On the last Friday of each month, I am going to highlight important discoveries that have been made in science during that month. August has been a great month for scientific research. As laboratories splurge on last minute reagents and supplies before the government fiscal year ends, there has also been an extraordinary flurry of publications outlining high-impact discoveries. Today I'm going to discuss a handful of them - studies that will take us from viruses, to cancer biology, and all the way to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our Solar System.
I'll mention beforehand that I'm going be highlighting only Nature research in this post. Please don't get the impression this is the only journal that has published high impact research this month. However, my personal bias had played a role in this, as I've only had time to read through Nature Publishing Group's websites this week. Part of that has been the fact that I've finally submitted revisions to my own manuscript that is currently under review at Scientific Reports, a journal that is part of NPG. But I wanted to get this post out today, so it's a trade off I'm comfortable with. I haven't posted in two months and that's been way too long.
1. The most important article, in my opinion, was published yesterday, called Vaccine Protection Against Zika Virus from Brazil. This groundbreaking paper highlights a multi-national effort to develop a new vaccine against the famous Zika virus. Researchers have developed two strategies to completely immunize mice from Zika infection (particularly against those strains associated with birth defects observed in infected, pregnant women in Brazil and the United States). Two methods achieved immunization in mice. One method was the classical inoculation using purified, inactivated virus. The second method involves a DNA plasmid that expresses several of the virus's genes that teach the immune system to recognize viral proteins and develop antibodies against the virus. These initial studies were only in mice, but the jump to humans is coming soon enough. It's a fantastic development.
*Climbs onto soapbox*
Unfortunately, I have to put this paper into the political context of our election. Vaccine development is an essential arm of the biomedical research enterprise. Trump, who very well could be President, is inexplicably in the camp of people who believe that vaccines cause autism (newsflash: they don't!), and it concerns me that a possible leader of our country could be so science-naive. Research, like the development of the Zika vaccine above, is imperative to the health and safety of everyone. If Trump is elected, I hope that vaccine funding (and science funding in general) doesn't take a major hit.
*Climbs down from podium*
Okay, let's get back to the science!
2 & 3. Two awesome papers out this month dive into the world of cancer biology. The first, Tumor-cell-induced endothelial cell necroptosis via death receptor 6 promotes metastasis, is a mouthful of a title but the discoveries are very important. The authors identified proteins expressed on endothelial cells that rogue cancer cells latch onto and use to leave the blood stream, enter into a new tissue, and develop into a metastatic tumor (the process in which a cancer cell can leave the bloodstream, push through the endothelial cell layers of the blood vessels, and enter underlying tissue is called extravasation). This discovery will hopefully lead to the advancement of new targeted therapies against this mechanism in order to prevent metastatic tumor formation and death in patients with aggressive cancers. It is also another example of how cancer cells can hijack our own body's normal physiology to grow, adapt, and invade surrounding tissues.
This highjacking of normal physiological functions is akin to the next paper I want to highlight called, Magneto-aerotactic bacteria deliver drug-containing nanoliposomes to tumour hypoxic regions. First, props to the authors for including the name of the most famous X-Men villain as the first word of their manuscript title. I love it. Second, the authors were extremely clever and hijacked a natural type of bacteria found in the ocean, and using physiological functions and properties common to both these bacteria and solid tumors, were able to develop a new type of drug delivery system to bring drugs to tumors in mice. SUCK IT CANCER!
In the late 1980s, researchers discovered a species of bacterium in the ocean that created their very own iron chains and used these little iron-filled chains to align themselves along local magnetic fields. These bacteria used those magnetic fields to guide themselves to areas of the ocean that were oxygen-depleted (similar to hypoxic environments within solid tumors). In the current paper, scientists coupled liposomes to the outsides of these bacterium and injected them into mice with tumors. You can think of liposomes as tiny, tiny little packages that were stuffed full of anti-cancer drugs. The bacteria were guided to the center of the tumor by a magnetic field created outside of the mouse that the researchers placed near the mouse's tumor. The bacteria were able to follow the magnetic lines into the center of the tumor, which is depleted of oxygen, and deliver the drugs to the local environment. FUCKING BRILLIANT!
This paper was a proof-of-concept that bacteria with an affinity for hypoxic environments could be guided to deliver drugs. Studies on safety, efficacy, and what kinds of drugs and cancers could be treated will need to be performed. But this is some really awesome work that could open up a new avenue for targeted cancer therapy.
4. Now we're going to travel all the way out of the body, out of the solar system, and over to Proxima Centauri, our closest celestial neighbor just over four and a half light years away. Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf star, and it was just discovered that there is an Earth-sized planet orbiting Promixa that may also fall within the long-sought after 'Goldilocks Zone' - a distance far enough way from this particular star that could support liquid water on the planet's surface.
That's pretty awesome, and the fact that it is so close (galactically-speaking) is astounding. Does that mean humans could definitely live on this planet? Hell no, but that doesn't rule out an eventual trip to the planet to check it out for other life. Interestingly, earlier this year Stephen Hawking, Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, proposed a new idea to send a small fleet of tiny probes (no bigger than phones) to check out our neighbor Alpha Centauri, in the neighborhood of Proxima. These little guys could sail over to this star system using solar sails and get there in about 20 years. So let's pretend it takes 10 years to develop the technology, 20 years to get the probes to Proxima and this little planet, and then 4.5 years to beam back photographs and other information (at the speed of light) back to Earth. In 35-40 years, literally in our lifetimes for those contemporaries of mine, we could be looking at actual pictures of a star and it's planet up-close. I'll take it. And couple that with a landing on Mars and now we've really experienced science fiction.
5. & 6. The last two papers I want to quickly highlight have to do with big data and genetic sequencing. The first is another effort to sequence the human exome, meaning those RNAs that code directly for protein. This massive exome sequencing project identified new protein-coding mutations and variants in over 60,000 humans and increases our knowledge of what kinds of mutations are associated with disease. It will take years to parse through all the data, but there could be some enormous findings hidden in there.
The second project brings us full circle and back to viruses, where we started at the beginning of this post. Recently, there was a large sequencing initiative to catalog and identify Earth's virome - that is to say, the collective of all viruses on Earth. You wouldn't know it, but viruses are EVERYWHERE. But don't worry, a vast majority are not harmful to humans at all, as they target bacteria and other single-cell organisms. However we really don't know the breadth and scope of what is out there and this paper is another looking-glass into a world we are still exploring. I anticipate this will also provide some important discoveries in the coming years. Remember those magnetic bacteria? They are found in the ocean. Perhaps we'll find a virus that can target and kill cancer cells, and perhaps they dwell in the ocean too. We'll never know unless we look. This is a great first step in that direction.
So there you go, a recap of research in August!
