Links in Progress: Snakebites, Pig Hearts, and More
A round up of the most important things happening in biotechnology and medicine
‘Links in Progress’ newsletters are semi-regular roundups of interesting stuff that's happening in topics that we care about. In this one, Asimov Press’ Niko McCarty and our own Saloni Dattani review the most important things happening in the world of biotechnology and medicine. You can opt out of Links in Progress here.
Around 50,000 people die from venomous snakebites every year in India alone, but existing antivenom technology needs cold-chain storage and is made through a century-old method: by physically 'milking' snakes, injecting the venom into a large animal, and then bleeding that animal to harvest its antivenom. Recently, computational biologists at the University of Washington used an AI tool, called RFdiffusion, to create a protein that neutralizes a wide range of lethal snake toxins. The designed protein is stable at higher temperatures, so it doesn’t require refrigeration, and blocks toxins from latching onto neuromuscular targets. In trials it has protected mice from otherwise lethal doses of snake venoms.
In 2019, the first vaccine against the Ebola virus was approved for adults by the European Union and the United States. Although the vaccine was highly effective in protecting people who received it in clinical trials, it’s given out with a different strategy in the real world, using 'ring vaccination': this is when contacts or high-risk groups are vaccinated, rather than everyone in the population. This strategy can help contain an outbreak quickly, but it’s unclear how effective it is in the real-world. For a new study, researchers estimated that the vaccine reduced the chances of Ebola virus disease by 84 percent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is highly effective. They arrived at this value using a test-negative design; when patients are tested for an illness like Ebola, in this case (cases test positive, and controls test negative). This method helps reduce biased results that could come from some groups being less likely to get tested than others.
Fears of a new flu pandemic have been growing, as bird flu outbreaks have occasionally led to human infections. In the US, there have been 67 confirmed cases in humans, but clinical testing is limited. So far, the virus doesn’t seem to have gained the ability to transmit between people, which means most infections have been from incidental exposure to infected wild birds, cattle, and contaminated raw milk. This might be why many cases have been mild so far and have not spread to the respiratory tract where flu infections are most dangerous. A new study shows that 93 percent of cases have had eye infections – specifically, conjunctivitis (or 'pink eye').
A large study, performed on 960 female mice, suggests that genetics – and not diet or exercise – are the biggest predictor of which mice live longer than others.
In ovo sexing technology has finally entered the US market, according to nonprofit Innovate Animal Ag. Something like six billion male chicks are killed in the egg industry each year. Farmers don’t have a use for them (and they don’t grow large enough, quickly enough, to be profitable for meat.) In ovo sexing technology could help identify the sex of a chicken egg before it hatches using hyperspectral cameras or polymerase chain reaction, which would help avoid culling live chicks. These technologies have been used in Europe for several years; Germany and France enacted bans on chick culling in 2022.
More than 500,000 Americans have lung cancer at any given time. Non-small cell lung cancer is the most common type, accounting for 80–85 percent of cases, and of them, about 10–15 percent have mutations in a gene called EGFR, which drives faster tumour growth. The mutation is much more common in Asia and lung cancer patients with it tend to lack a history of smoking and have more severe disease. Recently, a drug called Tagrisso has shown high efficacy against both early and late stage EGFR lung cancers. But new data from a phase 3 clinical trial, called MARIPOSA, shows an even greater efficacy from a combination of two drugs, called amivantamab and lazertinib, which the trial finds can extend their survival by an additional year, or more, over Tagrisso. The European Commission has already approved the treatment.
Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family reached a 7.4 billion dollar settlement with 15 US states to resolve lawsuits around their role in the opioid crisis, STAT reports. Their aggressive marketing of OxyContin, downplaying of its addictive properties, and influence over the FDA feature in the popular book Empire of Pain.
A second pig-to-human heart transplant has failed, according to a report in Nature Medicine. Surgeons at the University of Maryland extracted a heart from a gene-edited pig and transplanted it into a 58-year-old man with advanced heart failure. A total of ten genes were modified or added to the pig; four genes encoding sugars that can trigger human immune responses were deleted, and six human genes were added in (they help with stuff like inflammation and blood clotting.) The man did well for a few weeks, but then the heart stiffened up and failed. He died on day 40 post-surgery.
A gene-editing technology called 'dual prime editing' was used in plants for the first time. This tool can precisely delete up to two million bases of DNA, or replace a 258,000 base stretch of DNA with a new sequence, in both wheat and tomatoes (so far). The technology uses a special ‘fusion’ protein (essentially a modified Cas9 and reverse transcriptase enzyme tethered together) and two guide RNA molecules to make edits. The guide RNAs direct the protein to ‘nick’ two different sides of a DNA strand, opening up space to either paste in new DNA, invert the DNA, or delete everything between the nicks.
Scientists sifted through 2,000 microbial enzymes to find two that break down polyethylene terephthalate (PET) more quickly than any 'known' enzymes. The two PETases are called Mipa-P and Kubu-P. After their discovery, scientists engineered both enzymes to work under industrial-like conditions: an engineered form of Kubu-P, for instance, can break down 90 percent of PET in under 8 hours. Still, enzymes like this probably won’t be used in commercial recycling plants any time soon because they must contend with the rigid crystallinity of post-consumer plastics.
In May 2024, about 12 percent of American adults said, in a KFF poll, that they had used or are currently using GLP-1 drugs for diabetes or weight loss. Large-scale trials show that GLP-1 drugs minimize the progression of pre-diabetes, treat diabetes and kidney disease, reduce the chances of cardiovascular events like heart attacks and stroke, and reduce breathing problems during sleep. They also reduce overall death rates among people with cardiovascular disease. As more trials are run, we may find even more benefits of these drugs.
Chinese biotechnology companies now have 6,280 drugs in development – a 1,200 percent increase over one decade ago, and about two-thirds as many drugs in development as in the US – and are consistently beating Western companies to clinical trials. An American company called Pheast, for example, raised $76 million to make drugs targeting aggressive forms of breast cancer after its founder, Stanford professor Irv Weissman, discovered a new way to target such cancers in 2019. But Pheast was beaten to clinical trials by a company in China, called Antengene, after the latter 'noticed Weissman’s paper' and quickly developed a similar drug, according to reporting in Endpoints News.
OpenAI and Retro Biosciences (a longevity company funded by Sam Altman) say they’ve trained an AI model that can design transcription factors that are highly capable at converting regular cells into stem cells, a type of cell that can differentiate into many different cell types. This is typically done by ‘reprogramming’ a normal cell back into a stem cell using four different proteins, called Yamanaka factors. But this method doesn’t always work in all kinds of cells, so scientists have long wanted to find better factors. These AI-designed variants are apparently 50-times more effective than the normal Yamanaka factors (at what, exactly? None of the reports say), but neither company has yet released more complete data.