Week of July 1, 2024
Healthcare (more than some fields) is a natural incubator for cynicism. One of the most freeing aspects of moving away from full-time patient care has been the time and space for perspective—finding joy in working on larger-scale issues and ideas. Some weeks, optimism is a struggle (thanks to a hyper-polarized political system and the ebb and flow of a pandemic). And, some weeks, you find a wealth of articles highlighting the convergence of technology and biology, demonstrating humanity’s extraordinary creative capacity.
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Europe is seeing accelerating cases of hospitalized COVID patients. The summer wave of COVID (most typically seen in late July and August) is coming early this year. Based on wastewater data, The PMC forecasting model indicates we can anticipate 600,000 new daily cases by the end of July.
The Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative (PMC) website uses wastewater levels to forecast 4-week predictions of COVID rates.
https://pmc19.com/data/
based upon https://biobot.io/data/
Wastewater Scan offers a multi-organism wastewater dashboard with an excellent visual display of individual treatment plant-level data.
https://data.wastewaterscan.org/
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COVID articles
Analysis of COVID forecasting data:
https://x.com/michael_hoerger/status/1806552837293572229
Scotland's COVID hospitalization rates are rising.
https://x.com/coronaheadsup/status/1806606165377225088
The Tour de France is reinstituting some COVID protocols, including masks and more aggressive testing.
https://x.com/1goodtern/status/1806588936937967934
I do not fully endorse all of the recommendations in the linked thread. Still, I appreciate that an organization is dedicated to "clean air" and publishes a compiled list of ways to minimize COVID transition risk while flying. For instance, I am unsure what advantage coconut water (vs. any other fluid) confers (amongst the stay hydrated so you don't have to remove your mask to drink on the plane section). Nevertheless, the overall messages (using nasal sprays, mouthwash, and masks in poorly ventilated spaces) are reasonable and welcomed.
https://x.com/clean_air_club_/status/1805963237873115262
Dr. Vipin Vashishtha offered a thoughtful protocol on how and when to test for COVID, including timing relative to symptom onset, understanding how the evolving virus changes the sensitivity and specificity of the rapid tests, and the timing of repeat testing.
https://x.com/vipintukur/status/1805967756669464975
Medical Trends and Technology
Prion diseases (like Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or Crietzfeld-Jakob disease) are typically death sentences - abnormally folding proteins collect in the brain, ultimately resulting in death. New genetic and protein editing research suggests a path to treating these illnesses. Even more interesting - one of the researchers working on this problem has a genetic prion disease. Epigenetic protein suppression is another example of science fiction becoming science fact.
https://x.com/nikomccarty/status/1806455093723640010
https://x.com/erictopol/status/1806436630120821246
https://www.statnews.com/2024/06/27/prion-disease-sonia-vallabh-epigenetic-editor-crispr/
We are still learning how GLP-1 drugs (like Ozempic) work. Articles published last week have demonstrated more data. "Scientists describe two groups of neurons (brain cells) associated with feeling full: one for pre-meal fullness, and one for post-meal fullness. The studies [in the linked issue of Nature] also show that the blockbuster obesity drugs act on the 'fullness' neurons, but more research is needed to determine the treatments' mechanism[.]"
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02106-0
The A.I.-driven avalanche of novel pharmaceuticals is starting.
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00522-1?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867424005221%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
Infographics of the week
1-propenesulfenic acid makes us cry.
https://www.compoundchem.com/2014/01/22/the-chemistry-of-an-onion/
Tips on battling onion-induced lacrimation.
https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/stop-onions-from-making-you-cry
Things I learned this week
Taylor Swift is so emotionally evocative to her fans that they experience post-concert amnesia. It is not just Swifties, however. "Forgetting the details of a highly anticipated event like a concert might feel confusing and even frustrating, but it's a fairly common way that our brains often respond when they are excited or overwhelmed by outside stimuli."
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/taylor-swift-eras-tour-amnesia-swifties-b2569466.html
and
https://www.premierhealth.com/your-health/articles/healthnow/blank-space--post-concert-amnesia-phenomenon-haunts-taylor-swift-fans
Due to family and work commitments, I could not make the 2024 Finnish Hobby Horse Championships on June 15. However, I see no better reason to go to Finland in June than this annual event, and I look forward to a future visit. Words like keppihevostensm and the juxtaposition between competitors on hobby horses and dramatic music/camera angles amuse me (see the video on the linked homepage). Given the participants' homogeneous demographics (see the video), I see an opportunity to pioneer the overweight, middle-aged, balding American male contestant category. Please close your eyes and let that image sear itself into your mind.
https://keppihevostensm.fi/en/home/
Living with A.I.
The A.I. and Medical Trends sections of this newsletter are increasingly converging. About a month ago, "Profluent, an AI-driven protein design company, released an open-source gene editor called OpenCRISPR-1, demonstrating that LLMs can create molecules with the power to edit human DNA." In other words, this company used A.I. to iterate on CRISPR/CaS-9 molecules found in nature to generate novel derivations of gene editing molecules that have more precision than the more natural-derived CRISPR tools on the market.
https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/profluent-releases-ai-enabled-opencrispr-1-edit-human-genome
and
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.22.590591v1
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhCkbGMHiOo
Researchers at OpenAI published an article about a ChatGPT-based LLM (CriticGPT) that works with humans to evaluate and help correct other LLM outputs. This combination of human + LLM learning is called "Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback" (RLHF). CriticGPT supporting a human A.I. trainer improves catching errors in an LLM's output and allows for more rapid training and iteration.
https://openai.com/index/finding-gpt4s-mistakes-with-gpt-4/
and
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/06/openais-criticgpt-outperforms-humans-in-catching-ai-generated-code-bugs/
and
https://cdn.openai.com/llm-critics-help-catch-llm-bugs-paper.pdf
You must see this AI-generated gymnastics video in all its misinterpreted glory. The no-torso, 4-legged gymnast on a balance beam should be a thing, assuming we can edit the genome of humans to generate such a creature.
https://x.com/d_feldman/status/1806950107872469069
A.I. art of the week (A visual mashup of topics from the newsletter)
"A hobby horse dressed like a female pop singer chopping onions while wearing goggles and a face mask. There are other hobby horses performing gymnastics in the background."
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1er2o7qTj8t2qKnmMUMnTBKWSyW4xM9lb/view?usp=sharing
Clean hands and sharp minds,
Adam
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