BREAKTHROUGHS AS BIG AS VACCINES POSSIBLE IN 2021
2020 saw a staggering achievement: the use of a new technology to develop not one but two extremely effective vaccinations for COVID-19 in less than a year’s time, potentially saving millions of lives. Instead of vaccines which release a weakened or inactivated germ into our bodies to spur an immune response, messenger RNA vaccines get cells to make a protein that causes an immune response in bodies.
For months, researchers have said messenger RNA vaccines have enormous potential to treat other diseases — and last week, the Academic Times reported a breakthrough on malaria, which kills more than 400,000 people a year, mostly children in Africa. Human tests have not begun yet, but co-inventor Richard Bucala, a Yale physician, and other experts say lab results suggest the vaccine would be vastly more effective over the short and long haul than existing malaria vaccines, which often don’t work and don’t convey long-term immunity.
What comes after COVID-19 and malaria? Scientists say messenger RNA technology could lead to not just a herpes vaccine and improved flu vaccines but to genetic treatments for cancer, HIV and sicklecell disease.
Could 2021 see breakthroughs as life-changing as messenger RNA technology? Perhaps two.
Scientists (and venture capital investors) are optimistic about senolytics, a field that focuses on eliminating or reducing the effects of damaged, dying cells, which can accelerate the human aging process.
In November, Nature Biotechnology reported that the failure in the first clinical testing of a senolytic drug meant to treat knee osteoarthritis had hurt the nascent anti-aging industry. But it also noted that at least 25 startups were probing how “to target senescent [aging] cells — strategies that range from cell destruction and containment to senescence prevention and even reversal.” Clinical trials of other senolytic drugs are underway.
In January 2020, University of Michigan researchers reported that they had developed four different drugs that significantly slowed aging and physical decline in mice. This of course is no guarantee the drugs will work on humans. But there’s a reason mice are considered a “robust tool” for such tests, notes microbiologist Sunagar Raju: “Genetically and genomically, the mouse and the human are very similar, with many of the diseaserelated genes are nearly identical . ... Core elements of the mouse immune system correlate with those in humans, permitting testing the efficacy of vaccines and immunotherapies for infectious diseases.”
The hunt for the fountain of youth is hundreds of years old. But anti-aging researchers have made more progress the past few years than the rest of history combined. Between this research and messenger RNA, the future of humanity could be far healthier.
2021 may also bring a breakthrough in energy — one that in time could largely eliminate the need for fossil fuels whose emissions play a key role in global warming.
“Since the 1950s, producing electricity from nuclear fusion has been the dream of many scientists and nonscientists alike,” a Columbia University website explains. “By replicating, in a controlled fashion, the process that powers the sun, it is possible to obtain incredible amounts of energy in a potentially safe and environmentally clean way.”
This may induce groans from older readers, who remember the rapidly debunked claims of two University of Utah chemists in 1989 that they had created a world-changing “cold fusion” process.
Nonetheless, construction is expected to begin this spring of a small fusion reactor called SPARC that was developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers and Commonwealth Fusion Systems, an MIT spinoff company. The excitement over SPARC is palpable among nuclear physicists. In September, the Journal of Plasma Physics published a special issue featuring seven peer-reviewed papers attesting to the likelihood that SPARC would work.
As The New York Times noted, “the hurdles to building a machine that can create and control a fusion plasma — a roiling ultrahot cloud of atoms that will damage or destroy anything it touches — are enormous.” But it appears that MIT scientists have overcome these hurdles and are on the brink of creating a cheap, clean source of energy that doesn’t release greenhouse gas emissions and — unlike conventional nuclear fission plants — does not create any long-lived radioactive nuclear waste.
The failure of the federal government to come up with a safe, long-term repository for such waste — which can take a million years to decay — is one of the main reasons environmentalists oppose using nuclear power in the fight against climate change. But if fusion is clean as well as cheap, their objections should vanish.
A world in which energy is far less expensive — and much less of an environmental risk — is a far more prosperous and better world. MIT, make it so.
The hunt for the fountain of youth is hundreds of years old. But anti-aging researchers have made more progress the past few years than the rest of history combined.