Month: July 2023

Developing new antibiotics presents a complicated challenge, but scientists are now using artificial intelligence to design new drugs to address the problem. In May researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and McMaster University published a study on their use of an AI algorithm to identify an antibiotic that can kill a particularly resistant type of bacterium. The pathogen, called Acinetobacter baumannii, can lead to serious infections, including meningitis and pneumonia, and is often found in hospital settings. It’s also a leading cause of infections in military personnel in the Middle East.

The findings are significant because they show how AI can be used to hasten the development of new antibiotics to fight drug-resistant bacteria. Using AI and machine learning—the subset of AI that involves using algorithms to find patterns in data—dramatically reduces the number of experiments that humans would need to screen a potential drug for efficacy. It also greatly reduces the cost because the computer modeling weeds out compounds that aren’t promising.

Antibiotic resistance, the phenomenon in which bacteria become resistant to the drugs used to treat them, is a growing threat that could cause up to 10 million deaths annually by 2050. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that in 2019 alone 1.27 million people died globally from drug-resistant bacterial infections.

“We need new antibiotics because we’re facing a crisis due to the fact that the number of resistant bacterial pathogens is growing while our pipeline of new antibiotics is diminishing,” says James Collins, a professor at M.I.T.’s Institute for Medical Engineering & Science and co-senior author of the new study. “The former is arising due to numerous factors—largely the overuse and misuse of antibiotics, both in health care and in agriculture. And the latter is largely caused by a broken economic market for antibiotics.”

Antibiotic development presents something of a catch-22. The cost of developing a new antibiotic is enormous; it’s on par with the cost of developing a new cancer drug. But unlike cancer drugs, which can be taken for months or even years, antibiotics are usually taken for a relatively short period of time and often just for a single infection. Because of stewardship programs designed to decrease antibiotic resistance, any new antibiotic is likely to be reserved by health care workers until it’s really needed. And long drug approval periods and the widespread availability of generic drugs mean that there is little financial incentive for drug companies to develop new antibiotics.

“There is a real market failure in the antibiotic space, in the antimicrobial space—and I’d include some antifungal medicines in that bucket as well,” says Jocelyn Ulrich, deputy vice president for policy and research at the industry group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). She points out that antibiotic resistance is a naturally occurring phenomenon and that the only ways to control it are to use tools, such as those for infection prevention and control, to slow down the use of new products.

“We have seen the number of companies, especially the larger companies, decline from 20 or so down to just a handful who are still even in the space,” Ulrich says. “And as a result, we have a much smaller pipeline of novel therapeutics coming through.”

Scientists are hoping to change that. In the recent study, Collins and his fellow researchers exposed A. baumannii to thousands of potential drug compounds to see which of them blocked the pathogen’s growth. They used those data to train a computer model to predict a compound’s antibacterial activity based on its structure.

The team used the model to analyze 6,680 compounds in just a few hours—a process that would have taken a few weeks without AI. The analysis narrowed the batch down to a few hundred possibilities—240 of which Collins and his colleagues tested in the lab. Among these, the researchers identified nine antibiotics, including one that was effective at killing A. baumannii. Importantly, the compound is “narrow spectrum,” meaning it doesn’t kill other species of bacteria. This is beneficial because it reduces the chance of other bacteria spreading resistance against the drug and does not compromise the gut’s overall microbiome.

Collins explains that the new drug, named abaucin, works by disrupting the bacterium’s protective outer layer, the cell membrane. In tests on mice, it was effective against wound infections caused by A. baumannii. Abaucin also worked against a number of drug-resistant strains of A. baumannii that had been isolated from human samples and subsequently grown in the lab.

Collins’s team used the computer model to test thousands of compounds. “Now imagine you want to go from [testing] thousands to many billions of molecules,” he says. “It would be effectively impossible [for humans] to curate, purchase and test all of those molecules. And yet for billions of compounds, it still only takes several days to analyze with AI. So we are able to explore much, much larger chemical spaces that really would not be available to us without these computer models.”

“I think these tools have the potential to speed many aspects of the drug development process, but it’s early days,” Ulrich says. “Whenever we have really large data sets and can very efficiently analyze that data, that’s certainly time-saving.” But she notes that the findings are only in animal models. “You still have to do all the work to develop that compound into something that can be metabolized in the human body, and they need to do thorough clinical trials and other things,” she says. “I’d say there’s immense potential and immense excitement around some of these tools.”

Aleksandra Mojsilovi? is an IBM fellow and head of AI Foundations at IBM Research. She has been instrumental in research showing how AI can be used to develop new therapeutics and has co-authored a paper showing how IBM’s AI system could help accelerate the processes of finding new antibiotics.

