Articles by Darren Orf

Health

These Two Drugs Could Combine Forces to Treat Alzheimer’s—and They're Already On the Market

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:Treating Alzheimer’s requires a multi-faceted approach that can target various mechanisms behind this pernicious neurodegenerative disease. In a new study, scientists discovered two FDA-approved cancer drugs that could also be effective at combatting one well-known symptom of Alzheimer’s when used in combination.Researchers analyzed 1.4 million anonymized health records to narrow the list of potential treatment options down to two promising candidates: letrozole and irinotecan.The human brain is a complicated organ to comprehend. Scientists, philosophers, and everyone in between has yet come to any consensus regarding how this organ forms our subjective experience, and many illnesses of the brain remain similarly poorly understood. Even 120 years after being first described, for instance, Alzheimer’s remains a pernicious disease with few therapeutic options for slowing its decline. Part of the reason for this struggle is that there’s no one pathway, enzyme, or protein responsible for this particular type of cognitive decline, and this multi-faceted breakdown can make therapeutic options difficult to develop. A 2022 study from Carnegie Mellon University found that effective Alzheimer’s treatment will likely be similar to HIV, for which physicians use a cocktail of drugs to address certain aspects of the disease with the net result addressing symptoms of Alzheimer’s that are specific to each patient. However, finding those drugs can be hard, and it can be even harder to receive U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval. But what if certain, already-approved drugs—such as those that treat specific cancers—could be used in the fight against a neurodegenerative disease that impacts some seven million U.S. citizens?A new study—led by scientists at University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and published in the journal Cell—analyzed how Alzheimer’s impacted gene expression in the brain and then searched for FDA-approved drugs that caused the opposite of those changes. The search began with some 1,300 drugs, and that list was quickly narrowed down to 86 options (that were known to induce the opposite gene expression in a single cell type) and a further 25 (which impacted several cell types). Only a handful of those achieved FDA approval. Then, researchers paired this search with 1.4 million anonymized electronic health records of people over the age of 65 via the UC Health Data Warehouse. This invaluable dataset allowed researchers to track Alzheimer’s outcomes with patients currently using certain FDA-approved drugs, and found positive correlations with two in particular: letrozole and irinotecan.“Thanks to all these existing data sources, we went from 1,300 drugs, to 86, to 10, to just 5,” Yaqiao Li, the lead author of the study and a graduate student at UCSF, said in a press statement. “In particular, the rich data collected by all the UC health centers pointed us straight to the most promising drugs. It’s kind of like a mock clinical trial.”Letrozole is typically used in treating breast cancer, and scientists predicted it could be helpful in treating neurons. Meanwhile irinotecan (a colon and lung cancer drug) could possibly address problems with the glia—the non-neural cells in the nervous system. Once administered in mouse models, researchers found that the drugs in combination limited the build-up of a malformed tau protein (a well-known side-effect of Alzheimer’s) in the brain. “Alzheimer’s is likely the result of numerous alterations in many genes and proteins that, together, disrupt brain health. This makes it very challenging for drug development—which traditionally produces one drug for a single gene or protein that drives disease, Yadong Huang, a co-author of the study from UCSF, said in a press statement. “It’s so exciting to see the validation of the computational data in a widely used Alzheimer’s mouse model.”Thanks in part to the drug’s FDA approval, researchers hope that this research will move quickly to clinical trials, and that this drug combination can soon begin supplying relief to millions living with this difficult disease.

Technology

A Freak Accident Might Have Just Unlocked Faster Internet for Everyone

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:Frequency combs split laser light into dozens of colors that each represent their own optical channel, allowing for faster data transmission.Although this typically requires expensive and powerful lasers and amplifiers, a new study details how scientists accidentally found a way to achieve the same effect on a single chip. This could create better spectrometers, optical clocks, compact quantum devices, and advanced LiDAR systems, or even help AI data centers move massive amounts of information more effectively.In many ways, science is a story of happy accidents. From the (possibly apocryphal) story of Isaac Newton and the apple to the discovery of penicillin centuries later, accidents can lead humanity in some truly wondrous directions. Now a team of scientists from Columbia University are adding a new fortunate fluke to the list. This one may not rewrite our understanding of gravity or usher in a new era of medicine, but it could be a huge boon for another world changing technology: artificial intelligence. In the study, published earlier this month in the journal Nature Photonics, scientists detail how exploring ways to improve Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) accidentally led to the discovery of a chip-sized frequency comb, a special kind of light where color bands are lined up next to each other and bright frequencies appear as spikes on spectrogram—sort of like teeth on a comb. “The technology we’ve developed takes a very powerful laser and turns it into dozens of clean, high-power channels on a chip,” Andres Gil-Molina, a former postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University and the study’s lead author, said in a press statement. “That means you can replace racks of individual lasers with one compact device, cutting cost, saving space, and opening the door to much faster, more energy-efficient systems.”To pull this off, Gil-Molina and the research team relied on multimode laser diodes, which are typically used in medical devices and laser-cutting tools. Not exactly known for being neat and orderly beams of light, researchers used a technique known as a “locking mechanism” to essentially “purify” the noisy light, Gil-Molina says. This method uses silicon photonics to clean up the laser’s output so that it displays high coherence. Then the chip splits this rarified laser light into dozens of colors. Because these colors don’t interfere with one another, each optical hue is its own channel, allowing for the possibility of sending dozens of data streams simultaneously. Of course, this is far from the first time such a device has been created—in fact, this basic idea known as “wavelength-division multiplexing” is what transformed the internet into what it is today. What’s different is that frequency combs typically require powerful and expensive lasers and amplifiers, but this study shows that they can achieve the same trick on just a single chip. “This is about bringing lab-grade light sources into real-world devices,” says Gil-Molina. “If you can make them powerful, efficient, and small enough, you can put them almost anywhere.”The most obvious application for this new kind of chip is AI data centers, which are increasingly feeling the strain to move information fast enough, especially between processors and memory. While many data centers still use single-wavelength lasers along fiber optic cables, a compact frequency comb can send multiple data streams along that same cable. “This research marks another milestone in our mission to advance silicon photonics,” Columbia University’s Michal Lipson, the senior author of the study, said in a press statement. “As this technology becomes increasingly central to critical infrastructure and our daily lives, this type of progress is essential to ensuring that data centers are as efficient as possible.”