Biotechnology Archives Biotechnology

Biotechnology

Jul 16 2023

Revived, implanted, and analyzed—the personal stories at the heart of cutting-edge biotech

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

As regular readers will know, I tend to start each edition of this newsletter by telling you all about a topic that’s been on my mind—whether it’s a big news story, a fascinating trend, or just something cool I happened to hear about in my reporting.

This week is a bit different. It’s my last Checkup for a while. In a matter of weeks, I’ll be starting a Knight Science Journalism fellowship at MIT (which is completely unrelated to my position at Tech Review). The Checkup will live on—I’ll be passing the baton to my brilliant colleagues while I’m away! But this is a farewell from me, for now.

The Checkup is not yet a year old, but we’ve covered some extremely exciting developments in medicine and biotechnology since we launched last September. We’ve come a long way since then—today, there are over 77,000 of you getting this newsletter in your inboxes every week! We’ve covered everything from teeny-tiny viruses to life-changing brain implants. There’s been a real mix of stories that have made me laugh, cry, and—always—think. So let’s take the opportunity to look at some story highlights from the last 10 months.

The first edition of the Checkup looked at what minimally conscious brains can do. There’s some really fascinating research on the minds of people who are in what’s known as an unresponsive wakefulness state and only show unreliable flickers of awareness. Some studies suggest that people in this state can still learn.

I spoke to neuroscientist John Whyte, who told me about attempts to pull minimally conscious people back into full consciousness. Some of these have involved sticking electrodes into a part of the brain that’s thought to control awareness. Others have involved drugs.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget Whyte’s story about a young man he’d treated with one of these drugs. The man, who had sustained a head injury on his way home from his summer vacation, had been unconscious for three years. Within an hour of being given a drug called zolpidem, he seemed revived—he was even able to hug his parents. But the effects lasted only a few hours, Whyte told me through tears. His parents opted to save the drug for special occasions.

As a reporter covering health and biotech, I am hugely privileged to hear the personal stories of people who have been through incredible experiences. Another story that will stick with me is that of Ian Burkhart, who I spoke to for a more recent edition of the Checkup.

Burkhart also experienced a life-changing injury in his young adulthood—a diving accident that left him with a broken neck. He was no longer able to move his limbs.

A few years later, he volunteered to have an experimental device implanted in his brain. The device, which was essentially a set of 100 electrodes, was designed to record activity in a part of his brain responsible for controlling arm movement. Researchers were able to send recorded brain signals to a sleeve of electrodes on Burkhart’s arm via a computer. He was soon able to use the device to move his hand and fingers by thought alone.

I first spoke to Burkhart in 2016, a couple of years after he’d had the device implanted. By that point, he was able to control his fingers well enough to play Guitar Hero. At the time, he said of the device: “It’s grown to be a part of me.”

But looming funding cuts soon threatened the project, and after an infection, he had to have the implant removed. He found this difficult, he told me. “When I first had my spinal cord injury, everyone said: ‘You’re never going to be able to move anything from your shoulders down again,’” he said. “I was able to restore that function, and then lose it again. That was really tough.” (You can read more about the ethical implications of removing brain implants—particularly when recipients feel it has become part of them—in this piece).

More generally, brain implants can both record brain activity and electrically stimulate parts of the brain. It’s an approach that appears to help treat some disorders, but it’s worth bearing in mind that these devices can collect intimate biological data. And while this data should be used to improve a person’s health, there’s a chance it could be used in a legal setting.

Recordings from a brain device have already been used to clear someone from assault charges. In that case, recordings suggest the person was having a seizure at the time of the alleged assault. But such recordings could just as easily be used against someone, as we explored in a February edition of the Checkup. In another edition, I had an eye-opening chat with futurist and legal ethicist Nita Farahany about the need to protect our brain data and establish our “neurorights.”

Since its inception, the Checkup has also covered some of the most exciting aspects of microbiome research. Anyone who knows me understands my fascination with the tiny bugs that live in and on us. (Former colleagues referred to me as their “poo correspondent” for my reporting on fecal transplants.)

So perhaps it’s no surprise that a recent edition of this newsletter looked at what fecal analysis can tell you about your diet and your microbiome. Scientists are developing new tools that they hope will eventually allow them to create personalized, microbiome-based diet plans. Others are working on engineering “designer microbes” for healthier microbiomes.

It’s a worthwhile endeavor given just how important these microbes seem to be for our health. They even change as we age, which has led some scientists to wonder if establishing a “younger” microbiome in the gut might somehow improve older people’s health.

We’ve also explored some really tricky ethical questions that surround reproduction and parenthood as a result of new scientific advances. Scientists can now use stem cells to make what look like early-stage embryos, for example. How far should we allow them to develop?

We can also use cells from dead people to make babies. Who should get to decide how and when that technology is used, if ever? And then there’s the race to make functional human egg and sperm cells in the lab. This technology could allow us to create babies with more than two parents, or none at all. Will it change our understanding of what it means to be a parent?

There often aren’t definitive answers to questions like these, but exploring them has been a blast. I’d like to say a great big thank you for doing that with me.

From around the web

There’s evidence that weight-loss drugs like Wegovy work well in children—and trials in children as young as six are about to start. But taking these drugs could be a lifelong commitment, and they could be harmful for those with eating disorders. So should we ever give weight-loss drugs to kids? (New Scientist)

Humans transmitted the coronavirus to white-tailed deer more than 100 times in late 2021 and early 2022, according to new research. The virus probably spread among the deer, mutated, and then passed back to us. (The New York Times)

Activists are suing the Idaho government over a state law that prohibits adults from helping minors access abortions. The law was hastily cobbled together and is unconstitutional, according to the plaintiffs. (The Guardian)

The US Food and Drug Administration has approved a daily contraceptive pill for over-the-counter use. The move should allow people to buy birth control pills without a prescription. (Reuters)

There are somewhere between 50 and 800 longevity clinics in the US, where clients pay as much as $100,000 for sometimes unproven treatments. (The Wall Street Journal)

Two virologists have testified in support of their findings that the coronavirus had a “natural” origin and was not engineered in a lab. At a hearing titled “Investigating the proximal origin of a cover-up,” the scientists also said that Anthony Fauci did not exert influence over their research paper. (The New York Times)

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Biotechnology

Jul 8 2023

Covid hasn’t entirely gone away—here’s where we stand

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

We’re well into summer here in the Northern Hemisphere. For a parent of two young children, that means ice creams, water fountains, picnics, and—inevitably—coughs and colds. My eldest told me she was feeling poorly this morning, and the youngest crawled into my bed to cough in my face.

It’s not just kids, of course. My colleague has just come down with covid-19. The onset of symptoms was rapid, and she described it as “like being hit by a freight train.” “How very retro of you,” another colleague commented. Another replied: “This is still a thing?”

As a health reporter who has been covering covid since the early days, I am still asked this question on a fairly regular basis. So this week let’s take a look at exactly where we stand with covid.

It’s worth pointing out that there are still some big, unanswered questions when it comes to covid-19. For a start, we still don’t really know where this particular coronavirus came from. Most scientists believe it must have jumped from an animal host to humans at a market in Wuhan, China. But some maintain that it could have leaked from a lab. My colleague Antonio Regalado has explored the question in his five-part podcast series, Curious Coincidence.

What we do know is that covid-19 spread all around the world in 2020. On January 9 of that year, Chinese authorities determined that a mysterious cluster of pneumonia-like illnesses was caused by a novel coronavirus. The first death was reported days later. Since then, almost 7 million more deaths have been confirmed. The true figure is thought to be higher.

Lockdowns and the use of face masks helped slow the spread of the disease. But even “zero-covid” policies that aimed to keep the virus out of entire countries couldn’t stem the spread. To date, there have been over 767 million confirmed cases.

