Attomarker, a spinout from the University of Exeter, “is revolutionising diagnostic technology and the potential of big data”, said chief executive Andrew Shaw as he demonstrated the new testing devices at the British Science Festival in Exeter.

The technology gave its first clinical results this year in diagnosing long Covid from the presence of six antibodies that showed the Sars-Cov-2 virus persisting in a patient’s body.

It is also being developed to detect “biomarker” proteins associated with female fertility, food allergy, diabetes and Alzheimer’s, and to fight antimicrobial resistance by distinguishing bacterial from viral infections.

At present, the technology, which delivers results within seven to 10 minutes, runs on a benchtop laboratory instrument. But next year Attomarker expects to launch a handheld device with a diagnostic cartridge connected to a mobile phone.

Shaw said the apparent similarity between Attomarker and Theranos, the fraudulent US blood-testing company founded by Elizabeth Holmes, “always comes up when I’m talking to investors. The difference is we’ve got the technology to work and demonstrated it, which they never did.”

The scale of funding was different too, he added. While more than $700mn was invested and lost in Theranos, Attomarker has raised £4.5mn since 2017 and hopes to raise another £3mn by the end of 2023. A larger Series A funding round will follow in the next two years.

Attomarker’s technology works with gold nanoparticles printed on an array of sensor spots. The nanoparticles on each spot are treated to bind to a particular protein, and the array can scan for up to 20 biomarkers from a blood sample of just 0.01ml. In contrast, a routine hospital blood test takes a 30ml sample.

When the spots are illuminated from below as blood flows over the array, the nanoparticles scatter the light with a pattern that indicates the quantity of biomarkers that has stuck to the surface.

With several applications under development, Shaw singled out three that he expected to have great commercial potential.

One is a device capable of detecting nine different biomarkers associated with Alzheimer’s disease, including five variants of tau protein and two of beta amyloid protein, will be launched next year.

Another is an “infection chip” to tell whether an infection with non-specific symptoms is caused by bacteria that can be treated with antibiotics or by viruses, which do not respond to antibiotics. A third is capable of detecting hormones associated with fertility and menopause.

The mobile device is likely to cost about £300, Shaw said, with each test array or chip costing between £10 and £20. “The route to market will be private clinics to begin with and then the NHS later,” he said.

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Clive Cookson

The two groups, working independently at the University of California, San Francisco and Stanford University, have used new electrode arrays and artificial intelligence programs to turn thoughts into text and speech. The UCSF scientists also designed a lifelike avatar to speak the decoded words.

The details of both brain-computer interfaces were jointly published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

“Both studies are a big leap forward towards decoding brain activity with the speed and accuracy required to restore fluent communications to people with [voice] paralysis,” said Frank Willett, one of the Stanford team.

The two implants were significantly different in design. The UCSF team placed a paper-thin rectangle with 253 electrodes on the surface of the cortex to record brain activity from an area known to be critical for speech. The Stanford device inserted two smaller arrays with a total of 128 microelectrodes deeper into the brain.

Each team worked with a single volunteer: Stanford with Pat Bennett, 68, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and UCSF with a 47-year-old stroke patient known as Ann.

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Signals from Ann’s brain are converted into decoded speech via an avatar

Signals from Ann’s brain are converted into decoded speech via an avatar © Nature/Chang LabSignals from Ann’s brain are converted into decoded speech via an avatar

Despite the differences between the implants and research participants, the results from the two studies were broadly similar. They achieved average speech rates of about 60 to 80 words per minute — almost half the speed of a normal conversation but at least three times faster than any previous brain-computer interface has achieved.

Both projects used an artificial intelligence algorithm to decode electrical signals from their subject’s brain, teaching itself to distinguish the distinct pattern associated with individual phonemes, the subunits of speech that form spoken words. The systems needed long training sessions — 25 in Bennett’s case, each lasting four hours, during which she repeated in her mind different sentences chosen from a large data set of phone conversations.

“These initial results have proven the concept, and eventually technology will catch up to make it easily accessible to people who cannot speak,” Bennett wrote. “For those who are non-verbal, this means they can stay connected to the bigger world, perhaps continue to work, maintain friends and family relationships.”

The UCSF scientists, working with colleagues at UC Berkeley, created a personalised voice for Ann, based on a recording of her speaking at her wedding. They also created an avatar for her, using software that simulates face muscle movements from Speech Graphics, a company in Edinburgh that makes facial animation software.

