Immunotherapy, which recruits the body’s own immune system to attack cancer, has given many cancer patients a new avenue to treat the disease.

But many cancer immunotherapy treatments can be expensive, have devastating side effects, and only work in a fraction of patients.

Researchers at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) at the University of Chicago have developed a new therapeutic vaccine that uses a patient’s own tumor cells to train their immune system to find and kill cancer.

The vaccine, which is injected into the skin just like a traditional vaccine, stopped melanoma tumor growth in mouse models. It even worked long-term, destroying new tumors long after the therapy was given.

The results were published March 24 in the journal Science Advances.

“This is a new strategy for immunotherapy,” said Prof. Melody Swartz, who led the research. “It has the potential to be more efficacious, less expensive, and much safer than many other immunotherapies. It is truly personalized medicine that has the potential to overcome many issues that arise with other treatments.”

Speed is of the essence in a pandemic, and the researchers' model indicates that a higher level of early-capacity investment would yield large net benefits for countries of all income levels. Had their recommendations been applied in August 2020, the researchers estimate that the United States would have achieved widespread vaccination by March 2021—rather than this coming summer, as is projected. Had their recommendations guided decisions on a global level, widespread vaccination could have been achieved by October 2021 rather than in 2022.

Quantum Engineering News

In a first-of-its-kind discovery, researchers in the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and Argonne National Laboratory announced they can directly control the interactions between two types of quantum particles called microwave photons and magnons. The approach may become a new way to build quantum technology, including electronic devices with new capabilities. Scientists have high hopes for quantum technology, which has advanced by leaps and bounds over the past decade and could become the basis of powerful new types of computers, ultra-sensitive detectors, and even “hack-proof” communication. But challenges remain in scaling up the technology, which depends on manipulating the smallest particles in order to harness the strange properties of quantum physics.

The April 23^rd forum will include guest speaker panels featuring quantum experts, a keynote address, sessions with leading researchers, and networking opportunities to engage with employers. Learn more about the event and register here by April 15^th.

Destini Coleman has wanted to study biology since she was a kid in Englewood glued to the Animal Planet channel. “Even then, I was always interested in knowing more and knowing why about everything,” she said.

Now earning her associate degree at Richard J. Daley College with a plan to transfer to the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Coleman is one of sixteen City Colleges of Chicago students in the first cohort of an introduction to molecular engineering course at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) at the University of Chicago.

The course, designed to open pathways for more City Colleges students to transfer into four-year STEM degree programs, has been part of PME’s mission since the school’s 2019 launch with a $100 million commitment from the Pritzker Foundation.

“Some of our first conversations were about how we could show our commitment to the city by broadening the pipeline of underrepresented Chicago students into STEM majors and professions,” said Matthew Tirrell, dean of Pritzker Molecular Engineering and the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor. “As the nation’s first school of molecular engineering, PME is uniquely positioned to introduce students to this emerging field.”

When humans over-exploit underground water supplies, the ground collapses like a huge empty water bottle. It's called subsidence, and it could affect 1.6 billion people by 2040.

Humanity has tended to construct its cities where rivers empty into the sea, where the conditions for subsidence are ideal. Long ago, these rivers deposited sediments loaded with the clay, which humans then built upon. “The areas that are at high risk are in those kinds of settings near the outlets of river deltas, and where you have low-lying, flat sedimentary basins near coasts,” says University of California, Berkeley geophysicist Roland Burgmann, who studies subsidence but wasn’t involved in this new work. But you can actually find this problem inland, too, for instance in Mexico City, which is built on top of the sediments of a former lake, and is accordingly suffering from subsidence.

In findings published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials Letters, researchers found certain strains of bacteria elevated antibiotic resistance by up to 30 times while living on microplastic biofilms that can form inside activated sludge units at municipal wastewater treatment plants.

"We might think of microplastics as tiny beads, but they provide an enormous surface area for microbes to reside," explained Li. "When these microplastics enter the wastewater treatment plant and mix in with sludge, bacteria like Novosphingobium can accidentally attach to the surface and secrete glue-like extracellular substances. As other bacteria attach to the surface and grow, they can even swap DNA with each other. This is how the antibiotic resistance genes are being spread among the community."