Vaccines eventually helped us get the virus under control, at least to some degree. As of June 27, over 13.4 billion vaccine doses have been administered globally. These days, the number of reported cases is much, much lower. On July 3, the WHO reported 143,898 weekly cases of covid-19. People are still getting infected, but that’s a massive decline from July 3 last year, when the figure was 6.3 million.

Some of that difference in numbers may be due to changes in how often people test and the declining availability of free tests around the world. Those of us who are vaccinated can still get infected, but if and when we do, our symptoms should be less severe. That, along with the lack of free tests, mean it’s likely that far fewer people are testing for covid-19 when they start to get sick.

As I was clearing out my home earlier this week, I came across a box of covid tests. They’re old now—we’ve had most of them for over two years. About half of them have expired, so they’re no longer reliable. But what should we do with the others?

Reassuringly, older, non-expired tests do still seem to be picking up new variants of the virus (although it’s worth bearing in mind that we don’t know how future variants might evolve). But they’ve never been 100% accurate, and they still aren’t. (Antonio reviewed a few of the tests back in 2021 and had mixed results.)

A study published a couple of days ago found that symptomatic people should really take two tests, 48 hours apart. And people who think they might have been infected but don’t have symptoms should test three times.

A couple of months ago, the WHO declared that covid was no longer a public health emergency of international concern. Which sounds great, until you realize it’s because it is now “an established and ongoing health issue.” Oh, and it’s still a pandemic.

There can still be huge spikes in case numbers, like last winter, when the WHO recorded over 44 million cases on December 19. And while deaths have thankfully declined, they do still happen. The most recent data we have suggests that 497 people died of covid in the week ending July 3. Deaths were much higher in January of this year, with 20,000 to 40,000 every week. Again, those are just the recorded covid deaths. The real numbers are likely to be higher.

Personally, I’m not as worried about covid-19 as I was during the early days of the pandemic. That’s partly because I’m fully vaccinated and have already had covid at least twice. I’m also fortunate enough not to have a condition that makes me vulnerable to severe disease.

But the elephant in the room is long covid—another hotly contested topic. (There has been a particularly intense debate surrounding long covid in children, as I covered here.) The condition continues to cause lasting pain and suffering to an unknown but significant number of people. Scientists believe it’s possible to develop the condition after any infection with the coronavirus.

So I’m keeping my unexpired tests for now, just in case.

From around the web

Mealworm burgers? Fermented fungi facon? Here are seven sources of protein that don’t involve farming animals. (Nature)

Incidentally, my colleague Casey Crownhart recently explored the environmental impact of cultured meat. Unsurprisingly, it’s not straightforward. (MIT Technology Review)

There’s more evidence to show that brain stimulation can improve memory in people with brain injuries. (Brain Stimulation) I covered the use of a “memory prosthesis” in people with brain damage here, last year.

Injections of a single protein appear to have improved the cognitive function of older monkeys. Scientists hope it might rejuvenate the brains of old people, too. (Wired)

Nine months before the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Texas enacted a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Nearly 10,000 extra births followed. (The Cut)

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Biotechnology Climate change MIT Technology Review Explains

Jul 5 2023

Here’s what we know about lab-grown meat and climate change

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more here.

Soon, the menu in your favorite burger joint could include not only options made with meat, mushrooms, and black beans but also patties packed with lab-grown animal cells.

Not only did the US just approve the sale of cultivated meat for the first time, but the industry, made up of over 150 companies, is raising billions of dollars to bring products to restaurants and grocery stores.

In theory, that should be a big win for the climate.

One of the major drivers for businesses focusing on cultivated (or lab-grown, or cultured) meat is its potential for cleaning up the climate impact of our current food system. Greenhouse-gas emissions from the animals we eat (mostly cows) account for nearly 15% of the global total, a fraction that’s expected to increase in the coming decades.

But whether cultivated meat is better for the environment is still not entirely clear.

That’s because there are still many unknowns around how production will work at commercial scales. Many of the startups are just now planning the move from research labs to bigger facilities to start producing food that real, paying customers will finally get to eat.

Exactly how this shift happens will not only determine whether these new food options will be cheap enough to make it into people’s carts. It may also decide whether cultivated meat can ever deliver on its big climate promises.

Moo-ve over, cows

Raising livestock, especially beef, is infamously emissions intensive. Feeding animals on farms requires a lot of land and energy, both of which can produce carbon dioxide emissions. In addition, cows (along with some other livestock, like sheep) produce large amounts of methane during digestion. If you add it all up and take a global average, one kilogram of beef can account for emissions roughly equivalent to 100 kilograms of carbon dioxide. (Exact estimates can vary depending on where cows are raised, what they’re fed, and how farms are run.)

At a cellular level, cultivated meat is made from basically the same ingredients as the meat we eat today. By taking a sample of tissue from a young animal or fertilized egg, isolating the cells, and growing them in a reactor, scientists can make animal-derived meat without the constraints of feeding and raising animals for slaughter.

The USDA just gave two California-based companies, Eat Just and Upside Foods, the green light to produce and sell their cultivated chicken products. This makes the US the second country to allow sales of meat grown in labs, after Singapore.

Cultivated meat will still produce emissions, since energy is required to run the reactors that house the cells as they grow. In the US and most places around the world today, that will likely involve fossil fuels. Renewables could eventually be available widely and consistently enough to power facilities producing cultivated meat. However, even in this case, the reactors, pipes, and all other necessary equipment for production facilities often have associated emissions that are tough to eliminate entirely. In addition, animal cells need to be fed and cared for, and the supply chain involved in that also comes with emissions attached.

And the emissions from cultivated meat might be significant. Some of the early work in the field has relied on materials and techniques borrowed from the biopharmaceutical industry, where companies sometimes grow cells in order to produce drugs. It’s a painstaking and tightly regulated process involving high-purity ingredients, expensive reactors, and a whole lot of energy, says Edward Spang, an associate professor of food science and technology at the University of California, Davis.

Spang and his team set out to estimate the climate impacts of cultivated meat assuming current production techniques. To quantify the potential climate benefits, the researchers examined the total environmental impacts of both animal agriculture and cultivated meat in an analysis known as a life-cycle assessment. This type of analysis adds up all the energy, water, and materials needed to make a product, putting everything in terms of equivalent carbon dioxide emissions.

In a recent preprint study that hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, Spang estimated the total global-warming potential of cultivated meat in several scenarios based on assumptions about the current state of the industry.

The scenarios were divided into two categories. The first set assumed that cultivated meat would be produced with processes and materials similar to those used in the biopharmaceutical industry—specifically including an energy-intensive purification step to remove contaminants. The other scenarios assumed that cultivated meat production wouldn’t require ultra-high-purity ingredients and would instead rely on inputs like those used in the food industry today, meaning lower energy requirements and emissions.

The two sets of results have very different climate outcomes. A food-grade process results in the equivalent of 10 to 75 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions—lower than the global average emissions from beef and in line with production in some countries today. But in the biopharmaceutical-like process, cultivated meat leads to significantly more emissions than beef production today: between 250 and 1,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent for every kilogram of beef, depending on the specific scenario.

Where’s the beef?

Spang’s preprint, which appeared in April, sparked splashy news headlines about the potential for sky-high emissions. The study also drew quick criticism from some in the industry, including a widely circulated open letter questioning its assumptions.

Experts particularly took issue with the assumption that materials used in producing cultivated meat would need to use pharmaceutical-grade ingredients and go through intense purification steps to remove contaminants called endotoxins. Endotoxins are pieces of the outer membranes of some bacteria, and they’re shed as the microbes grow and when they die. Removing them is often necessary in biopharmaceutical processes, since even very small quantities can harm the growth of some cell types and provoke immune responses.

The process that removes those contaminants is the major contributor to the high emissions seen in one group of the preprint’s scenarios. However, that purification step won’t be necessary in commercial production of cultivated meat, says Elliot Swartz, a principal scientist at the industry group Good Food Institute and one of the authors of the open letter. Different cell types are affected by endotoxins differently, and the ones that will be used for cultivated meat should be able to tolerate higher levels, meaning less purification is needed, Swartz says.

