Continuing Scientific and Technological Breakthroughs in 2022 – Part 2

When Peter Diamandis sent out his picks for scientific and technological breakthroughs in the last year, he compared the volume and extent of these discoveries and innovations with the year 1922.  One thing is for certain, when comparing that which was innovative and discovered a century ago with the pace of discovery today, we are witnessing an unprecedented acceleration in knowledge accumulation that makes a century ago seem quaint.

In Part 1 we looked at innovations in Space and Energy in 2022. In Part 2 we tackle Health and the amazing number of breakthroughs.

And yes there will be Part 3 coming after the turn of the New Year.

Health

The #5 breakthrough on the list is the synthesizing of life without sperm or eggs. This year scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel grew mouse embryos in a lab without the use of sperm, egg, or a womb. The scientists were able to do so by growing the mouse embryos inside a bioreactor made up of stem cells cultivated in a Petri dish. Using a mechanical uterus combined with a novel cocktail of stem cells—some of which were chemically programmed to overexpress genes that switched on the development of the placenta and yolk sac—the team produced embryos with gene expression patterns 95% similar to natural mouse embryos of the same age. The embryos developed normally, elongating on Day 3, folding their neural tubes and budding tails by Day 6, and developing beating hearts by Day 8. This marked the first time that scientists successfully managed to grow fully synthetic mouse embryos outside the womb.

What this means is scientists now have a better understanding of how some pregnancies fail and how to prevent this from happening. It marks a major leap forward in the ability to grow organs for transplant. It may even pave the way for new treatment strategies for diseases like cancer. Imagine, for instance, a patient with untreatable leukemia that needs a bone marrow transplant to survive. In the future, we may be able to biopsy skin cells from that patient, rewind those skin cells into stem cells and then put those into a bioreactor to produce a stockpile of bone marrow stem cells that can be given back to the patient. It means no more waiting for a donor match.

The #6 breakthrough is research leading to 100% remission for early-stage rectal cancer. A New England Journal of Medicine study this year revealed that using Dostarlimab, a monoclonal antibody and checkpoint inhibitor has produced complete remission in early-stage rectal cancer patients. Approved by the FDA in August 2021, Dostarlimab blocks tumours that inhibit the body’s immune system T cells. With approximately 45,000 patients annually diagnosed in the United States, and on the increase in younger adults with estimates by 2030, of a 124% rise in patients between ages 20 and 34, and 46% in patients between ages 35 and 49, using Dostarlimab could eliminate the need for surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy with immune memory preventing future cancer spread. It also represents an advance in the use of checkpoint inhibitors for other cancer treatments.

The #7 breakthrough is the development of vaccines for Malaria and all Influenza strains. In September, a novel Malaria vaccine developed at Oxford University has proven to be up to 80% effective in preventing the disease. And in December, a research team at George Washington University announced the development of two highly-effective mRNA vaccines that also reduced Malaria infection and transmission as well.

Then in November, an mRNA-based experimental Influenza vaccine-induced protection against all known influenza subtypes in an animal study. The University of Pennsylvania vaccine produced antibody responses for all 20 known strains of Influenza A and B in tests on mice and ferrets. The protection lasted for 4 months.

With nearly 90 countries and territories in areas at risk for Malaria, and the fact that the disease kills 627,000 people annually, the majority of them children younger than five years old, a vaccine that inhibits transmission represents a significant breakthrough.

Influenza, which provides an annual challenge for medicine, constantly evolves to evade immune responses. That’s why a vaccine that addresses all variants is exciting. Blunting the harm of Influenza will be a big win for public health.

The #8 breakthrough is the use of AI to predict all known protein structures. How proteins fold determines the way they work in our cells. Protein folding has been one of the grand challenges for computer modellers since the 1960s. This year an AI program, AlphaFold2, built by DeepMind, a Google company, has solved the 3D structures of roughly 200 million known proteins. This breakthrough has been followed by researchers from Meta announcing the use of an AI tool that has allowed them to predict the structures of roughly 617 million proteins in bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms yet to be fully characterized. The Meta AI took just two weeks to produce these results. And Meta (formerly Facebook) is making a free API (application program interface) available to all to use it.

Right now DeepMind’s AlphaFold2 is being used for research on COVID-19, cancer, and antibiotic resistance. DeepMind has set up a public database for protein structures predicted by AlphaFold2 which currently has approximately 1 million entries with 100 million more to be added in the next year. And Meta’s database, the ESM Metagenomic Atlas, should produce the protein structures of millions more.

Almost everything in our bodies is determined by protein interactions. Understanding their structure and function, therefore, is critical in dealing with diseases and developing treatments. With these two tools, our 3D protein structure prediction capacity will grow astronomically helping scientists to pinpoint the root causes of diseases and develop effective drugs for their treatment.

The #9 breakthrough involves the revival of organs in dead pigs. Researchers at Yale University earlier this year successfully revived cells in the hearts, livers, kidneys, and brains of pigs that had been declared dead for one hour in a laboratory. Revival was accomplished using a device similar to a heart-lung machine. A  unique solution, OrganEx, was circulated in the bodies of the deceased pigs. This caused the pigs’ hearts to start beating and pumping it throughout their bodies. While the pigs were dead, their organs became functional again. What this means for organ transplantation is significant because every year in the U.S., 100,000 people are on waiting lists for organ transplants. Each day, 17 people die while waiting and a new name is added to the list every 9 minutes.

In the short term, scientists hope that OrganEx could help doctors preserve the organs of the recently deceased for transplants. This would provide doctors with viable organs from bodies long after death has occurred. The technology can also be used to limit damage from heart attacks and strokes with longer-term implications for reversing sudden death.

The #10 breakthrough is happening in human genome sequencing. Illumina, a genomics company, this year unveiled the NovaSeqX genome sequencers These machines represent a breakthrough in sequencing cost, at $200 compared to $3 billion the first time it was done, $100 million for the second, $10,000 a decade ago and $600 today. In addition, the machines produce results twice as fast as current sequencers. At about $1 million per machine, each can generate 20,000 whole genome sequences per year.

What genome sequencing allows doctors to do is detect cancers early using simple blood tests. It makes it possible to develop genetically-targeted drugs. And it is proving to be useful in diagnosing rare diseases and developing new COVID-19 vaccines.

The cost has always been a problem with this technology. But with Illumina’s new machine genomic medicine can enter the mainstream and create a future where every child born is automatically sequenced to anticipate and plan for the treatment of revealed childhood diseases, and patients when admitted to hospital, get sequenced to help facilitate treatment.

The #11 breakthrough advance in cancer treatment combines the use of mRNA vaccines and immunotherapy. Moderna’s mRNA-4157/V940 and Merck’s Keytruda immunotherapy treatment, in combination, have been shown to successfully cure melanoma, the deadliest skin cancer. In a Phase 2 clinical trial, the combination of the two reduced the risk of recurrence and of death by 44% compared to treatment using Keytruda immunotherapy alone.

If you didn’t know it, cancer is a group of more than 200 diseases affecting tens of millions annually. In 2022 in the U.S., nearly 2 million new cancer cases will have been diagnosed. Globally, almost 10 million cancer-related deaths occur each year.

The Moderna and Merck study demonstrates for the first time the efficacy of mRNA-based cancer treatments in a clinical trial. The encouraging results are paving the way for a Phase 3 trial, and the potential approval in the near future of the first mRNA cancer vaccine. The upside of mRNA vaccine technology is it can be used to develop treatments for many other cancers.

We’ll continue this list of amazing scientific and technological breakthroughs in Part 3 when we look at advances and breakthroughs in the fields of Food and Robotics. So stay tuned.