Signals from Ann’s brain as she tried to speak were converted into corresponding movements on the avatar’s face. “When the subject first used this system to speak and move the avatar’s face in tandem, I knew that this was going to be something that would have a real impact,” said Kaylo Littlejohn of UC Berkeley.

Much more development work will be needed to translate the laboratory proof of concept into devices simple and safe enough for patients and their carers to operate at home. An important step, the researchers say, will be to produce a wireless version that would not require the user to be wired to the implant.

In a Nature editorial two neurologists who were not involved in the research, Nick Ramsey of Utrecht University and Nathan Crone of Johns Hopkins University, called the results “a great advance in neuroscientific and neuro-engineering research, [showing] great promise in alleviating the suffering of individuals who have lost their voice as a result of paralysing neurological injuries and diseases”.

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Clive Cookson

Researchers at University College London gave both an MRI scan and PSA test to 303 men aged 50 to 75. The scan showed signs of cancer in the prostate of 48 men, although 32 of them had less PSA in their blood than the level of 3 nanograms per millilitre (ng/ml) currently recommended for further investigation.

Clinical assessment then found that 29 men had tumours that needed treatment, and that 15 of them serious cancer but a PSA reading below 3ng/ml, according to the study published in BMJ Oncology.

“The thought that over half the men with clinically significant cancer had a PSA less than 3 ng/ml and would have been reassured that they didn’t have cancer by a PSA test alone is a sobering one — and reiterates the need to consider a new approach to prostate cancer screening,” said Caroline Moore, professor of surgery at UCL and the study’s chief investigator.

“Our results give an early indication that MRI could offer a more reliable method of detecting potentially serious cancers early, with the added benefit that less than 1 per cent of participants were ‘over-diagnosed’ with low-risk disease,” she added.

Prostate cancer is the most common tumour in men, with about 52,000 new cases every year in the UK, according to charity Cancer Research UK. It is responsible for 12,000 deaths a year.

At present, men over 50 in the UK can request a blood test for PSA if they are concerned about prostate cancer but there is no screening programme. The protein tends to be raised in men with prostate cancer but high levels often have other causes; levels can sometimes remain low even though a prostate tumour is present.

The next stage in assessing the feasibility of a national prostate screening programme will be a larger MRI-based study, also led by UCL. The project will recruit 800 men from hospitals in London, Cambridge and Manchester and a community site in London. It aims to use a new technique capable of detecting prostate cancer in a five-minute scan that could be delivered using a mobile MRI scanner located in a travelling van.

Mark Emberton, professor of oncology at UCL, said: “Given how treatable prostate cancer is when caught early, I’m confident that a national screening programme will reduce the UK’s prostate cancer mortality rate significantly. There is a lot of work to be done to get us to that point, but I believe this will be possible within the next five to 10 years.”

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Clive Cookson

The results from the study advance the promise of xenotransplantation — using organs from animals genetically engineered to prevent rejection — as a therapy to address the severe worldwide shortage of kidneys from human donors. In the US almost 5,000 patients a year die while waiting for a transplant.

The unnamed recipient of the pig kidneys was a 52-year-old “decedent” man who had been left brain-dead by an accident. He had asked his family to donate his body for research after his death. Results were published in the journal JAMA Surgery.

“The [pig] kidneys functioned remarkably over the course of this seven-day study using current standard immunotherapy drugs,” said Jayme Locke, leader of the University of Alabama transplant team. The surgeons hope the safety and scientific information gathered from the study will boost their efforts to secure regulatory approval for a Phase I clinical trial in living humans.

The Alabama team carried out a similar operation last year on a 57-year-old man who was also left brain-dead by a motorbike accident. Although the pig kidneys produced urine and were not rejected in that experiment, they failed to carry out a key renal function — clearing creatinine, a waste product made by the muscles. The researchers had to end the experiment early.

In both studies the participants had their own failing kidneys removed and replaced with organs from pigs with 10 genetic modifications that reduce the risk of rejection by the recipient’s immune system and help the organ grow in a human body. Four porcine genes were inactivated and six human genes added.

In the latest study the transplanted pig kidneys produced healthy quantities of urine and were able to filter creatinine from the blood. Biopsies showed no sign of damage to the renal cells and blood vessels. The animals were developed for xenotransplants by Revivicor, a Maryland subsidiary of biotechnology group United Therapeutics, and grown in a pathogen-free facility in Alabama.