The study’s results do differ from those of many previous analyses in the field, which generally found that cultivated meat would reduce emissions compared with conventional beef production. Most of those studies assume that producers of cultivated meat will be able to avoid the energy-intensive methods described in the preprint, and will instead scale up to large commercial facilities and progress toward using more widely available, food-grade ingredients.

Experience will provide a better picture of the industry’s potential climate impact, says Pelle Sinke, a researcher at CE Delft, an independent research firm and consultancy focusing on energy and the environment. “In all innovative technologies, there’s an enormous learning curve,” Sinke says. “I’m not sure we should worry that much that [cultivated meat] will add an enormous burden to the climate globally.”

In an analysis published in January 2023, he and his team set out to estimate emissions associated with cultivated meat in 2030, assuming that the production process can use food-grade ingredients and will reach commercial scale sometime in the next decade. That study put the potential climate impact at between three and 14 kilograms of carbon dioxide per kilogram of cultivated meat.

Where the total emissions from cultivated meat production will fall in this range depends largely on where the energy comes from to run the bioreactors: if it comes from the electrical grid, which will still rely partly on fossil fuels, the carbon impact will be much higher than it will be if renewables are used to power the facility. It also depends on what ingredients are in the media used to grow the cells.

In any case, Sinke’s study found that total emissions would be significantly lower than emissions from beef production, which his study estimated as equivalent to 35 kilograms of carbon dioxide in an optimized system in western Europe. (Chicken and pork came in at roughly three and five kilograms of carbon dioxide, respectively.)

Sinke’s analysis is far from the first to estimate that cultivated meat could have a smaller climate impact than conventional agriculture. An early analysis in the field, published in 2011, estimated that cultivated meat production would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by between 78% and 96% compared with meat production in Europe, assuming production took place at commercial scale.

Cultivated meat could eventually have major climate benefits, says Hanna Tuomisto, an associate professor at the University of Helsinki and the lead author of the 2011 study. Tuomisto recently published another study that also found potential climate benefits for cultivated meat. However, she adds, the industry’s true climate impacts are yet to be determined. “There are many, many open questions still, because not very many companies have built anything at larger scale,” Tuomisto says.

Till the cows come home

Scaling up to make cultivated meat in larger production facilities is an ongoing process.

Upside Foods, one of the two companies that received the recent USDA nod, currently runs a pilot facility with a maximum capacity of about 400,000 pounds (180,000 kilograms) per year, though its current production capability is closer to 50,000 pounds. The company’s first commercial facility, which it’s currently in the process of designing, will be much larger, with a capacity of millions of pounds per year.

“In all innovative technologies, there’s an enormous learning curve.”

Pelle Sinke

According to internal estimates, Upside’s products should take less water and land to produce than conventional meat, said Eric Schulze, the company’s VP of global scientific and regulatory affairs, in an email. However, he added, “we will need to be producing at a larger scale to truly measure and start to see the impact that we want to have.”

Eat Just is currently operating a demonstration plant in the US and constructing one in Singapore. Those facilities include reactors with capacities of 3,500 and 6,000 liters, respectively. Eventually, the company plans to produce millions of pounds of meat each year in a future commercial facility containing 10 reactors with a capacity of 250,000 liters each.

There are already “plenty of reasons to be hopeful” about the climate impacts of cultivated meat, said Andrew Noyes, VP of communications at Eat Just, in an email. “However, achieving those goals is dependent on several factors tied to the optimization and scale-up of our production process, as well as the design of future large-scale manufacturing facilities.”

Even though recent regulatory approvals have been celebrated as a milestone for the cultivated meat industry, these products won’t be in your burger joint anytime soon. To cut their production costs, companies still need to build those larger facilities and get them running smoothly.

Part of that growth will mean turning away from the more expensive equipment and ingredients the industry has borrowed from other businesses, says Jess Krieger, founder and CEO of Ohayo Valley, a cultivated meat company: “This is not how we’re going to be doing it in the future.” The factors that led to Spang’s worst-case emissions scenario, like intensive purification, expensive reactors, and pharmaceutical-grade media, aren’t necessary for production, she says.

It is true that early-stage companies still often use pharmaceutical-grade ingredients, says Elliot Swartz of the Good Food Institute. However, there are already cheaper, food-grade options available on the market. Both Eat Just and Upside Foods say they plan to use these nonpharmaceutical ingredients in their eventual commercial operations.

Energy-intensive methods aren’t just unsustainable for the planet, says Sinke, the researcher with CE Delft. Many processes that lean on biopharmaceutical techniques won’t be used in industry not just because they’d produce high emissions, he says, but “because nobody can afford them.”

For his part, Spang agrees that economics will likely keep cultivated meat from following the type of production path that would lead to extreme climate impacts. “If it requires pharmaceutical inputs, I don’t think there will be much of an industry,” he says. “It will be too expensive; I just don’t think that’s a viable pathway.”

But for him, there are still many open questions to answer, and plans to execute, before the industry can start taking credit as a climate solution. “The leap from lab-scale science to cost-effective climate impact—there’s a substantial amount of distance there, in my opinion,” Spang says.

It’s still possible for cultivated meat to become a major positive for the climate, especially as renewables like wind and solar become more widely available. An industry where cells can be grown efficiently in massive reactors while being fed widely available ingredients, in a process all powered by renewable electricity, could be a significant way to help clean up our food system.

But the facilities that would make that possible are mostly still in the planning phases—and it’s not yet clear which path cultivated meat might take to reach our plates.

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Biotechnology CRISPR

Jul 2 2023

How gene-edited microbiomes could improve our health

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

Microbes have been on my mind this week. These tiny organisms are everywhere, and the ones that reside in our bodies appear to be incredibly important for our health.

Microbes are ancient—they were evolving on the planet for millions of years before humans came along. So it’s no surprise that they’ve developed intricate relationships with other living systems. They feed on chemicals in their environments to produce other chemicals—some of which are more beneficial to nearby organisms than others.

The question is: can we tweak the genomes of these microbes to control exactly which chemicals they break down or produce? Imagine the possibilities. What if we could get microbes to help us reduce pollution? What if we could create microbes that make medicines, or that churn out gut-friendly products in our intestines?

Modified microbes seem to help treat cancer in mice, and human trials are on the way, as I reported earlier this year. (For a more general update on gene editing, you can read about how the editing tool CRISPR is already changing people’s lives, and how some believe we’ll eventually be using the technology to treat the majority of people.)

Getting microbes to work for us has been a tantalizing prospect to scientists for decades. New technologies are bringing us ever closer to making it a reality. So for this week’s newsletter, let’s focus on a couple of particularly exciting ways people are engineering microbes to benefit our health and environment.

Take the work being done by Brad Ringeisen, executive director of the Innovative Genomics Institute in Berkeley, California, and his colleagues. The team recently received a huge amount of funding to explore new ways to engineer microbes for the well-being of people and the planet—particularly people living in low- and middle-income countries.

“We got $70 million to develop precision microbiome-editing tools,” says Ringeisen. The team is focusing on using CRISPR to change the behavior of microbes—not just bacteria, but also their lesser-studied co-habitants, such as fungi and archaea. The idea is that feeding such treatments to people or animals could get their gut microbiomes to a healthier state.

The likely first recipients of such treatments will be cows. The way we farm these animals has a tremendous impact on the environment, for several reasons. (Read more from Tech Review about what it would take to clean up farming here and here.) But one significant element is the methane they emit, since methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change.

Technically, the methane isn’t made by the cows themselves. It’s produced by the bacteria in their guts. Ringeisen and his colleagues are looking at ways to alter microbes that reside in the rumen—the first and largest stomach compartment—so that they produce much less of the gas, if any.

