmission. Social distancing is probably not the only factor suppressing endemic pathogens. Walgreens, for instance, has seen “unprecedented demand” for flu vaccine shots this season

2021-06-03: Flu clade extinction?

With Covid suppression measures like mask wearing, school closures, and travel restrictions driving flu transmission rates to historically low levels around the world, it appears that 1 of the H3N2 clades may have gone extinct. The same phenomenon may also have occurred with 1 of the 2 lineages of influenza B viruses, known as B/Yamagata. “Without doubt this is definitely going to change something in terms of the diversity of flu viruses out there. The extent to which it changes and how long it stays changed are the big question marks. But we have never seen this before. I do think we’re likely to lose a little bit of the H3N2 diversity. That’s a great thing. Currently when we make recommendations for vaccine strains, it’s always the headache virus.”

Flu, HIV, Nipah vaccines

Even as we have shown that our mRNA-based vaccine can prevent COVID-19, this has encouraged us to pursue more-ambitious development programs within our prophylactic vaccines modality. Today we are announcing 3 new vaccine programs addressing seasonal flu, HIV and the Nipah virus, some of which have eluded traditional vaccine efforts, and all of which we believe can be addressed with our mRNA technology. Beyond vaccines, we are extending our mRNA development work to a total of 24 programs across 5 therapeutic areas

Health Trends

For too long, we’ve confused the status quo for stasis in healthcare. We’ve accepted certain things as true, things we believed to be immutable, intractable, or at the very least, extremely hard to change—like that it takes years to develop a vaccine, or that virtual medicine will never scale for doctors or patients, or that the regulatory system can’t adapt to innovation quickly enough to support lasting change. But then came 2020.

  1. Patient data moves beyond the EHR.
  2. Health insurance gets unbundled.
  3. Virtual care becomes a first-class citizen…
  4. …with its own operating system.
  5. The home becomes a primary site of care (again).
  6. Mental health gets engineered.
  7. Value-based care comes for Rx.
  8. Illumina for X.
  9. Infectious diseases attract investment again.
  10. Clinical trials (finally) go digital
  11. Personal genomics finally goes clinical.
  12. Working on rare diseases gets more common.
  13. Biotech reaches the industrial age.
  14. Targeted delivery of complex therapies.
  15. Biotech R&D goes more virtual.
  16. The bright line between life sciences and care delivery blurs.

Biggest EMP in 10 ka

Today, such a superflare would be civilization-ending.

In the year 774 AD, an enormously powerful blast of matter and energy from space slammed into Earth. Nothing like it had been felt on this planet for 10 ka. A mix of high-energy light and hugely accelerated subatomic particles, when this wave impacted Earth it changed our atmospheric chemistry enough to be measured centuries later. Such an event happening today would be catastrophic. It could take out numerous satellites — the particles and high-energy radiation can short out even hardened electronics — and cause widespread blackouts. Those could take a long time to fix, since the bigger transformers used by power grids cannot be mass-produced.

2022-01-29: An even bigger EMP happened in 9125 BP. It was 2x bigger than the 774 AD one.

2020s Technology

Therapeutic plasma exchange is FDA-approved (not for aging, but for a bunch of other conditions). I imagine there remain prohibitions on advertising that it can add years to your life, but it is safe, and a doctor can prescribe it off label. It’s also cheap. An automated plasmapheresis machine—which lets you do treatment after treatment—can be bought online for under $3000. That is less than the cost of a single transfusion of young blood sold by the startup Ambrosia. How long until someone opens a clinic offering plasma dilution? I bet someone tries it in 2021. If it works, people will get over the weirdness, and it could be commonplace by 2030.

