The Beginning of the End.

The biggest breakthrough in a generation.

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1. Millions of Alzheimer’s patients have been given hope of a cure after a drug was proven to slow the disease for the first time. Trial results confirmed that lecanemab — delivered as a fortnightly intravenous drip — slowed memory decline by 27 per cent over 18 months. The new treatment reverses pathological changes in the brain, finding and removing a toxic protein called amyloid that builds up in people with Alzheimer’s disease. The “momentous and historic” study was presented last night at a packed conference of the world’s leading scientists and doctors in San Francisco. Experts said that it was the biggest breakthrough in a generation, marking the “beginning of the end” of Alzheimer’s and offering “real optimism that dementia can be beaten and one day even cured.” (Source: thetimes.co.uk)

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2. Proteins control every cell-level aspect of life, from immunity to brain activity. They are encoded by long sequences of compounds called amino acids that fold into large, complex 3D structures. Computational algorithms can model the physical amino-acid interactions that drive this folding. In a recent breakthrough, a machine-learning model called AlphaFold predicted the 3D structure of proteins from their amino-acid sequences. Now James Roney and Sergey Ovchinnikov of Harvard University have shown that AlphaFold has learned how to predict protein folding in a way that reflects the underlying physical amino-acid interactions. This finding suggests that machine learning could guide the understanding of physical processes too complex to be accurately modeled from first principles. (Source: physics.aps.org)

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