Ringeisen thinks that modifying existing microbes should be less disruptive than introducing entirely new ones. He likens the approach to that of a conductor fine-tuning the sound of an orchestra. “[It would be like] bringing up the violin and lowering the bass drum, but to tune the microbiome,” he says.

The team is also looking at how a CRISPR microbiome treatment might benefit human infants. A baby’s first microbiome—thought to be picked up at birth—is especially malleable during the first two years of life. So microbiologists believe it’s important to get an infant’s microbiome as healthy as possible early on.

We still don’t know exactly what that means, or what a healthy microbiome should look like. But ideally, we want to avoid having bugs that make chemicals that cause harmful inflammation or damage the gut lining, for example. And we might want to encourage the growth of microbes that make chemicals that aid gut health—like butyrate, which is made when some microbes ferment fiber and seems to strengthen the intestine’s natural barrier.

The work being done here is still in its early stages. But the researchers envision an oral treatment that would be fed to babies to manipulate their microbiomes. They don’t have a specific age in mind, but it could be quite soon after birth.

As long as the modified microbes aren’t making anything harmful, it should be relatively straightforward to approve these treatments, says Ringeisen. “Those are experiments that are going to be relatively easy to do,” he says.

Justin Sonnenburg, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University in California, is also looking at ways to reengineer the microbes in our guts to improve our health. One important target is inflammation—a process that has been linked to all sorts of diseases, ranging from arthritis to cardiovascular disease.

Microbes that live in our guts can sense inflammation, says Sonnenburg. If we could “rewire the genetic circuit” of these microbes, we could potentially enable them to secrete anti-inflammatory compounds that treat inflammation if and when it arises. “All this [would be] happening behind the scenes without the person harboring the microbes even knowing about it,” he says.

One of the challenges will be to develop a treatment that works the same way in different people, who will have different microbiomes. But there may be some ways around this. In a study a few years ago, Sonnenburg and his colleagues delivered a modified microbe into the guts of mice. This microbe glowed under a microscope, so the scientists could tell how well it had settled in the mice’s intestines. It was quite variable—some of the mice had more of the microbes than others.

This particular microbe also fed on a carbohydrate found in seaweed, called porphyran. And when the scientists fed the mice seaweed, they found they could influence levels of the microbe in the gut. A diet rich in seaweed brought up the levels in all the mice, for example. “Now we have the ability to control engraftment and the level of the microbe independent of the background microbiota,” says Sonnenburg.

Some of the scientists who worked with Sonnenburg on this study have since formed a company, called Novome, which has shown that it can achieve similar results in people. The company is working on a proprietary microbial strain that has been engineered to break down oxalate, a compound that contributes to the formation of kidney stones. The company is also working on engineered microbes for irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease.

Scientists have been working on “designer microbes” for decades. But the progress made in recent years has brought such treatments closer to reality. Ringeisen reckons we’re four to six years away from a human treatment, and he thinks cow treatments are even closer than that. It’s an exciting time. Let’s wait and see.

From around the web

Penile enlargement surgery promises to help men stop worrying about their penises. But for those who experience problems—including devices protruding from their skin or injuring their wives, and loss of penile sensitivity—the dissatisfaction can get worse. (The New Yorker)

Learning about our ancestors can be fascinating and enriching. But it can also be disturbing—especially if we find out they were awful people, or were treated badly. Should DNA tests come with trigger warnings? (The Conversation)

A third of US adults say they would pay whatever they could afford, indefinitely, to get their hands on weight loss drugs like Wegovy. Nearly a quarter would pay up to $250 a month, according to a poll. (STAT)

When Singulair, a treatment for childhood asthma, was launched in the late ’90s, the company behind the drug didn’t mention any risk of psychiatric side effects. Then came reports of children who developed neuropsychiatric symptoms and some who died by suicide. The company, Merck, now faces multiple lawsuits alleging it knew of the risks and minimized them. (Reuters)

A janitor assigned to clean a university lab turned off a freezer when he heard its “annoying alarms.” In doing so, he destroyed decades’ worth of research materials valued at nearly $1 million, according to scientists at the university, which is suing the cleaning company that employed the janitor. The lawsuit states he was “just trying to help.” (Washington Post)

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Biotechnology Climate change

Jun 30 2023

Lab-grown meat just reached a major milestone. Here’s what comes next.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

I briefly became a vegetarian around the age of 13. The story is a common one in my generation, I think: I saw a video of slaughterhouse conditions, cried my eyes out, and vowed never to eat meat again.

I lasted a few weeks, during which time I ate a lot of peanut butter sandwiches. Eventually, though, I gave up: meat was central to my family’s diet, and I found myself missing some of my favorite foods, especially Chick-fil-A sandwiches. (Fun fact: I went on to work there for a year in high school.)

I think my younger self would be excited to know how quickly the world is changing. It’s easier to avoid meat these days if you want to, with alternative products like plant-based meat becoming more common (you can even get Impossible burgers at Burger King now). And soon we might have new options, like products made with animal cells grown in a lab.

Just last week, the US Department of Agriculture gave the green light to two companies to make and sell their cultivated chicken products in the US. This is a major moment for the field—even if a lot of milestones are left ahead. In a stroke of luck, this week I’m at a conference called Future Food Tech, where people are talking about the biggest news and challenges for alternative proteins of all types. So for the newsletter this week, let’s check in on the world of lab-grown meat.

Cultivating success

Eat Just and Upside have reached the end of a complicated regulatory process that includes both a nod from the Food and Drug Administration and multiple approvals from the USDA.

This is a huge milestone for the industry, and it’s been the talk of Future Food Tech this week. “There was a lot of celebration, of course,” said Patricia Bubner, cofounder and CEO of the cultivated meat company Orbillion Bio, during a panel discussion. There had been a looming question about whether this sort of product would be legitimized—and now it is, at least in the US, “the most significant market,” said Arik Kaufman, cofounder and CEO of Steakholder Foods.

Cultivated meat had previously been approved only in Singapore, and it has been served in a restaurant there over the past couple of years. Now it’s legal for the two companies to serve their products in the US too, and both plan to do so in restaurants in the coming months.

But as Upside’s chief operating officer, Amy Chen, put it in a talk at Future Food Tech, “in so many ways, we’re just getting started.”

One major thing I’ll be watching is how these companies start producing their products at larger scales. Upside’s pilot facility can currently produce around 50,000 pounds (22,600 kg) of finished products each year. At full capacity, it will eventually be able to grow to about 400,000 pounds (180,000 kg) per year.

That sounds like a lot, but in the grand scheme of food production, it’s pretty tiny. Large commercial meat facilities produce millions of pounds of meat each year—and that’s the sort of scale Upside is targeting for its first commercial facility, said Eric Schulze, VP of global scientific and regulatory affairs at Upside foods, in an email.

Eat Just’s cultured meat subsidiary Good Meat runs two demonstration facilities, one in the US and one in Singapore. Those facilities use large reactors with capacities of 3,500 and 6,000 liters, respectively, said Andrew Noyes, VP of communications at Eat Just. Again, those sound like huge reactors, but the company’s plans for its first commercial operation include 10 250,000-liter reactors, and in total, capacity will be about 30 million pounds (13.6 million kg) each year.

The road ahead

While scaling up processes that have already been demonstrated in labs and pilot facilities will be a major development in the industry moving forward, I’m also fascinated to see what new sorts of products come to market in the next few years. There are over 150 companies in the cultivated meat industry, making everything from beef to tuna to products unlike anything on the market today.

A few potential bottlenecks face companies trying to bring new products to market, including developing cell lines, designing and building bioreactors, and making the meat’s structure, said Jess Krieger, founder and CEO of the cultivated meat company Ohayo Valley, in a panel discussion.

