Simple Things.

A quantum state of light.

“This is part of my morning ‘must read’ list. I learn something every day from News Items — it does an amazing job curating what’s interesting and important from a wide variety of publications and sources around the world.” — Rebecca Patterson, former chief investment strategist, Bridgewater Associates.

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1. Ozempic and Wegovy are already transforming how we treat type 2 diabetes and obesity, and from next year another condition affecting millions of people worldwide might be added to the list: Alzheimer’s disease. Two clinical trials investigating semaglutide, the drug in Ozempic and Wegovy, as a therapy for early Alzheimer’s are expected to conclude in 2025. If the results are positive, it could mark a breakthrough in treating this intractable condition. Semaglutide belongs to a class of drugs that mimic a hormone called GLP-1. These GLP-1 agonists, as they are known, have wide-ranging effects, including regulating blood sugar, suppressing appetite and dampening inflammation. A growing body of evidence suggests that they may treat Alzheimer’s too. The most compelling research is a small trial involving 204 people with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s. (Source: newscientist.com)

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2. Natasha Loder, Health editor, The Economist:

After decades of disappointment, efforts to create vaccines that can stimulate the immune system to fight cancer are showing renewed promise. Breakthroughs are possible in the coming year. The optimism stems from advances in mRNA technology and personalized medicine, and in particular from a melanoma vaccine called mRNA-4157, developed by Moderna and Merck, that is performing well in trials. In 2025 the FDA, America’s drugs regulator, could approve the vaccine. And in Britain the NHS’s Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad, a tie-up with BioNTech, a pioneer of covid vaccines, aims to fast-track thousands of patients into trials for mRNA-based personalized vaccines for colorectal, pancreatic and melanoma cancers.

Personalized vaccines are tailored to a patient’s specific mutations, and aim to train the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells based on their unique genetic make-up. First comes a biopsy, then the sequencing of the tumor, the identification of mutations likely to generate proteins that would be recognized by the immune system, and finally the manufacturing of a vaccine to target those markers. This can all be done within six weeks, thanks to advances in mRNA technology made during the pandemic, and to progress in artificial intelligence, which is used to predict the molecular markers most likely to stimulate the immune system into action. (Source: economist.com)

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3. The dogs’ names are Mars, Moon and Pluto, and you might say their cancer-sniffing skills are out of this world. An experimental screening method that paired the dogs with artificial intelligence was able to detect the odor of cancer carried on patients’ breaths. The canine-AI duo was both highly accurate and highly sensitive, successfully spotting four types of cancer in 94 percent of cases, scientists report November 15 in Scientific Reports. What’s more, the screening worked just as well detecting early stage cancers as it did later stage cancers, says Assaf Rabinowicz, chief technology officer at SpotitEarly, the Israel-based company that developed the method. That’s crucial because early detection can substantially contribute to increasing cancer survival rates. Research paper is here. (Sources: nature.com, sciencenews.org)

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4. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC):

CDC has sequenced the influenza viruses in specimens collected from the patient in Louisiana who was infected with, and became severely ill from HPAI A(H5N1) virus. The genomic sequences were compared to other HPAI A(H5N1) sequences from dairy cows, wild birds and poultry, as well as previous human cases and were identified as the D1.1 genotype. The analysis identified low frequency mutations in the hemagglutinin gene of a sample sequenced from the patient, which were not found in virus sequences from poultry samples collected on the patient’s property, suggesting the changes emerged in the patient after infection. (Source: cdc.gov)

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