Roger Lord, an expert on immunology and transplant biology at Australian Catholic University, who was not involved in the study, said it “provides important preliminary evidence that genetically modified kidneys can function normally following xenotransplantation and offers hope to those on waiting lists for kidney transplantation”.

The study stopped after seven days and the recipient’s life support was switched off, as specified in advance by the university’s institutional review board and ethics committee, but the evidence suggested the kidneys could have continued to function healthily for much longer, said Locke.

“We have since received permission to extend studies out to 30 days, if the families decide that is appropriate,” she added.

Xenotransplants have been a focus of medical research for several decades. But advances in genetics and immunology have only recently brought the technology to a point at which regulators will consider its use for clinical practice.

Last year the first man to receive a pig’s heart transplant died two months after the operation at the University of Maryland Medical Center. A subsequent autopsy found that his new heart showed no signs of rejection but he had succumbed to “heart failure caused by complex factors”.

Locke believes that the US regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, should permit a Phase 1 clinical trial of kidney xenotransplants into living recipients to begin as soon as possible without insisting on further data from studies with monkeys.

“I don’t think the non-human primate model is ever going to provide the answers we need for FDA applications,” she said. “I had hoped that the FDA would approve a Phase 1 trial this year but now I don’t think that will happen.”

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Clive Cookson

The track was not a recording by the rock band but had been generated using artificial intelligence techniques from the brainwaves of people listening to it, in the world’s first scientific experiment to reconstruct a recognisable song from neural signals.

The findings will be invaluable both for scientists seeking to understand how the brain responds to music and for neurotechnologists who want to help people with severe neurological damage to communicate through brain-computer interfaces in a way that sounds more natural, whether they are speaking or singing.

“Music has prosody [patterns of rhythm and sound] and emotional content,” said Robert Knight, UC Berkeley professor of psychology and neuroscience, who led the research and whose findings were published in the journal PLOS Biology on Tuesday.

“As the whole field of brain-machine interfaces progresses, this provides a way to add human tone and rhythm to future brain implants for people who need speech or voice outputs . . . that’s what we’ve really begun to crack the code on,” added Knight.

The electro-encephalography (EEG) recordings used in the research were obtained in about 2012, at a time when people with severe epilepsy often had large arrays of electrodes — typically 92 each — placed over their brain surface to pinpoint the location of intractable seizures.

The patients volunteered to help scientific research at the same time by allowing researchers to record their brainwaves while they listened to speech and music.

Previous studies based on these experiments gave scientists enough data to reconstruct individual words that people were hearing from recordings of their brain activity. But only now, a decade later, has AI become powerful enough to reconstruct passages of song.

The Berkeley researchers analysed recordings from 29 patients who heard Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)”, part of a trilogy of songs from the 1979 album The Wall. They pinpointed areas of the brain involved in detecting rhythm and found that some parts of the auditory cortex, located just behind and above the ear, responded at the onset of a voice or synthesiser while others responded to sustained vocals.

The findings supported longstanding ideas about the roles played by the brain’s two hemispheres. Although they work closely together, language is processed predominantly on the left side, while “music is more distributed, with a bias towards [the] right”, said Knight.

His colleague Ludovic Bellier, who led the analysis, said that devices used to help people communicate when they cannot speak tend to vocalise words one by one. The sentences spoken by machine have a robotic quality reminiscent of the way the late Stephen Hawking sounded on a speech-generating device.

“We want to give more colour and expressive freedom to the vocalisation, even when people are not singing,” said Bellier.

Audio file of 'Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)' recreated from neural signals using enhanced AI © Ludovic BellierAudio file of 'Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)' recreated from neural signals using enhanced AI © Ludovic Bellier

The Berkeley researchers said brain-reading technology could be extended to the point where musical thoughts could be decoded from someone wearing an EEG cap on the scalp rather than requiring electrodes under the skull on the brain. It might then be possible to imagine or compose music, relay the musical information and hear it played on external speakers.

“Non-invasive techniques are just not accurate enough today,” said Bellier. “Let’s hope that in the future we could, just from electrodes placed outside on the skull, read activity from deeper regions of the brain with a good signal quality.”

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Clive Cookson

The TC1 strain of Delftia tsuruhatensis, a naturally occurring bacterium, was discovered accidentally at the Spanish laboratories of GSK, the pharmaceutical and biotechnology company, in the course of its work looking into a disease that kills more than 600,000 a year.