I’m especially interested in that last bit, because meat’s structure dictates so much of our experience eating it. Some people, Krieger included, want to use plants to provide it. Others plan to use manufacturing techniques: Upside Foods intends to grow its cells in ways that will help develop the fibrous texture of chicken. Still others, including Steakholder Foods, are looking to 3D-print their meat to replicate the flakiness of fish or the tenderness of a properly cooked steak.

Food is so central to our lives, and the tech working to bring new options to our plates is moving quickly. Maybe someday soon, teenagers looking to stop eating animals won’t have to give up chicken sandwiches.

Another thing

Heat pumps and beer—name a better combination. I bet you can’t.

Industrial facilities, including breweries, often rely on fossil fuels for heating. A startup called AtmosZero is looking to replace those emissions-heavy heat sources with industrial heat pumps. The company has a partnership with New Belgium Brewing to test out one of its electric boilers next year.

My colleague James Temple has the scoop. Check it out here.

Keeping up with climate

The world is remembering a titan of the battery world this week. Nobel laureate John B. Goodenough, inventor of some of the key technologies behind lithium-ion batteries, passed away Sunday at the age of 100. (New York Times)

→ This 2015 profile of Goodenough and his work is worth a read. (Quartz)

In a surprising twist, NASA is opposing lithium mining at a site in Nevada. The agency uses the lakebed in question to calibrate sensitive equipment on satellites. (Associated Press)

The US government is giving a $9.2 billion loan to Ford to build three battery factories. It’s the biggest loan to an automaker in over a decade. (Bloomberg)

In news that should probably surprise no one, the wildfires in Canada are threatening forest offset projects there. (Bloomberg)

→ For a deep-dive on some of the issues with forest offsets, check out this 2021 story. (MIT Technology Review)

Extreme weather is becoming the norm in California, testing the state’s dams. What happens if they fail? (New York Times Magazine)

Heat battery company Rondo is opening up a massive factory for its energy storage systems. (Canary Media)

→ For everything you could ever want to know about the company and its hot bricks, check out my story from earlier this year. (MIT Technology Review)

You may have heard about, or even purchased, something called “renewable energy credits.” The problem is, while these credits might seem to suggest you’re running your home or business on renewables, that’s not necessarily the case … at all. (Washington Post)

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Biotechnology

Jun 24 2023

The wild race to improve synthetic embryos

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. This week, Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine is filling in for Jess Hamzelou.

Something journalists and scientists have in common is that they hate getting scooped. And it’s especially annoying when the news is “fake.”

But that’s what happened at the meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Boston last week when The Guardian newspaper blasted out news of a sensational “breakthrough.”

The publication claimed that a researcher named Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, based at the University of Cambridge and Caltech, had created “synthetic human embryos” using stem cells as the starting point.

The reason the Guardian story annoyed me is that this idea isn’t so new. The amazing fact that stem cells will self-organize into structures sharing features with real embryos has been known and studied for several years, as we first reported in 2017.

Since then, several labs have been in a competitive race to make these “embryo models” more complete, more realistic, and ever more like bona fide embryos, complete with placenta tissue.

What irked scientists was that Zernicka-Goetz appeared to claim to have finished the race—but did so in the media, without providing any scientific proof.

A Spanish scientist, Alfonso Martinez Arias, quickly launched a campaign on Twitter in which he fiercely denounced “fake news” and “#posttruth” science. In reality, he says, Zernicka-Goetz had produced blobs he calls “weakly organized masses of cells” with limited similarity to real embryos.

The twist in the story is that there actually was a breakthrough, but it came from a different lab. Shortly after the Guardian story came out, Jacob Hanna, a scientist based in Israel, posted a preprint paper describing extremely realistic synthetic embryo models that were grown to a stage of around 14 days.

According to Arias, Hanna “showed exactly” what Zernicka-Goetz had claimed “but hadn’t done.”

For Zernicka-Goetz’s part, she later said on Twitter that her lab’s creations “are not real embryos.” “In response to recent media on my group’s research, I would like to clarify that our goal was not to make headlines but to share our research with the community. We cannot control how the news reports our discoveries, but we are grateful for the interest & constructive comments,” she also said.

It’s not unheard-of for scientists to try to scoop one another. But what’s troubling about last week’s hijinks (nicely covered by the Spanish newspaper El País) is that we’re talking about lab creations that could eventually count as real human embryos.

“We need a defined framework, but instead what we see here is a fairly wild race between labs,” one journal editor told me during the ISSCR meeting. “The overarching question is: How far do they go, and where do we place them in a legal-moral spectrum? How can we endorse working with these models when they are much further along than we were two years ago?”

So where will the race lead? Most scientists say the point of mimicking the embryo is to study it during the period when it would be implanting in the wall of the uterus. In humans, this moment is rarely observed. But stem-cell embryos could let scientists dissect these moments in detail.

Yet it’s also possible that these lab embryos turn out to be the real thing—so real that if they were ever transplanted into a person’s womb, they could develop into a baby.

So far, scientific organizations like the ISSCR say transplanting a synthetic human embryo should be forbidden. But technical advances suggest that it could be possible to incubate them outside of the womb entirely. Not only are scientists able to grow embryos in the lab for longer periods, but on the other end of development, premature babies can be kept alive earlier and earlier.

“You’re digging a tunnel to meet in the middle, and I see no reason why that would stop,” Carlos Gantner, a member of the Zernicka-Goetz team, told me when I caught up to him at the meeting.“There is no reason you couldn’t reproduce this way.”

But would you want to? Strangely enough, any person who developed from a synthetic embryo would be a clone—a clone of whoever’s cells were used to make the embryo in the first place.

If you are looking for a clone army, like in Star Wars, this is the technology you’ll want to be considering.

Another thing:

Police broke up an overcrowded scientific presentation on rejuvenation technology. The brouhaha in Boston signaled intense interest around Altos Lab, a company established to explore age reversal in animals and human cells. Reversing the life process would be the “ultimate feat” for biotech engineers. (MIT Technology Review)

From around the web:

Patient-zero rumors. News reports say the US believes three key scientists doing risky coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill with a respiratory illness in 2019, feeding speculation that covid-19 was the result of a laboratory accident. (WSJ) The Biden Administration missed a deadline to declassify all that it knows about the pandemic’s origin. (NYT)

We’re used to hearing about dramatic gene therapy cures … and so are stock investors. That could be why shares of the gene therapy company Uniqure tumbled by 40% after its effort to treat Huntington’s disease gave equivocal results. The genetic disease is fatal, so patients are desperate for options and still hope the experimental treatment will prove useful. (Evaluate)

In other investment news, the biotech industry is awash with questionable trades. Executives and investors are making “superbly well-timed trades” that net them hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Some look suspicious. (ProPublica)

Organs can be stored by “vitrifying” them into a glass-like state. Researchers say vitrified organs from rats have been thawed and successfully transplanted into recipient animals—a “historic” development for the field. (STAT)

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Biotechnology Climate change

Jun 22 2023

Two companies can now sell lab-grown chicken in the US

The first cultivated, or lab-grown, meat has been approved for sale in the US.

Two California-based companies, Upside Foods and Eat Just, received grants of inspection from the United States Department of Agriculture today. It’s the final approval needed for each company to begin commercial US production and sales.

Animal agriculture makes up nearly 15% of human-caused global greenhouse-gas emissions. A growing number of companies are working to bring alternatives to market that have the potential to cut emissions.

Most meat alternatives on the market today are made using plants. Upside Foods, Eat Just, and other cultivated-meat companies instead make products using animal cells that are grown in bioreactors. Tissue samples from living animals are isolated and their cells grown in a lab. As those cells grow and multiply, they can be processed into food.

Singapore was the first country to approve cultured meat, giving Good Meat, the cultivated-meat division of Eat Just, the green light to sell its cultivated chicken in 2020. Eat Just was founded in 2011, and the company also makes plant-based products, including an egg alternative.

Today’s pair of approvals are first of their kind in the US.