What is more plausible this decade is enhanced and advanced geothermal systems. The legacy geothermal industry is sleepy, tapping energy at traditional volcanic hydrothermal hotspots—forget about it. The next generation of the industry, however, is a bunch of scrappy startups manned by folks leaving the oil and gas industry. The startups I have spoken to think with today’s technology they can crack 3.5¢/kWh without being confined to volcanic regions. With relatively minor advancements in drilling technology compared to what we’ve seen over the last decade, advanced geothermal could reach 2¢/kWh and become scale to become viable just about anywhere on the planet. Collectively, the startups are talking about figures like 100s of gigawatts of generation by 2030. I’m watching this space closely; the Heat Beat blog is a great way to stay in the loop. As I wrote last month, permitting reform will be important.

The 2020s will be a big decade for sustainable alternative fuels (SAF). Commercial aviation can’t electrify—batteries will never match fossil fuels’ energy density. Given political realities, aviation has no choice to decarbonize, which means either hydrogen fuel or SAF. Hydrogen fuel is much better than batteries, but still not as energy dense as fossil fuels or SAF, and so my money is on SAF, and particularly on fuel made from CO₂ pulled from the atmosphere. It is easy to convert atmospheric CO₂ to ethanol in solution; and it is easy to upgrade ethanol into other fuels. But it is hard to separate ethanol from water without using a lot of energy—unless you have an advanced membrane as Prometheus Fuels does. I have written about Prometheus before and continue to follow them closely. Their technology could decarbonize aviation very suddenly.

Construction tech is another area to watch. Whether it’s 3d-printed homes as imagined by Icon, or advanced manufactured housing as designed by Cover or Modal, there has to be a better way to build than our current stick-built paradigm. Housing costs have skyrocketed largely due to zoning rules, but construction technology is another lever by which we can increase housing productivity. This is another area where the barriers don’t seem to be primarily technological.

Continuous blood tests

“A blood test is great, but it can’t tell you, for example, whether insulin or glucose levels are increasing or decreasing in a patient” The Real-time ELISA is essentially an entire lab within a chip with tiny pipes and valves no wider than a human hair. An intravenous needle directs blood from the patient into the device’s tiny circuits where ELISA is performed over and over.

Immune System Arms Race

The challenge for the immune system is that mammals do not evolve as fast as viruses. How then, in the face of this disadvantage, can the immune system hope to keep pace with viral evolution? If a protein is fragile, even small changes can render it completely unable to do its job. TRIM5α is not fragile; most random mutations increased, rather than decreased, the protein’s ability to prevent viral infection. TRIM5α can readily gain antiviral activity and, once gained, does not lose it easily during subsequent mutation.

2022-12-02: And new infections can be filmed

The early stages of the virus–cell interaction have long evaded observation by existing microscopy methods due to the rapid diffusion of virions in the extracellular space and the large 3D cellular structures involved. We present an active-feedback single-particle tracking method with simultaneous volumetric imaging of the live cell environment called 3D-TrIm to address this knowledge gap. 3D-TrIm captures the extracellular phase of the infectious cycle in what we believe is unprecedented detail. We report previously unobserved phenomena in the early stages of the virus–cell interaction, including skimming contact events at the millisecond timescale, orders of magnitude change in diffusion coefficient upon binding and cylindrical and linear diffusion modes along cellular protrusions. We demonstrate how this method can move single-particle tracking from simple monolayer culture toward more tissue-like conditions by tracking single virions in tightly packed epithelial cells. This multiresolution method presents opportunities for capturing fast, 3D processes in biological systems.

Single cell learning

The question of whether single cells can learn led to much debate in the early 20th century. The view prevailed that they were capable of non-associative learning but not of associative learning, such as Pavlovian conditioning. Experiments indicating the contrary were considered either non-reproducible or subject to more acceptable interpretations. Recent developments suggest that the time is right to reconsider this consensus.

2020 AI papers

Here are the most interesting research papers of the year, in case you missed any of them. In short, it is basically a curated list of the latest breakthroughs in AI and Data Science by release date with a clear video explanation, link to a more in-depth article, and code (if applicable).