Thomas Breuer, chief global health officer at GSK, hailed an “entirely novel approach for malaria control”. He continued: “TC1 has potential to further reduce the huge burden of malaria in endemic countries and is more evidence that through deploying a range of prevention approaches, we may be able to finally eradicate this terrible disease.”

Nearly half the world’s population is at risk from malaria. The Anopheles mosquito, which spreads the Plasmodium parasite responsible for malaria, is currently tackled with insecticidal nets, indoor sprays and antimalarial drugs. But the effectiveness of these methods is declining as mosquitoes and parasites become resistant to chemical treatments.

Field tests in Burkina Faso’s Institut de Recherche en Sciences de la Santé (IRSS) and further research in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University in the US and other international partners suggested that TC1 could be developed into a safe and effective way to control malaria. Results were published in the journal Science.

Janneth Rodrigues, project leader at GSK’s Tres Cantos lab, said experiments showed that mosquitoes infected with the bacteria were no longer carrying the parasite at any stages of their life cycle.

When the scientists introduced TC1 into mosquito colonies in controlled settings, the insects were not harmed by the infection. The study showed that the bacterium was not transmitted to humans when the mosquito fed on their blood.

Delftia tsuruhatensis bacteria are routinely found in natural environments. Although the species has been shown to cause rare cases of disease in immunocompromised individuals, the researchers do not expect this to be a serious safety concern.

They found that TC1 produced a small molecule called harmane that inhibited parasitic development. Harmane is a neurotoxin in high doses but is considered safe in the tiny quantities produced by the bacterium in mosquitoes.

“Harmane can be found in most foods, coffee and barbecued meats and is naturally produced within the human body,” said Rodrigues. 

Further confidence comes from the safety record of Delftia-based products already marketed as plant growth promoters in agriculture.

Mathematical modelling at Imperial College London forecast that use of TC1 over three years would reduce clinical cases of malaria by 15 per cent, not only saving lives but reducing hospital admissions and freeing healthcare resources to tackle other potentially fatal diseases.

Rodrigues said future research and development would help GSK and its public health partners decide how to deploy TC1 in malaria control. It might be possible to use live bacteria, a cell-free extract containing harmane or purified harmane in different circumstances.

“The successful implementation of this biocontrol tool could have a profound impact on public health, ultimately helping to save the lives of millions of children and fostering sustainable development in malaria endemic regions,” said Abdoulaye Diabaté, director of medical entomology and parasitology at the IRSS in Burkina Faso.

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Clive Cookson

Chemify was spun out in March 2022 by Professor Lee Cronin and colleagues in Glasgow’s Digital Chemistry Laboratory. The funding includes $34mn from venture investors led by Triatomic Capital in the US, as well as $9mn from the UK government’s Innovation Accelerators programme.

“We can design, discover and make complex molecules on demand more quickly and efficiently than ever before, using digital blueprints,” said Cronin, Chemify’s chief executive.

Computerised chemical design is now well established, as AI drug discovery makes rapid progress in the pharmaceutical industry. What makes Chemify stand out, according to Cronin, is the way its “chemputer” technology extends to manufacturing the newly invented molecules.

“A lot of people are using AI to dream up new molecules that turn out to be hard or impossible to make,” he said. “The bottleneck is in the lab. We only select the dream molecules that can be actually manufactured efficiently. We make the AI work.”

“What we’ve been missing in chemistry is a global standard, a universal language for chemical procedures,” said Stephen Hilton, associate professor at UCL School of Pharmacy in London, who is not involved in Chemify but is looking to use its technology in his lab.

“I think the technology and equipment [Cronin] has developed could be applied to digitise the whole of chemistry,” Hilton added. “He was the first person really to pick up on that need.”

Another vote of confidence for Cronin came from Fraser Stoddart, Nobel laureate and professor of chemistry at Northwestern University in Chicago, who is not involved in the company.

“As someone who is both an out of the box thinker and an accomplished doer, he is a very rare scientist in the chemical community,” Stoddart said. “I see Chemify as a major development for the field of chemistry.”

Cronin said the chemputer, using lab robotics, could make chemicals in quantities ranging from milligrams to hundreds of grammes, including complex molecules that require as many as 15 steps to synthesise. It has already made several medicinal compounds, as well as advanced materials for other applications.