“It’s cool to see an idea become an industry,” says Eric Schulze, VP of product and regulation at Upside Foods. Upside was founded in 2015 as Memphis Meats and has since been developing its technology and working to gain regulatory approval.

Both the Food and Drug Administration and the US Department of Agriculture have a say in the regulation of meat in the US. In November 2022, Upside Foods received a no-questions letter from the Food and Drug Administration, the final signoff on food products from that agency. Eat Just received its FDA signoff in March 2023.

In June, the USDA granted approval for both companies’ labels, which allows them to sell their products under the name “cell-cultivated chicken.” Today’s green light is a grant of inspection, which allows the companies to start up their production facilities. With all these approvals in hand, Upside Foods and Eat Just can produce and sell their products to the public.

Getting signoff from US regulators is a major milestone for the industry, says Po Bronson, general partner at SOSV, Upside’s first venture capital investor. “Making sure food is safe is really important,” Bronson says. “It’s absolutely necessary, and we wouldn’t have a future industry without it.”

Each company plans to launch in restaurants before moving to retail sales. Eat Just’s cultivated chicken will be sold first at an undisclosed restaurant in Washington, DC. Schulze said that Upside’s products, which it produces in a pilot facility in California, should be available by the end of the summer at Bar Crenn, a San Francisco restaurant.

“It’s an incredible, historic moment,” Schulze says. “The next giant hurdle is scaling up. Frankly, that’s what matters.”

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Biotechnology Genomic medicine

Jun 18 2023

Police got called to an overcrowded presentation on “rejuvenation” technology

It’s not every day that police storm through the doors of a scientific session and eject half the audience.

But that is what occurred on Friday at the Boston Convention and Exhbition Center during a round of scientific presentations featuring Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a specialist in “rejuvenation” technology at a secretive, wealthy, anti-aging startup called Altos Labs.

Interrupting another speaker mid-phrase, officers loudly ordered anyone without a seat to clear out, after an overflow crowd began jostling in the aisles for space.

“You’re not getting back in,” a conference official told the crowd of PhD students and postdocs who began milling around the doors after being escorted from the room.

The brouhaha shows how excitement is building as researchers uncover the secrets of life and some, like Belmonte, claim they will eventually use molecular technology to radically extend it, by 40 years or more, he has said.

The meeting in Boston wasn’t even about defeating aging. It was a convention of specialists on stem cells. The idea of these researchers is to mimic, in the lab, the way human cells develop during pregnancy into their specialized roles. Their results already include organoids that grow to resemble fetal brains and manufactured retina cells that have been injected into the eyes of blind people, with promising early results.

However, while the stem-cell researchers want to copy the molecular programs that bodies use to develop, new discoveries could eventually let researchers press rewind on that same process, and thus make old animals younger.

“This is almost the ultimate feat for an engineer: the reversal of the life process,” said Haifan Lin, the Yale University cell biologist who is president of the International Society for Stem Research, which organized the meeting.

And that explains the boisterous attendees, Lin told me later in the day. “I apologize if there was a disruption. But take a step back,” he added. “It’s a good sign for this field that there is so much interest. It’s a hot topic. Hotter than we expected.”

Altos Labs

After witnessing the roiling crowd of researchers on Friday, it’s easy to imagine riots in the streets if science ever actually discovers the cure for aging — which at first, would surely be an ultra-expensive remedy for the rich.

Just how close science is to age-reversal is what the crowd had come to hear. That, and to catch a glimpse of Izpisua Belmonte, the bald, squint-eyed figurehead of a new technological concept for reversing aging called “cellular reprogramming.”

The Spanish scientist, usually seen in his signature blue sport coat, has led efforts to try to rejuvenate entire animals, or parts of them, since 2016 when he reported that sick mice lived 30% longer than expected after receiving a cocktail of special “reprogramming” proteins.

His ideas rocketed to new prominence two years ago when Izpisua Belmonte was recruited by Altos Labs, a startup company set up by billionaires to pursue what they called rejuvenation technology. Altos, with an eye-popping $3 billion in startup funds, is among the best funded biomedical startups of all time, if not the richest of them all.

You can think of Altos as a biomedical version of OpenAI, the software company releasing intelligent-seeming chatbots. Like OpenAI, Altos has amassed technical talent, financial resources, and attracts overwhelming hype as it pursues technology that could fundamentally transform society.

Altos has ample funding to investigate rejuvenation and, if possible, corner the market on the most promising approaches. The company has established three institutes, in Cambridge, UK, San Diego and in the San Francisco Bay area. Wolf Reik, leader of Altos’ Cambridge institute, also spoke during the Boston event and mentioned the “very beautiful building” Altos occupies there. He showed a photo of workers lined up in an atrium, who he referred to as “many happy people. Happy people in lab coats.”

Reik was kidding, but not really. Unlike workers at universities, Altos researchers don’t have to spend time applying for grants. Altos pays its top staff salaries of one million dollars and more and doubles what junior scientists can earn. It’s an enviable place to do science, but one with a commercial mission. Reik said that last month his group had filed its first patent application on its discoveries.

During his talk, Belmonte, who heads Altos’ San Diego outpost, reviewed evidence—both published and unpublished—that he says supports the phenomenon of rejuvenation or de facto age-reversal of tissues.

It all has to do with the “epigenome”—the series of chemical controls on and around our genes that determine which are active, and which are not. These controls can modulate individual genes, or large stretches of chromosomes, putting open for business signs some areas, while others are tightly wound and packed away, like a pair of earphones jammed deep in a pocket.

Broadly speaking, Belmonte says he believes “dysregulation” of these control systems is a fundamental process that underlies aging and many diseases.

To rejuvenate cells, Belmonte has been exploring a method of resetting the epigenome called ‘reprogramming.’ During his talk, Belmonte raced through examples of how reprogrammed cells become more resilient to stress and damage, and on the whole appear to act younger.

In one experiment, for example, he says his lab gave mice ultra-high doses of the pain-killer acetaminophen that are usually fatal. Yet if the mice are given a reprogramming treatment, which consists of special proteins called Yamanaka factors, half will survive. “We reduce the mortality about 50%, more or less” he says.

He also described experiments where mutant mice were allowed to gobble high-fat food. They became obese, but not if they were given a brief dose of the same reprogramming proteins. Somehow, he said, the procedure can “prevent the increase in the fatty tissue.”

So how is it that reprogramming can have such very different, but very helpful effects on mice? That is the mystery he’s trying to unravel. “I could go on and on and on about the…examples we’ve been using in the lab these last years,” Belmonte said. “You have to agree with me that this is a little strange, having one medicine that can cure all these things. “

So is this what the fountain of youth looks like? Many researchers remain skeptical and some say Belmonte’s dramatic claims should come with more proof. On Twitter, biologist Lluis Montoliu cautioned against “unjustified hype” and said researchers should “wait to see” scientific publications.

Junk DNA

Even as police kept onlookers away from the door, Belmonte unspooled evidence for what he says is a second way to produce rejuvenation results, one that Altos is also pursuing.

Some researchers suspect aging could cause our cells to lose control over some of so-called junk DNA that makes up 45% of our genomes and which is the residue of genes known as transposable elements, or jumping genes, which are able to copy themselves, a bit like a virus.

The role of these parasitic genetic elements remains mysterious. They may be useful in some ways, helping us evolve by mix-and-matching pieces of genetic code, but they’re also eyed as the cause of health problems.

“There’s a good side to it, but so far it’s mostly bad,” says Lin, whose lab has studied how our cells continuously try to suppress transposable elements.

It’s known that as we age, our ability to silence these elements appears to gradually wane, for several reasons including changes to our epigenome, which helps to keep them in check. Some researchers describe a nearly constant battle between jumping genes and the epigenome, a battle cells start to lose as the years go by.

To test the connection, Belmonte told the audience he has been using genetic drugs to artificially suppress these elements, especially one called LINE-1, which on its own accounts for around 18% of the human genetic code.