In the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, finding ways to improve testing has been key to addressing the spread of disease. While much effort has focused on testing individual people, scientists have begun to explore large-scale sampling of wastewater to understand patterns of viral transmission over larger areas.

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory are participating in a pilot study to sample wastewater at some of the Chicago area’s wastewater treatment plants.

“This technique is very versatile,” Grippo said. ​“It’s not going to stop COVID-19, but it is going to give us another tool in our toolkit to grapple with it.”

“The idea is that some people might contract the virus and be asymptomatic, but they’d still be shedding the virus,” said Argonne ecologist Mark Grippo, who is leading Argonne’s effort in wastewater-based epidemiology. ​“Wastewater monitoring would give us a window into how the virus spreads throughout a community in the early stages of an outbreak — you can follow not only the initial outbreak, but also the overall trends over time. Plus, once doctors start administering the vaccine, you can see how viral loads change in wastewater.”

But the most striking aspect of Kirby's presentation was his acknowledgment that a traditional corporate path toward greening up operations—carbon offsets—is basically a nonstarter for a company as vast and energy-hungry as United. A carbon offset, or credit, is a certificate representing the reduction of 1 metric ton of carbon dioxide emissions. To compensate for their own carbon dioxide pollution, companies buy carbon credits from certified organizations that support community development, protect ecosystems or install efficient technology to reduce or remove emissions from the atmosphere. Tree-planting is often the carbon offset technique of choice. It's not a bad idea, but when you're talking about pollution on the scale of what an airline puts out, carbon offsets aren't going to get us where we need to go. As Kirby put it, "The reality is, we produce 4,000 times as many emissions as we did in the preindustrial era. We cannot plant 4,000 times as many trees. There's not enough space on the planet."

We have spent several years studying the CE in different industries and have revealed four main steps companies can follow to put a CE-approach into practice. The four steps bring together the physical side of CE with the monetary and customer perspective.

The global supply of natural rubber – around 20 million tonnes per year – is produced almost entirely by fragmented smallholders working tiny plots of land in tropical forests. Millions of these workers tend to plantations in Thailand, Indonesia, China and West Africa, carefully stripping bark from the trees to extract a milky white sap which is shaped into sheets and dried in the sun. Between them, these farmers provide 85% of the world's natural rubber supply.

Over the past few years, fuel cells have become a focal point of research in eco-friendly technology because of their superior abilities to store and produce renewable energy and clean fuel. A typical type of fuel cell gaining ground is the oxide-ion-conducting fuel cell, which is primarily made of materials through which oxide ions (oxygen ions: O^2-), can easily move. New materials with higher conductivity at low and intermediate temperatures, provide a number of advantages over commonly used fuel cells based on yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) electrolytes, such as higher power generation efficiency, longer lifetimes, and lower costs.

There’s a lot to like about ammonia. This colorless fuel emits no carbon dioxide when burned. It’s abundant and common, and it can be made using renewable electricity, water, and air. Both fuel cells and internal combustion engines can use it. Unlike hydrogen, it doesn’t have to be stored in high-pressure tanks or cryogenic dewars. And it has 10 times the energy density of a lithium-ion battery.

For all these reasons, ammonia (NH₃) is gaining favor in the global shipping industry, a multitrillion-dollar machine in need of cleaner fuels to power the freighters and tankers that haul manufactured goods and bulk materials across the ocean. Shipping companies seek climate-friendlier alternatives to petroleum that can propel their behemoth vessels for days or weeks at sea and still leave room on board for cargo.

About 95% of the hydrogen currently produced in the U.S. is “gray” hydrogen, so called because it’s produced from natural gas, in a process that yields about nine parts CO₂ for every one part of hydrogen. In order to create a lower-carbon fuel, “blue hydrogen,” producers of the gas must deal with the undesired volumes of CO₂ through carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS).