GSK, the UK-based pharmaceutical group, has tested a prototype chemputer from Cronin’s lab. “Interest in the pharma industry is extremely high,” he said. “We expect to be announcing partnerships soon.”

Cronin is one of chemistry’s more imaginative and colourful figures. Another of his research interests is investigating the process by which simple molecules started to assemble into the first living organisms.

“My dream is to turn Chemify into a $10bn company and then build an institute to discover the origin of life,” he said.

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Clive Cookson

The US pharmaceuticals group on Monday reported full findings of its phase 3 clinical study of donanemab at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Amsterdam, showing that the antibody treatment slowed progression by about 35 per cent in the early stages of the disease.

The peer-reviewed results follow similar phase 3 findings released last November by US biotech Biogen and Japan’s Eisai for lecanemab, another antibody drug, which received full marketing approval from the US Food and Drug Administration this month under the brand name Leqembi.

Eli Lilly announced on Monday that it had submitted donanemab for FDA approval and expected a decision before the end of this year. Submissions are under way to other global regulators.

Experts on dementia called Lilly’s donanemab presentation, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a landmark in the field.

“The past eight months have been a real turning point, as two drugs are shown to slow down the progression of the disease after decades of work with no positive findings,” said Richard Oakley, associate director of research at UK charity the Alzheimer’s Society.

The donanemab trial involved 1,736 participants with an average age of 73 who had mild to moderate symptoms of Alzheimer’s, with half receiving intravenous infusions of the treatment and half a placebo every four weeks for 18 months. The drug slowed the progression of the disease most effectively in its earlier stages.

Both lecanemab and donanemab are based on antibodies against amyloid, one of the toxic proteins that build up in the brain as Alzheimer’s proceeds, but they worked at different stages of the process, Oakley said.

Lecanemab targets amyloid as it begins to form fibres in the brain while donanemab is active at a later stage, when the fibres have clumped together into larger accumulations of plaque. The main adverse side effect with both drugs was swelling and bleeding of the brain in a small minority of patients.

Although the clinical trial designs for the two drugs make direct comparisons difficult, there were tentative indications that donanemab might be more effective than lecanemab when administered to people in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s, said Oakley.

It cleared amyloid plaques completely from the brain in some participants, who were then taken off the drug.

Another potential advantage for donanemab, according to Howard Fillit, chief scientist at the US-based Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation, is that patients receive infusions twice as frequently for lecanemab — every two weeks.

While Biogen and Eisai have announced a US list price of $26,500 a year for Leqembi, Lilly said it was not yet ready to set the price for its drug.

“With two drugs on the market, we can expect some competition on price,” said Fillit, “but we don’t know yet which factors will play an important role in the marketplace.”

Datamonitor Healthcare forecasts combined sales for the two products of $9bn a year by 2030 in the world’s main markets.

“This is a watershed moment but it is just a start,” said Fillit. “We must continue advancing the drug pipeline to develop the next class centred around the biology of ageing to ultimately stop Alzheimer’s in its tracks.”

He added that future therapies would be drug combinations tailored to each individual through biomarker tests.

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Clive Cookson

Analysis released by the UK Health Security Agency on Friday showed that England had 128 confirmed cases of measles in the first half of this year, with 66 per cent of those cases in London. There were 54 cases across the country in the whole of 2022.

Mathematical projections suggested that numbers could rise very quickly in the future, leading to a measles outbreak affecting between 40,000 and 160,000 people in the capital, though UKHSA said the chance of a nationwide epidemic was low because vaccination rates were significantly higher outside London.

Beate Kampmann, professor of paediatric infection and immunity at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that “for every 1,000 children who get measles, one or two will die from it”. She added that 95 per cent of the population needed to have been inoculated to “avoid deaths, serious cases and a community outbreak . . . but our current coverage is well below this target”.

According to the UKHSA, the vaccination rate — normally achieved through the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) jab in young children — runs at about 85 per cent for England as a whole, but in parts of London it is below 70 per cent.

The NHS has launched a national campaign to encourage uptake of MMR, with special targeting of communities in the capital identified as having the lowest vaccination rates.

The UKHSA said that, besides young children, “susceptibility to measles is particularly high among 19- to 25-year-olds, affected by unfounded stories in the early 2000s” that MMR caused autism.

It said these “Wakefield cohorts” of unvaccinated young adults — named after Andrew Wakefield, who promoted the now discredited idea that MMR jabs had unacceptable side-effects — would be most vulnerable in a large outbreak.

