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Today, the world-renowned technology media "MIT Technology Review" announced the "World's Top Ten Breakthrough Technologies" in 2022, and the biomedical field occupies four seats. Not only are they based on addressing the current COVID-19 crisis, they can also benefit a large number of people in poor areas, and they can also pave the way for future breakthroughs.
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Breakthrough of the Year: COVID-19 Variant Monitoring
Related agencies: GISAID, Nextstrain, Illumina
Since the outbreak of the new crown epidemic, when it comes to science, people always think of a variety of vaccines and drugs, but they ignore another important scientific fact - the new crown virus is the most sequenced object in human history, surpassing humans themselves, and also surpassing the pathogens of concern such as influenza and HIV.
When the swab is put into the nose, the person receiving the test may not expect that a subset of those positive samples will be sent for additional genome sequencing. The goal is simple – to see how the genome of the coronavirus has changed. If a large number of similar variants suddenly appear in a short period of time, it is likely to indicate the emergence of a new variant. Public data shows that the current genome sequencing results of the new crown virus have exceeded 7 million. The MIT Technology Review press release notes that similar alpha variants, Delta variants, and Omiljung variants were discovered this way.
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Although sequencing cannot tell us the future evolution direction of the virus, it is precisely because of this that we should better monitor the new coronavirus mutation and detect new variants that may appear in the future at an early stage. Before it spreads around the world, a scientific warning is issued.
Breakthrough of the Year: AI Predicts Protein Folding
Related agencies: DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs, Baker Lab
A press release from the MIT Technology Review points out that almost all biochemical processes in the human body are inseparable from the participation of proteins. This biological macromolecule is folded by a long chain of amino acids to form a complex three-dimensional structure, and if you can understand their properties, it is possible to understand their function and even pave the way for the development of drugs. For years, scientists have tried to use computational tools to predict the structure of proteins. However, the accuracy of these works is difficult to match with the manually obtained structure.
This is where ai makes a breakthrough. Through the method of deep learning, the system can make more accurate predictions of protein structure, which is the first time that the computer has generated protein structure data close to the quality of human experiments. The latter is more accurate, but also more time-consuming. The real impact of these efforts may take years to be fully realized. But its potential for change is already there for all to see.
Breakthrough of the Year: Malaria vaccine
Related institution: GlaxoSmithKline, World Health Organization
Living in modern society, it is hard to imagine that more than 600,000 people around the world die of malaria every year, the vast majority of them children under the age of 5. This deadly mosquito-borne disease places a huge social burden in impoverished Africa.
Mosquirix, brought by GlaxoSmithKline, is a malaria vaccine. Of the 800,000 children in Kenya, Malawi, Ghana and other countries, the vaccine delivers 50 percent protection against severe malaria in the year after vaccination. Although vaccines continue to decline over time, public health officials see this as an important breakthrough in changing the way malaria is controlled. If we convert the efficacy of protection, we can get a more intuitive result – the vaccine is expected to reduce malaria deaths by as much as 70% compared to existing drugs.
In other ways, this vaccine also has its milestone significance. It was the first vaccine developed against parasites, which, as multicellular organisms, are 500 to 1,000 times larger than the genomes of ordinary viruses or bacteria and are more likely to produce mutations and escape the immune system. GlaxoSmithKline's vaccine targets some of the surface proteins of the early life of the malaria parasite, supplemented by molecules that activate the immune system and promote the production of antibodies.
Breakthrough of the Year: Oral medications for the treatment of COVID-19
Related agencies: Merck, Pfizer, Pardes Biosciences
In the early days of COVID-19, many people were exploring different off-the-shelf therapies, hoping to find a panacea to control the virus as soon as possible. Looking back, most of these treatments didn't work on COVID-19 and didn't help control the disease, but these initiatives also reflect a naïve idea that people expected easy ways to treat the disease. It is best to eat a few pills to get rid of the new crown virus in the body.
Last year, oral anti-coronavirus therapies from companies such as Merck and Pfizer made a series of breakthroughs. In individuals newly infected with COVID-19, these oral medications can greatly reduce the risk of hospitalization in infected people. From a mechanism point of view, they are not a clever hand of scientists, but based on long-term scientific research - people have long known the core replication mechanism of such viruses, and inhibiting some of these key enzymes can prevent the replication of viruses.
The MIT Technology Review news points out that these drugs have set new records — from the laboratory bench of chemists, to the clinical trials of volunteers, to the bright green light of regulators, this speed is amazing. And these drugs not only prevent severe illness in people with new crown infection, but also hope to deal with the new coronavirus that may appear in the future lurking in animals.