Stem cell transplants can reverse diabetes
Half a billion people worldwide live with diabetes. There are different types with different causes, but all lead to people having too much sugar in their blood. If not well controlled, this excess glucose can wreak havoc throughout the body, putting people at risk for gum disease, nerve damage, kidney disease, blindness, amputations, heart attack, stroke and cancer.
For now, patients manage the condition with medicine, insulin and lifestyle changes, but a new generation of treatments could reverse the disease. Details of the first woman to be treated for type 1 diabetes with stem cells taken from her own body was announced last month. Beforehand, the 25-year-old required significant amounts of insulin. Now she produces her own.
In April, a similar cell transplantation A 59-year-old man with type 2 diabetes allowed to come off insulin. It is early days and challenges remain, not least around the scale of the treatment, but the results so far are exciting.
Cancer vaccines
Vaccines have been one of the remarkable success stories of the pandemic. Now scientists hope that the same mRNA technology that underpinned the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 challenges can be used to train the immune system to recognize and attack cancer.
These jabs work by instructing the patient’s cells to secrete a specific protein that acts as a flag for the immune system to target. In this case, scientists adapt the vaccine design to proteins on the surface of a patient’s cancer cells.
In August, hundreds of patients enrolled in the world’s first personalized mRNA cancer trial vaccine trial for melanoma and trials are ongoing for pancreasintestine and other cancers. And since the protection provided by vaccines can be long-lasting, it may be possible to use the approach as a preventive measure, for those at high genetic risk of breast or ovarian cancer, and to prevent cancer from returning .
AI will help catch cancers faster
The next four years will see rapid progress in the use of artificial intelligence to better diagnose serious diseases such as lung cancer and brain tumours, which should mean longer lives.
The technology is being rolled out in hospitals, including several in the north of England, to cure cancer faster and prolong lives. The system, which scans x-rays and prioritizes cases where it spots something suspicious that the human clinician might have missed, has been shown to improve diagnostic accuracy by 45% and diagnostic efficiency by 12%, according to the South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust.
In the two years since its launch, the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed the night sky in a series of images that are technicolor masterpieces. It also enables unprecedented discoveries about the origin of stars, black holes, the evolution of the universe and the likelihood of life existing elsewhere in the cosmos.
The telescope is so powerful that it has observed galaxies that existed when the universe was less than 300m years oldwhose light has traveled 14 billion years – almost the age of the universe itself – to reach us. Capturing light from the first stars to illuminate the sky – long seen as a holy grail in astronomy – now appears within reach. Some of these discoveries are emerging conventional theories, with the earliest galaxies appearing much brighter or larger than expected and the first black holes appearing to snowball faster than can be explained by current models.
In science, strange and unexpected findings are not met with disappointment – they are the fuel that drives the next revolution. This telescope promises to do just that for our understanding of the history of the universe and whether we humans are alone in it.
Renewable energy is gaining momentum
The world’s transition to green energy is accelerating. A recent report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the world’s energy watchdog, found that over the next six years, renewable energy projects are on track to execute at three times the rate of the previous six years. This will put the world on track to surpass the 2030 goals set by governments to create a total global renewable energy capacity roughly equal to the existing power systems in China, the EU, India and the US combined.
In Europe, the solar boom caused market prices to go negative for a record number of hours this summer. Wind developers are preparing to launch a new generation of floating offshore wind turbines to better capture the more powerful wind speeds further offshore.
The green electricity boom will be led by the clean energy programs of China and India, which will help displace fossil fuel consumption from two of the world’s most polluting countries.
China will have more than half of the world’s renewable energy by the end of the decade, according to the IEA, which is already thought to have slowed China’s pipeline of future coal-fired power plants. The number of new permits for coal plants in China fell from 100GW in 2022 and 2023 to just 12 new projects totaling 9.1GW in the first half of 2024, according to Global Energy Monitor.