“Green hydrogen,” results when renewable energy sources are used to generate electricity, which is then used to separate water, H₂O, through electrolysis into its component parts of hydrogen and oxygen. Because of the extra expense of disposing of the unwanted carbon through CCUS, it’s more expensive to produce blue hydrogen than it is gray, while green hydrogen involves the most expensive process of all.

DOE’s Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office is working with industry and academia to develop new commercial-scale technologies to make the production of zero-carbon hydrogen more economical, Satyapal said. Its H2@Scale program “explores the potential for wide-scale hydrogen production and utilization in the United States to enable resiliency of the power generation and transmission sectors.”

“We talk to our customers pretty much each and every day about these issues,” said Mitch Jackson, FedEx’s chief sustainability officer. “Sustainability is not a discretionary thing anymore. I think it’s really become central to a lot of the considerations in thinking.”

Some of the companies promising to meet that goal and inspire other firms to do the same have signed on to an initiative called the Climate Pledge, co-founded by Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post. Those companies include IBM, Microsoft, Unilever, Johnson Controls, Coca-Cola, Uber and Best Buy. Acciona, a Spanish energy and infrastructure company, went carbon-neutral in 2016.

Carbon neutrality means companies must rely entirely on renewable fuels or offset the burning of fossil fuels with the capture and storage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Yet even the prodigious voluntary steps by a portion of the corporate world lack the speed, scale or scientific know-how needed to move the thermometer of the warming planet very far in the right direction without government support or broader behavioral changes in the private sector.

Their answers included rising carbon prices, storage breakthroughs, a fusion moonshot and more.

Despite decades of warnings and increasingly devastating disasters, we’ve still made little progress in slowing climate change.

Clean energy alternatives have secured just a fraction of the marketplace today, with renewables generating around 10% of global electricity and electric vehicles accounting for about 3% of new sales. Meanwhile, greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to climb year after year, aside from the occasional recession or pandemic.

Given the lack of momentum, how do we make faster, more significant progress? We asked 10 experts across a variety of disciplines, including climate scientists, economists, physicists, and policy experts, a single question:

“If you could invent, invest in, or implement one thing that you believe would do the most to reduce the risks of climate change, what would it be and why?”

Vanessa Chan, director of the Office of Technology Transitions and chief commercialisation officer, US Department of Energy. (Photo courtesy of US Department of Energy)

A battery that uses a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry is set to be used in Tesla’s upcoming $25,000 entry-level EV. The technology is more reliable but the trade-off is that it weighs more and has lower energy density compared with more expensive batteries, although it does have a long cycle life, says Madeline Tyson with RMI, a think tank in Colorado formerly known as the Rocky Mountain Institute. Other established chemistries—lithium-nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC) and lithium-nickel cobalt aluminium (NCA)—are also being rapidly evolved to increase energy density at an affordable price, adds Tyson.

Weight saving is key. Li-ion batteries can be encased in epoxy, rather than steel, reducing the amount of the metal used—and its associated emissions—by 40%, says RMI’s Charlie Bloch. Tesla promises to produce cells surrounded by epoxy with coolant distributed below, improving cooling and reducing weight while giving a 14% increase in the driving range of an EV. Cell-vehicle integration will lower battery pack costs by 7% per kilowatt-hour (kWh), says Tesla.

It is important to think really big. It is imperative that we get everybody from C-suite-level decision makers at the largest public companies to small businesses, foundations and academics to lock hands and make the strategic, financial and technological commitments to commercialise at scale while creating jobs. There is not a single stakeholder, the DOE included, that can meet the challenge on its own. However, if we can catalyse an alignment and commitments, we will start seeing real impact.

"Hammering and other hardening methods are all top-down ways of altering grain structure, and it's very hard to control the grain size you end up with," said Ou Chen, an assistant professor of chemistry at Brown and corresponding author of the new research. "What we've done is create nanoparticle building blocks that fuse together when you squeeze them. This way we can have uniform grain sizes that can be precisely tuned for enhanced properties."

