It’s hard to know where to start in describing the biopharma applications of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. It was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”
David Baker, director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine, is a pioneer in protein design. His contributions have been recognized with countless awards, and now, a place among the 2024 Clarivate Citation Laureates. Baker’s lab has developed several open-source software applications for nanotechnology and biomedicine. With these methods, scientists build new proteins that bind to drug targets and block them or activate cellular signals.
Research into the regulation of gene expression experienced a significant breakthrough with the discovery of microRNA, small RNA molecules that do not code for proteins but control their translation. This finding has earned its discoverers – Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun – the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.”
A collaboration led by the Flywire Consortium and comprising hundreds of scientists has completed a whole map of the adult fruit fly brain after several decades of collaborative work. By using electron microscopy and three-dimensional reconstruction supported by AI tools, the researchers have revealed the neural wiring of the Drosophila melanogaster brain, a connectome of 140,000 neurons with 50 million synaptic connections. In the future, researchers could possibly use this map as an artificial in silico model to study the brain as a simulator through its connections, though a lot of work remains to be done for this.
The spread of drug-resistant bacteria is a global health concern and could once again become a leading cause of mortality. The World Health Organization has flagged carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii as a top priority pathogen requiring innovative therapies for its management, which has a mortality rate of 25%-60% and caused more than 100,000 deaths worldwide in 2019. Therapy based on the use of bacteriophages (phages) to fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria is one such innovative strategy.
Breakthrough – or even better, revolutionary breakthrough – is perhaps the most overused term in drug development. But the discovery and development of GLP-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RAs), which was honored with the 2024 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award just last week, is one of the rare innovations that is deserving of the title.
At the 2024 European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) Congress, researchers have presented work that could lead to ways to boost brain development and prevent neurodegeneration in individuals with Down syndrome.
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy moved the needle at the 2024 ECTRIMS (European Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis) congress and will continue to do so – not just in multiple sclerosis (MS), but in other autoimmune diseases as well.
An innovation that has kickstarted a revolution in the study and practice of health care is getting even more attention. Three scientists who pioneered the discovery and development of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1)-based obesity treatments have been named 2024 Lasker Award winners.
By treating mice with antifibrotic drugs, researchers were able to stave off functional decline of the ovaries. Six weeks of systemic treatment with the antifibrotic pirfenidone, which is approved for the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, in early middle age improved both the morphology and the endocrine function of the animals’ ovaries at 1 year of age.
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