Coming on the heels of an advisory committee in which the U.S. FDA and its independent advisers grappled with trying to fit an ultra-rare disease development program into the confines of the agency’s “significant evidence” requirements, an Oct. 16 public meeting on a Rare Disease Innovation Hub the agency is setting up seemed like a welcome step in the right direction for rare disease patients, their caregivers and companies working in the space.

David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper share the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their contributions to the science of protein structure. David Baker was awarded half the prize “for computational protein design,” according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Hassabis and Jumper shared the other half “for protein structure prediction.”

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.”

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.”