Mobile-phone chargers and other devices could become much smaller after an all-RIKEN team of physicists successfully shrunk an electrical component known as an inductor to microscale dimensions using a quantum effect.

Inductors are a basic component of modern electrical circuits, and they are used in a wide range of applications including information processing, wireless circuits and chargers for mobile devices. They are based on the law of induction that English physicist Michael Faraday discovered in 1831. But while physics has made great leaps since then, the fundamental principles of inductors remain essentially the same—they are basically coils of wire.

Unlike other electrical circuit components, inductors have been difficult to miniaturize because the size of their inductance diminishes with their volume, such that if you halve their volume, the inductance drops by half too.

The new breed of computers is expected to excel at simulating quantum systems, like molecules. That should have a big impact on the energy sector.

“We see huge potential in areas leading to cleaner fuel, emissions reduction, and energy efficiency,” Svore says.

Among other things, quantum computers are expected to aid in chemistry and materials development far beyond the capacity of present-day supercomputers. The simulation capabilities could help researchers create batteries with greater storage capacity; and high-temperature superconductors, which could be used for new catalysts that could convert and optimize alternative fuel sources. Quantum computing could be used for climate modeling, for example, to find potential locations of wind flow that would help in designing new wind-energy sources. It would require collecting historical data and implementing it into certain models.

Quantum computing applications are ideal for such processes, and give high-resolution and calibrated results with real data. Also, such applications can upload the data into geographic information systems for the best wind-turbine locations.

It all started in 2009 with the publications of the “HHL” Algorithm proving an exponential acceleration for matrix multiplication and inversion, which triggered exciting applications in all linear algebra-based science, hence machine learning. Since, many algorithms were proposed to speed up tasks such as classification, dimensionality reduction, clustering, recommendation system, neural networks, kernel methods, SVM, reinforcement learning, and more generally optimization.

These algorithms are what I call Long Term or Algorithmic QML. They are usually carefully detailed, with guarantees that are proven as mathematical theorems. We can (theoretically) know the amount of speedup compared to the classical

algorithms they reproduce, which are often polynomial or even exponential, with respect to the number of input data for most of the cases. They come with precise bounds on the result’s probability, randomness, and accuracy, as usual in computer science research.

Recent initiatives from pharmaceutical giants suggest the drug industry is paying more and more attention to quantum computing. For example, in January, the world's largest private drug company, Boehringer Ingelheim, announced it would partner with Google to use quantum computing in pharmaceutical R&D. That same month, Roche, the world's largest pharmaceutical company, revealed it was collaborating with Cambridge Quantum Computing to design quantum algorithms for early-stage drug discovery and development.

“Google's view is that chemistry is the near-term application for quantum computing, and I buy that as well,” says Chad Edwards, head of strategy and product at Cambridge Quantum Computing in England.

In theory, quantum computing can do a better job simulating molecules and chemical reactions than conventional high-performance computers (HPCs). “A molecule only as complex as caffeine is the upper limit for HPCs,” Edwards says. Caffeine has only 24 atoms. In contrast, “In pharma, you're dealing with molecules much larger: proteins with thousands of atoms. When we want to understand how quantum mechanical systems like chemistry works, we want to use machines that think and work quantum mechanically.”

The next epidemiological crisis—and there will be a next one, and another one after that—need not be this bad if we plan ahead.

In late 2019 every infectious disease expert knew something like the novel coronavirus was coming sooner or later, just as they know today that Covid won’t be the last pandemic. As depressing as the current situation is, though, the next one—and there will be a next one—doesn’t have to be this bad. Shortly before his inauguration, President Biden proposed spending $20 billion to speed up vaccination rollouts. That’s a start. But a complete plan—one that can protect the U.S. from mass death, catastrophic economic damage, and (let’s hope) incompetent political leaders who squander the public’s trust—will have to be more comprehensive. It will likely involve at least five separate areas of research and investment. Most of all, it will require careful preparation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused life sciences organizations to adjust to supply chain and clinical development disruptions and financial challenges that would have previously been unthinkable. Where can your organization focus its response? How can you continue to deliver products and innovative discoveries to your patients? And what should you do next? Learn how we can help you combat the coronavirus with resilience.