After doing so, he claims, he can get very similar rejuvenation effects as with reprogramming technology. For instance, according to unpublished data, Belmonte says the cartilage of mice can be “rejuvenated” either by reprogramming or by silencing the effects of transposable elements.

These big claims will need to be confirmed, but one scientist I spoke to said he thought Belmonte may well have the tiger by the tail. “Working at Altos, they are under pressure to deliver,” says Rudolf Jaenisch, a professor at MIT and the Whitehead Institute. “But he clearly has the right questions in mind. These transposable elements are underappreciated in aging and how they shape the genome.”

So has Altos gotten closer to the fountain of youth—and to a drug intervention that could turn back the clock? Who knows. Certainly not all the scientists who couldn’t get into the talk.

When he heard what Belmonte had discussed, Lin, the president of the stem cell society, said he was disappointed to have missed it. “Gee, I wish I was there,” said Lin. “But there were too many people in the room. It violated the fire code.”

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Biotechnology

Jun 3 2023

Microplastics are everywhere. What does that mean for our immune systems?

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here.

Microplastics are pretty much everywhere you look. These tiny pieces of plastic pollution, less than five millimeters across, have been found in human blood, breast milk, and placentas.

Yes, they are in our drinking water and the air we breathe. But they’ve also been found in regions of the planet that you might think of as pristine, such as the French Pyrenees, the Galápagos Islands, and even the Mariana Trench—the deepest part of the ocean. Most recently, we’ve heard that the recycling process can release tons of microplastics into the environment.

Given their horrifying ubiquity, it’s worth considering what we know about microplastics. What are they doing to us?

The short answer is: we don’t really know. But scientists have begun to build a picture of their potential effects from early studies in animals and clumps of cells.

This week, I came across a new study that looks at the impact microplastics might have on our immune cells. It is really difficult to do this kind of research in people—you can’t ethically inject a person with tiny bits of plastic, for a start. So the researchers looked at cells in a dish.

Specifically, they looked at macrophages—a type of white blood cell that kills foreign invaders and helps get rid of dead cells. Thierry Rabilloud at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and his colleagues investigated how macrophages responded to beads of polystyrene.

Tests revealed that some types of macrophages engulf the beads of plastic entirely. Others don’t. The cells that get loaded up with plastic behave differently, suggesting they may not work as well at providing protection from harmful bacteria and other invaders that might cause disease.

Rabilloud and his colleagues write that microplastics could have wider effects on the immune system more generally, as well as on the health of the body tissues that the particles infiltrate.

One remaining question is what happens after the plastic is taken into our cells. It’s possible that our bodies can find a way to eliminate it. But if not, it could stick around for the rest of our lives, and damage or kill those cells it has infiltrated.

Microplastics could have other health consequences. You might remember a recent Tech Review article about some research into their effects on seabirds, for example. These poor animals are often exposed to a lot of plastic because garbage ends up floating about on the sea, degrading extremely slowly.

Here, bits of plastic can end up collecting various types of bacteria, which cling to their surfaces. Seabirds that ingest them not only end up with a stomach full of plastic—which can end up starving them—but also get introduced to types of bacteria that they wouldn’t encounter otherwise. It seems to disturb their gut microbiomes.

There are similar concerns for humans. These tiny bits of plastic, floating and flying all over the world, could act as a “Trojan horse,” introducing harmful drug-resistant bacteria and their genes, as some researchers put it.

It’s a deeply unsettling thought. As research plows on, hopefully we’ll learn not only what microplastics are doing to us, but how we might tackle the problem.

From around the web

An eating disorder helpline sacked its staff and used a chatbot to support people instead. Within weeks, the National Eating Disorder Association had to take the chatbot offline—it had been found to give information that was “harmful and unrelated to the program,” a spokesperson said. (Motherboard)

Members of the billionaire Sackler family will be protected from future legal claims surrounding the involvement of their company in opioid prescriptions. The family, which owns Purdue Pharma, is receiving immunity in exchange for a $6 billion payment, which will go toward victim compensation and overdose rescue medication. (New York Times)

The people making lab-grown meat may argue that it’s better for animal welfare and the environment, but what about the religious perspectives of the people who might buy and eat it? According to surveys, 68% of Hindus would eat cultivated chicken, and 81% of Buddhist people surveyed said they’d eat cultivated beef. (Nature Food)

What happens if you inject a psychedelic into the veins of healthy volunteers? Everything from mystical experiences and the transcendence of time and space to nausea, high blood pressure, and uneasiness. (Translational Psychiatry)

Coral reefs are among the most diverse ecosystems on Earth. Now it appears that the microbiome of the Pacific coral reef is as diverse as that of the rest of the planet combined. Scientists found 2.87 billion genetic sequences in samples taken from 99 reefs. (Nature Communications)

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Biotechnology

Jun 1 2023

Longevity enthusiasts want to create their own independent state. They’re eyeing Rhode Island.

It’s a Friday morning in early May, and I’ve woken up to the sound of waves crashing against the rocks in a small bay on the coast of the Adriatic.

The sky is completely gray, and there are continual rumbles of thunder. The weather has been bad since I arrived in Montenegro. It was too stormy for the pilot to land the plane I was traveling on, and we ended up touching down in neighboring Croatia.

I’m here for a gathering of longevity enthusiasts, people interested in extending human life through various biotechnology approaches. One attendee, with whom I ended up sharing a cross-border taxi ride, told me half of his luggage was “supplements and powders.” Most attendees seem to be wearing “longevity” stickers. Everyone is super friendly, and the sense of optimism is palpable. Everyone I speak to is confident we’ll be able to find a way to slow or reverse aging. And they have a bold plan to speed up progress.

Welcome to Zuzalu

Humans have been searching for the fountain of youth for thousands of years. But progress has been slow, to say the least. Though plenty of companies are working on ways to slow or reverse the process, it’s incredibly difficult and expensive to run a study to find out whether a treatment has helped people live longer. And health agencies like the World Health Organization don’t even consider aging to be a disease in the first place.

Now a community of people is working on an alternative setup, including perhaps even establishing an independent state. Aging is “morally bad,” they argue, and it’s a problem that needs to be solved. They see existing regulations as roadblocks to progress and call for a different approach. Less red tape allows for more innovation, they say. People should be encouraged to self-experiment with unproven treatments if they wish. And companies shouldn’t be held back by national laws that limit how they develop and test drugs.

Around 780 such people gathered at this “pop-up city” in Montenegro to work out how they might create such a state—a place where like-minded innovators can work together in an all-new jurisdiction that gives them free rein to self-experiment with unproven drugs. Some attendees are just visitors, passing through. But the dedicated among them have been living here for almost two months. Welcome to Zuzalu.

I heard about Zuzalu through a contact who invests in longevity technologies. The gathering, held at a luxury resort in Tivat, Montenegro, runs until the end of May. Each week has a different theme, ranging from synthetic biology to artificial intelligence, although the overarching focus is on longevity, cryptocurrencies, and the idea of creating novel jurisdictions.

“Zuzalu is not just a conference,” Laurence Ion, one of the core organizers, told an audience at the event. “It’s an experiment in co-living and exploring what the physical presence of an online tribe would look like.” The concept came from the mind of Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of the cryptocurrency Ethereum, although the organizers stress that it was a collaborative effort.

The word Zuzalu doesn’t mean anything, says co-organizer Janine Leger, who works at Gitcoin, a blockchain platform. The name was generated using ChatGPT, using multiple prompts. The event’s logo was also AI generated. Buterin “spent hours on that one,” Leger says.

Over a cup of tea, Leger and Ion told me that they wanted as little hierarchy as possible. Members of the core team behind the event were each given 10 invitations, and those invitees were also given their own set of invitations. Leger and Ion won’t tell me who made the invite list, but other attendees gave me the names of celebrities, politicians, and billionaires who were rumored to have dropped in.