Measles is one of the most contagious viruses known, with each case infecting roughly 15 more people in an unprotected population. It causes significant complications in an estimated one in 15 cases.

The disease has been on the rise globally since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, which led to a decline in childhood vaccinations. Large outbreaks are happening in several countries in Africa and South Asia. Some 128 cases were reported in Austria in the first half of 2023, more than occurred in the whole EU last year.

David Elliman, consultant in community child health at Great Ormond Street Hospital, said the UKHSA warning, “along with the recent concerns about polio and diphtheria, should act as a wake-up call about the state of childhood immunisation in general”.

Elliman added: “It would be much better that everyone is immunised on time, rather than have repeated catch-up programmes.”

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Clive Cookson

Unesco will begin to develop a “universal ethical framework” for neurotechnology, which connects computers with the brain and increasingly uses artificial intelligence to analyse neural activity, at a conference of scientific and political leaders in Paris on Thursday.

“When you add AI, you are putting neurotechnology on steroids,” said Mariagrazia Squicciarini, lead author of a Unesco report on the rapid pace of innovation in neurotechnology.

Neurotechnology, including implants to diagnose and treat brain-related disorders, is beginning to improve the lives of people living with disabilities, but the increased investment in AI-based programs that can read people’s minds and store neural data has raised concerns about its use.

Gabriela Ramos, Unesco assistant director-general for social and human sciences, said: “The promise . . . may come at a high cost in terms of human rights and fundamental freedoms, if abused. Neurotechnology can affect our identity, autonomy, privacy, sentiments, behaviours and overall wellbeing.

“Developments that many thought were science fiction only a few years ago are here with us already and are poised to change the very essence of what it means to be human.”

The Unesco researchers estimate that private investments in neurotech companies such as Onward Medical and Elon Musk’s Neuralink increased more than 20-fold in the decade from 2010, reaching $7.3bn in 2020. The market for neurotech devices is projected to exceed $24bn by 2027.

The report analysed scientific publications and patents to examine the field’s swift expansion. The number of neuroscience papers rose from 57,899 in 2011 to 94,456 in 2021, while patents worldwide related to neurotech rose from 418 to 1,531 between 2010 and 2020.

One speaker at the Unesco conference is Rafael Yuste, director of the Neurotechnology Centre at New York’s Columbia University who is a leading neurobiologist and advocate of international regulation “to protect mental privacy”.

He pointed out that in four studies published within the past year, not all peer reviewed, “researchers have decoded speech and images from the brains of human volunteers, using non-invasive devices that didn’t need neurosurgery to insert”.

“All four incorporated advanced AI models to decode the brain data,” Yuste said. “The new algorithms will enable you to decode information that is highly sensitive — which makes the protection of mental privacy all the more urgent.”

Regulation is needed because “almost without exception neurotech companies in the US and Canada take complete ownership of the client’s neural data in their consumer user agreements”, he added. “We need to protect mental property — otherwise companies will start to bank brain data. They may not decode it today, but AI will enable them to decode it tomorrow.”

Yuste’s own laboratory has decoded and manipulated neural processing in the visual cortex of mice so that researchers can “implant hallucinations — make them see things that they are not really seeing. Manipulation of human brain activity in the future is something we should start discussing now. It opens the possibility of a new type of human being where part of our mental processing happens outside the body”.

Unesco’s Squicciarini said: “We are not against neurotechnology or asking for a moratorium on research, because it has huge potential to reduce the deaths and disabilities caused by neurological disorders.

“But we need a globally co-ordinated approach to regulation for neurotechnology not only in medicine but in the consumer market.”

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Clive Cookson

The vaccine, called M72, will be given from next year to 26,000 young adults in Africa and south-east Asia who have a latent infection with the bacteria that cause TB but no symptoms. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will contribute $400mn to the phase 3 trial while Wellcome Trust provides $150mn.

In most years tuberculosis kills more people than any other infectious illness — an estimated 1.6mn deaths in 2021. Cases increased during the coronavirus pandemic, and the World Health Organization warned last year that drug-resistant strains were spreading.

Clear evidence about M72’s efficacy in preventing the emergence of active pulmonary tuberculosis will take several years to emerge from the trial, said Trevor Mundel, the Gates Foundation’s head of global health. A smaller phase 2 study with 3,500 people in southern Africa reported in 2018 that M72 was 54 per cent effective.