How vaccines are made, and why it is hard [The Economist]

NINE VACCINES against covid-19 have already been approved in one jurisdiction or another, with many more in various stages of preparation. That this has happened within a year of the illness coming to the world’s attention is remarkable. But it is one thing to design and test vaccines. It is another to make them at sufficient scale to generate the billions of doses needed to vaccinate the world’s population, and to do so at such speed that the rate of inoculation can outpace the spread and possible mutation of the virus.

Maximising a bioreactor’s yield is as much an art as a science. The underlying health of the cells involved matters. So do environmental conditions at the manufacturing site. That AstraZeneca has not been able to meet its own production targets shows how hard it is to predict when the right balance of biology will be found. The company says it can take six to nine months to start a production site up from scratch, and that even this timetable is possible only by working with experienced partners and at an accelerated pace. At the moment, AstraZeneca is working with 25 manufacturing organisations in 15 countries to make its vaccine.

Producing mRNA vaccines at scale has problems, too. The biggest is how to protect the mRNA molecules both from the environment they must travel through in order to reach the arm of their recipient, and from the recipient’s own body, which will attack them as they journey to the ribosomes which will transcribe them.

Making the mRNA itself – which codes for the virus spike protein inside our cells – is uncomplicated. ‘The reaction mix has a well-defined composition and relatively few components, with no living cells or cell excretions or cell debris,’ says Zoltán Kis, a chemical engineer at the Future Vaccine Manufacturing Hub at Imperial College London in the UK. The mRNA synthesis takes two hours, while making the vaccine takes a couple of days.

‘The manufacturing step is very unusual and tricky,’ Lowe warns. ‘The entire supply chain of components and materials that go into these vaccines is new,’ adds Kis, who notes that the supply of some specialised lipids is likely squeezed by intellectual property issues. Lipids suppliers to BioNTech include Merck and Evonik Industries, according to the Wall Street Journal, while Dermapharm in Germany, Acuitas Therapeutics in Canada and Polymun Scientific Immunbiologische Forschung in Austria are involved in the formulation process.

A range of SARS-CoV-2 variants has emerged across the world since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Most attention has been on fast-spreading variants recently identified in the UK, South Africa, and Brazil. Scientists suspect that the variants’ particular patterns of mutations have the potential to affect their transmissibility, virulence, and/or ability to evade parts of the immune system. The latter could make people with vaccine-induced or natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 vulnerable to becoming reinfected with novel variants, and these possible effects remain under investigation.

There are a handful of other variants—typically with fewer eye-catching mutations—that researchers are also keeping a close watch on, notes molecular epidemiologist Emma Hodcroft of the University of Bern in Switzerland. Making matters confusing, scientists can’t agree on a standardized naming system for new variants, causing what one researcher has called a “bloody mess” of nomenclature.

Here The Scientist compiles a summary of some noteworthy variants recently associated with rapid spread that US researchers are currently monitoring.

The researchers have studied a group of patients suffering from REM Sleep Behavior Disorder (RBD), a condition where the patients physically act vivid dreams with vocalizations and movements. If a patient e.g. dreams that they are running, their legs will move as if they were actually running. The sleep disorder is often discovered by a spouse as it results in violent movements at night, and the diagnosis is often indicative of something more. Patients with RBD have a high risk of developing Parkinson's—statistically approximately ninety percent of them will be diagnosed with a parkinsonism related disorder over the course of five to 10 years.

VIDEO: One year into the pandemic, a clearer understanding of how Covid-19 infections spread suggest people need to shift efforts away from cleaning surfaces and toward better ventilation and filtration

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=318IA6ugoGU

The secret to successful aging may lie in part in your gut, according to a new report. The study found that it may be possible to predict your likelihood of living a long and healthy life by analyzing the trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that inhabit your intestinal tract.