A temporary home

The resort itself feels more like a very small town on part of the steep, hilly coastline. There’s a fancy hotel, but there are also hundreds of luxury apartments, where many of Zuzalu’s residents made a temporary home. Over the two months, the organizers planned several themed conferences. But residents have been encouraged to set up their own events too.

And there are plenty of social activities, including a daily cold plunge in the sea and community breakfasts. Other events included a “social VR baptism + beat saber party,” a truth-or-dare night, and meditation sessions. I was disappointed to learn that I’d missed out on the Pony Art Garden Party.

I arrived just in time for the launch of Zuzalu’s longevity biotech conference—a three-day event that brought together people from universities, startups, and longevity clinics around the world. We heard from startups working on ways to keep people healthier for longer, and ultimately to extend our life spans.

But one of the core goals of attendees is to develop what they call a network state. “It’s a highly aligned online community with the capacity for collective action,” Max Unfried, a PhD student at the National University of Singapore who hopes to find a cure for aging, told the crowd during a panel session. “On top of that, it crowdfunds territory around the world and aims to gain diplomatic recognition as a state.”

This particular network state would be dedicated to longevity, and to fast-tracking technologies that might possibly add more healthy years to our lives. Life is good, and death is morally bad, said Nathan Cheng, who leads the Longevity Biotech Fellowship, an online community for people working in the field. “We have this moral imperative to do something about death, about aging,” he said. “This is the moral philosophy that we believe in, that guides most of the actions of our lives. We’re trying to get more people to rally around it.”

A longevity state

Cheng made the case for what he calls a longevity state: “a state that prioritizes doing something about aging.” The state could encourage biotech companies to set up bases there by offering tax perks, supporting biohacking, and loosening regulations on clinical trials, panel members said. It should be up to individuals to decide how much risk they are willing to accept—doctors shouldn’t have the final say on whether a person is able to access an experimental treatment.

The plan is modeled on the Free State Project, a movement launched just over 20 years ago with the goal of encouraging 20,000 libertarians to move to New Hampshire. The idea is that once enough people with a particular ideology move to a region, their votes can begin to alter regional policies and state laws. (It’s worth noting that the outcome of the New Hampshire project has not been entirely rosy, and there were reports of an increase in violent crime and bear attacks in the town at the project’s center.)

There are no firm plans for a longevity state just yet, and Zuzalu’s organizers stress that they want any decisions to be made collaboratively. The new state could find a home in a special economic zone, or even on the high seas. But the idea is appealing to biotech companies working on treatments that target aging.

Plenty of companies are trying to develop drugs that target the aging process, whether by rejuvenating cells or clearing away aged ones, for example. For those companies, “the number-one issue at the moment is that there is no regulatory path to market,” says Zuzalu attendee Josef Christensen, chief business development officer at the stem-cell company StemMedical.

Part of the issue is that aging itself is not recognized as a disease that needs to be treated. This makes it difficult to approve a trial for an aging treatment, and unlikely that a longevity drug could be medically approved for that purpose. Even if aging were a disease, it would be incredibly difficult and expensive to show that a treatment slowed or reversed it. Trial participants would have to be monitored for decades. The alternative would be to use biomarkers that indicate how biologically old a person is, or to use “aging clocks.” In theory, instead of waiting for someone to die of old age, you could take a spit or blood sample and estimate the person’s rate of aging from certain DNA markers. But we don’t yet have truly reliable biomarkers or aging clocks.

As a result, in the current regulatory environment a potential longevity drug might be shown to extend the life span of mice but still be years away from human trials. And given how long those trials could take, who knows when, if ever, such a drug might become available to consumers outside of clinical trials. “You cannot get to market with an anti-aging drug,” says Christensen. “The hypothesis is that if we have a longevity state, we could create that pathway.”

Human guinea pigs

One of the key features of this proposed state is that it would allow, and possibly encourage, self-experimentation and biohacking. That means enabling people to get their hands on experimental drugs that have not yet been proved to be safe or effective.

Christensen supports the idea. “I’m sufficiently ultra-liberal … who am I to prevent you from trying a compound?” he says. “We’re all adults, and if you understand what you’re doing and understand the risk, then do it.”

Regulators are “too restrictive about validating efficacy,” says Yuri Deigin, cofounder and director of Youth Bio, a biotech company trying to develop rejuvenating gene therapies. “I’m all for validating the safety of novel therapies,” he says. But he thinks that the bar is too high when it comes to proving how well a drug works—and that this is holding back progress. “I think we as a field could benefit [from allowing] people to try novel therapies earlier,” he says.

Oliver Colville, a speaker at Zuzalu who works at Apeiron, an organization that invests in biotech and technology companies, likes the sound of a state in which self-experimenting inhabitants have their health tracked. “If you had a longevity state where one of the premises was … offering yourself up as a guinea pig for monitoring,” he says, “I think that could go a long way to understanding some of the key things [about healthy aging].”

But while investors, libertarians, and some biotech companies support the idea, not everyone is keen on stripping away regulations. There’s a good chance that doing so could end up hampering progress in the field, says Patricia Zettler, a legal scholar at Ohio State University.

“[Food and Drug Administration] requirements force individuals or companies to conduct rigorous scientific research to demonstrate that the claims they’re making are, in fact, supported by scientific evidence,” she says. Without those, we’d end up in a world where companies can make up any old claims about their products, she warns. We wouldn’t know which would work, and people could lose trust in the field more generally.

“Should companies be able to distribute products without evidence that their products work for medical uses?” she says. “My answer is no.” At any rate, the problems faced by those developing longevity drugs go way beyond regulation, she says: “These are just difficult scientific and medical problems.”

Christensen acknowledges other potential problems with lifting regulations. “If you lower the bar [of evidence], the logical conclusion is that you’ll see more adverse events … more potential deaths from these things,” he says. He also points out that even if a drug did go through some kind of fast-tracked trial in a longevity state, it might not be accepted by other jurisdictions—including the major worldwide players like Europe and the federal government of the US.

A home in Rhode Island?

Exactly where a longevity state might be developed is currently being worked out. The backers, Ion suggests, could take their lead from the founders of Próspera—a crypto city set up in a special economic zone in Honduras, designed to offer companies a low-tax environment with “innovation-friendly” regulations. Zuzalu’s organizers have been in talks with politicians in Montenegro, where they are exploring the possibility of creating a similar long-term home for pro-longevity devotees.

“Basically what we’re trying to do is get people to take proactive political action, which could include relocation to, potentially, certain states and jurisdictions around the world, so you can vote and transform the policies of the state to benefit all the people within that state,” Cheng said.

He also raised the possibility of setting up a longevity state in the US, since the country is home to plenty of longevity supporters and biotech companies that might not be willing to move internationally. Specifically, he has his sights set on Rhode Island. It’s close to Boston, a well-established biotech hub. And it has a small population. If enough people who believed in his moral philosophy moved there, they could have enough voting power to influence mayoral and state elections, he said. “Five to ten thousand people—that’s all we need,” he told the attendees.

But the structure of the US government might complicate the plan. “No state can eliminate federal law,” says Zettler. “It’s not as though Rhode Island can exempt individuals … from the requirements of the FDA.” That’s one reason why other attendees suggested the new state be located somewhere in Latin America, such as Costa Rica. The week after I left, Montenegro’s prime minister was due to arrive at Zuzalu. Some planned to discuss the idea of a longevity state there, during “Montenegro Day.”

Whatever the outcome of Zuzalu, it was certainly a fascinating event that has brought together a diverse group of people to bat about some bold ideas. During my brief visit, I heard people propose everything from longevity fashion brands to cryonics.

Deigin told me that for him, a highlight was “living among people who are your tribe.” Another attendee, who had already been there for six weeks when I spoke to him, likened Zuzalu to a religion. The organizers hope to plan other, similar gatherings in the future. Whether any result in a new state for life-extending drugs, we’ll have to wait and see.

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