The WHO calculated that a vaccine 50 per cent effective at preventing the emergence of active disease could save between 4.6mn and 8.5mn lives by 2050.

“Of course we’d be happy with 90 per cent efficacy but from our modelling 50 per cent is good enough on the assumption that the durability is at least five years — and most of the vaccinologists who have looked at the data have said that is likely,” said Mundel.

A prototype M72 vaccine was first tested in humans in 2004 by Corixa, a US biotech company acquired the following year by GSK. The UK-based pharmaceutical group continued to develop M72, with funding from several aid agencies, before giving the Gates Foundation a non-exclusive licence to commercialise it in about 100 low- and middle-income countries.

GSK will continue to provide its AS01E adjuvant, which boosts the vaccine by stimulating the recipient’s immune system. The other critical ingredient of M72 is a “fusion protein” derived from the TB bacterium.

Alexander Pym, Wellcome’s head of infectious diseases, said it had taken so long to take M72 into a large-scale clinical trial partly because the pathogen’s complex lifecycle — lying dormant in the patient for years before symptoms appear — made it a difficult target for vaccine development and partly because of “market failure”.

“TB is the quintessential disease of poverty,” said Mundel. “Its incidence very much tracks poverty around the world. There’s no commercial market really for TB drugs, diagnostics or vaccines.”

Thomas Breuer, head of global health at GSK, agreed. His team runs the largest R&D programme aimed at tackling infectious diseases in the developing world “but in the end we are not an NGO. We are a publicly traded company,” he said, explaining the decision not to take the vaccine beyond phase 2 trials as a corporate project.

Community and activist groups welcomed the investment in the phase 3 trial. Mark Harrington, executive director of Treatment Action Group, said: “We hope this funding commitment sparks governments and other funders to substantially increase investments in the TB vaccine pipeline, which contains a number of promising candidates in addition to M72 but faces a dire financial shortfall.”

The only TB vaccine available today is BCG or Bacille Calmette-Guérin which was developed in France in the early 20th century by Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin from a weakened strain of bovine tuberculosis. It protects infants against severe systemic disease but offers little protection against pulmonary TB in adolescents and adults.

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Clive Cookson

Sir Chris Whitty told the hearing that diagnostic ability was essential in any epidemic and the UK had responded well to the initial small number of cases. But he added that it had lacked the ability to accelerate its response in diagnostics and other areas such as personal protective equipment.

“It’s the scaling up which, in my view, was a weakness that was demonstrated during the early phase of Covid,” Whitty said.

He added that maintaining capacity between pandemics required investment and politicians would need to choose “between having an insurance against future events and, for example, investing in pressures in the NHS during winter. That is a choice and I think it has to be made explicit,” he said.

The chief medical officer also suggested that although expert committees such as the scientific advisory group for emergencies (Sage) had worked well during the epidemic, with “a reasonable balance between coherence and challenge”, there was a need for more “radical” thinking by scientific advisers between public health emergencies. 

He admitted that it would not have been feasible for scientific experts to have prepared for the possibility of a national lockdown without being instructed to do so by ministers. The mandatory quarantine that Britons were subject to at the height of the pandemic was “the very big new idea” that had emerged through the crisis and “a very radical thing to do”, he said.

“I would have thought it would be very surprising, without this being requested by a senior politician or similar, that a scientific committee would venture, between emergencies, into that kind of extraordinarily major social intervention with huge economic and social ramifications,” he said.

Whitty added that most overseas observers would judge the UK scientific response to have been “very strong by international standards” even though there were “other areas people might be more critical on”, he noted.

Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser until April 2023, followed Whitty into the witness box and backed up several of his colleague’s points. He said the government had to be clearer about the risks of spending money on things that might not be needed. 

He pointed out that while the Vaccines Task Force had been one of the success stories of the pandemic, when it was set up in the spring of 2020 he thought it “possible, even likely” that its mission would fail.

“If it had failed, the National Audit Office would have probably written a report saying what an outrageous waste of money it was,” he said.

Covid-19 also showed how important the country’s industrial base was for pandemic preparedness, Vallance said. “By 2020 UK vaccine manufacturing had almost gone . . . while we didn’t have a diagnostics industry on any scale, which made it very hard to scale up testing.” Germany, with a larger diagnostics sector, had been able to scale up much faster.