The new research, published in the journal Nature Metabolism, found that as people get older, the composition of this complex community of microbes, collectively known as the gut microbiome, tends to change. And the greater the change, the better, it appears.

In healthy people, the kinds of microbes that dominate the gut in early adulthood make up a smaller and smaller proportion of the microbiome over the ensuing decades, while the percentage of other, less prevalent species rises. But in people who are less healthy, the study found, the opposite occurs: The composition of their microbiomes remains relatively static and they tend to die earlier.

Established companies have to innovate for the future, while running their core business. This is a reality that is now accepted by the majority of corporate leaders. A report by McKinsey notes that 70% of senior leaders view innovation as one of the top three drivers of growth in their companies.

Innovation is no longer just a nice to have, it has become a matter of survival for established companies. This is because startups are now better funded and their incentives are in the right place. Whereas, for innovation in large corporates this is not necessarily the case.

Leaders may be keen for their teams to innovate, but they fall victim to the myths around innovation. Since they don't really understand how innovation systems work, they start engaging in a lot of different activities. Companies have been trying everything from idea competitions, rapid prototyping, hackathons and more expensive programs such as innovation labs and corporate accelerators.

Despite all this activity, most corporate leaders are still not satisfied with the returns they are getting from their investments in innovation. Less than 30% of leaders indicate that they are confident with the decisions they are making around innovation. When innovation does succeed, it is often as one-off projects rather than as a sustainable and repeatable process.

Most companies start working on innovation without taking the time to assess their level of readiness to nurture innovation. To take innovation from being a series of one-off projects to a repeatable process, leaders need to put in place the right internal structures, processes and environment. Innovation Readiness is key to sustaining innovation long term. Companies need to put in place the following three pillars; leadership support, organizational design and innovation practice.

"We got really good at that as a way to get capital for basic things," says Alvarez. "Like, we need a printer, let's go to a quick pitch competition," referencing how she entered and won TiE Pittsburgh. She notes an additional benefit of her business-competition funding strategy: "Investors show up." At that point, she says, "it becomes less about the money, more about expanding our network," which is key, especially when Covid-19 has made socializing normally so hard.

Chicago has major competitive advantages, such as world-class universities and a diversified industry base. Our geographical location also allows us to be leaders in transportation and logistics as the capital of the Midwest economy. While the Chicago region represents 2.9 percent of the U.S. population, it accounts for 3.3 percent of manufacturing employment, with manufacturing jobs in the Chicago area totaling over 420,000. World Business Chicago estimates that there are currently over 10,000 open manufacturing jobs in the broader Chicago region. As a result, we need to focus on workforce development programs that train, place and support talent in Chicago's manufacturing ecosystem for today, tomorrow and the future. Fortunately, Chicago has an incredible resource in the Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership, the largest public workforce development system in the nation, providing hands-on manufacturing training programs with the goal of increasing our skilled labor pool available to Chicago-region manufacturers.

Your network is a complicated thing. The entire network includes all the people you’ve worked closely with, but the active part of your network can look strikingly different at different times, depending on where you’re working, what you’re working on, even how you’re feeling. Your network goes dormant in some areas and comes alive in others. It informs the way you solve problems and make decisions. It is unique to you, but it contains traits shared by other networks: successful managers have networks that share characteristics not only with the networks of other successful managers, but also successful artists and musicians.

Importantly, it is not enough to say the public should trust scientists because we know better or because we know more. Trust must be earned. Unfortunately, science and scientists have not consistently earned and nurtured this trust. In some respects, this is the result of the advancement of the scientific enterprise. Science in the 21st century is much more removed from daily life because of the necessity of speaking with precision by using technical terms and jargon. Although it may serve a purpose in the practice and communication of important developments within a field, jargon removes science almost completely from the realm of the lay public. It has become a special skill set to break out of the audience of scientists and into the audience of the interested, the allies of scientists, and the public. The pace of discovery and knowledge, and the size and scope of the scientific enterprise, makes this especially difficult. It is incumbent on scientists to value and develop these skills.