Vallance said practical expertise in vaccine manufacturing would be important for future resilience. “Don’t dream that you can have a vaccine factory sitting there waiting for a pandemic,” he said. “It’s going to be staffed by people who don’t know how to make vaccines.”

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Clive Cookson

But the former prime minister, the first politician to appear before the public inquiry, rejected claims that his government’s austerity programme had undermined the ability of the NHS to respond to the health crisis.

Cameron closed by telling Mitchell: “I’m desperately sorry about the loss of life. So many people have lost people that are close to them . . . and people also suffered in all sorts of ways through the pandemic. And that’s why this inquiry is so important.”

The Covid inquiry was set up to examine the UK’s response to and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic and is due to hold public hearings until at least 2026.

The next politicians to give evidence will be former chancellor George Osborne and Sir Oliver Letwin, former cabinet minister on Tuesday, followed by chancellor Jeremy Hunt and cabinet office secretary Oliver Dowden on Wednesday.

The leaders of the government’s scientific response to Covid, chief medical officer Sir Chris Whitty and former chief scientist Sir Patrick Vallance, will appear on Thursday.

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Clive Cookson

The pharma giant will pay Quell $85mn upfront and up to $2bn more if it meets various development and commercialisation milestones over the next few years.

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Clive Cookson

In a report published on Thursday, the Information Commissioner’s Office called for new regulations over neurotechnology applications in non-medical fields, such as wellbeing and marketing and in workplaces, to prevent ethical breaches.

In the longer term, the regulator’s report noted that “neuroenhancement” devices would aim to improve reaction times and muscular responses, “potentially allowing athletes to run faster, jump higher and throw further”.

Gaming and entertainment is set to be one of neurotech’s biggest consumer markets, as more sophisticated devices are introduced not only to control computers but also to boost users’ performance through “neuromodulation”.

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Clive Cookson

The project combined the genetic information of about 800 primates belonging to 233 species of apes, monkeys and lemurs. An AI algorithm based on the genomic database was then used to analyse the DNA of 454,000 human participants in the UK Biobank project, with the results showing “greatly improved genetic risk prediction”, the researchers said.

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Clive Cookson

Professor George Gao, former head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told a BBC Radio 4 podcast that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was checked by experts to see whether the facility could have been the source of the coronavirus pandemic.

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Clive Cookson

Swiss researchers implanted an electronic device in the patient’s skull on top of the region of the brain responsible for controlling leg movements. Using algorithms based on adaptive AI methods, “movement intentions are decoded in real time from brain recordings”, said Guillaume Charvet, head of brain-computer interface research at French public research body CEA.

Although the digital bridge has so far been tested only on Gerd-Jan, the researchers are about to extend the clinical trial, initially to three new patients and then many more. They expressed confidence that the technology would work in other applications if the position of implants was altered. Hand and arm mobility could be restored in people with paralysed upper limbs and disability reduced in stroke patients, for example.

“The concept of a digital bridge between the brain and spinal augurs a new era in the treatment of motor deficits due to neurological disorders,” the Nature paper concludes.

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Clive Cookson

Japan’s government is hosting a meeting of global dementia organisations in Nagasaki this weekend ahead of the summit beginning on May 19. Tokyo hopes the conference will pave the way for an updated declaration, matching the scope of the commitments made at the G8’s London summit in 2013.

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Clive Cookson

The study adds to the growing evidence that academic publishing faces a damaging surge in fabricated research sold by paper mills to researchers desperate for published work to boost their careers. It also backs up recent evidence that the majority of fake research comes from China.

Most of the growing band of independent investigators who track scientific fraud analyse the content of papers and look, for example, for manipulated images and implausible genetic sequences. Academic publishers are also beginning to adopt more sophisticated fraud detection tools.

Citing the “mass production” of faked research by paper mills, the researchers also investigated the techniques used by a sector whose annual revenues were estimated at $3bn-$4bn. “They typically appear to use sophisticated AI-supported text generation, data and statistical manipulation and fabrication technologies, image and text pirating,” they said.

But the ultimate solution, Gigerenzer added, was to reduce the pressure to publish, particularly in China. Others, he suggested, could follow the example of the German Research Foundation, which tells applicants for funding that they should limit the number of their own papers cited to five.

Jennifer Byrne, an oncology professor at the University of New South Wales and leading sleuth, who was not involved in the project, said: “It’s an important study because very few studies have been published on this large scale. It is pointing to a massive problem.”

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Clive Cookson