Mojsilovi? agrees that AI can accelerate research by reducing the time it takes to search thousands or millions of compounds. “But it can go way beyond that,” she says. “You can train the models to actually predict properties of existing molecules quickly, which allows you to screen or predict how good the molecule is, or identify the unknown properties, such as toxicity.” Additionally, with generative AI, computer models can be trained on the existing molecules to learn their “representation,” or characteristics, Mojsilovi? says. Researchers can then design molecules that have never been seen before in nature.

In response to the market challenges in developing new antimicrobial drugs, in 2021 U.S. senators Michael F. Bennet of Colorado and Todd Young of Indiana introduced the  PASTEUR Act in Congress. The bipartisan bill would create an incentive program and government investment of $6 billion for the development of new antivirals and antibiotics—and give the government unlimited access to the drugs once they’re approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The bill was just reintroduced in April 2023, after more than 200 organizations, including PhRMA, signed a letter in support of the act in March.

If the bill passes, researchers will still be in a race against time to develop new antibiotics against the most dangerous drug-resistant pathogens—and that’s where AI could be critical. The FDA recently released a paper to facilitate discussion among developers, manufacturers, regulators, academic groups and other stakeholders on the use of AI and machine learning throughout the drug-development process.

AI has been getting a lot of negative attention lately for the ways it could be misused, but it could also be a very powerful tool in helping us solve some of our most pressing challenges.

“I’m very hopeful,” Collins says. “I think our AI tools, our technology platforms to discover, design and develop new antibiotics, are expanding with each year.”

How do you design a robot that can explore a wide variety of terrain it might encounter on alien planets?

A team from Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has designed a robot that goes way beyond your typical rover and may be the next step in planetary exploration. The four-wheeled Multi-Modal Mobility Morphobot (M4) is designed to autonomously asses its surrounding terrain to determine how to best traverse upcoming obstacles. 

The M4’s unique capabilities combine solutions from hurdles experienced in previous robotic missions on Mars and could provide the innovation needed to anticipate future ones. Rough terrain ahead? No problem. The M4’s four wheels are designed to pivot onto their sides and work as propellers, turning the Morphobot into a quadcopter drone. Obstacle in your way? M4 can stand up using its back two wheels like legs, balancing itself with the rotary thrust of its front propellers as it pivot-walks to a clear path. And using artificial intelligence (AI), M4 is designed to make these determinations autonomously. 

Related: Curiosity rover on Mars gets a brain boost to think (and move) faster

Robotic planetary exploration vehicles, like the wheeled rovers on Mars, are limited to the landscapes they are able to navigate. NASA’s Curiosity rover, for example, has been exploring the Martian surface for eleven years. In that time, the robotic explorer has driven less than twenty miles (32 kilometers) and experienced damage to its wheels within the first several months of its mission. 

NASA’s more recent Mars rover, Perseverance, was sent with a small helicopter companion called Ingenuity. The success of Ingenuity’s flights on the Red Planet prompted NASA to keep the drone-like vehicle operational long past its planned mission in order to help scout routes for Perseverance, providing mission operators valuable insight into the rover’s road ahead. 

M4 could handle all of these tasks on its own thanks to a revolutionary set of capabilities.

“Our aim was to push the boundaries of robot locomotion by designing a system that showcases extraordinary mobility capabilities with a wide range of distinct locomotion modes. The M4 project successfully achieved these objectives,” assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University Alireza Ramezani said in a Caltech statement. 

Ramezani and Caltech director of Bioinspired Engineering and aeronautics professor Mory Gharib came up the idea for M4, which they developed together with a group at Caltech’s Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST). Their team consisted of Caltech’s Eric Sihite, an aerospace postdoctoral scholar research associate, CAST design engineer Reza Nemovi and Arash Kalantari, from JPL. 

The group published a paper last month in the journal Nature Communications announcing the robot. The paper cites the locomotive techniques of different animals as the inspiration behind some of M4’s design, such as the Chukar bird, which flap its wings for balance while walking over hilly landscapes. 

“Chukar birds adopt a similar wing repurposing to increase redundancy to support legged locomotion over steep terrain through a phenomenon known as wing-assisted incline running (WAIR),” the paper states. It also draws comparisons to sea lions’ differing appendage usage depending on whether they animal is swimming or walking on land. 

The M4 team at CAST also see uses for the Morphobot’s technology here on Earth, particularly in the field of emergency services. One example in the paper describes the aftermath of a natural disaster, in which M4 is able to fly inside a collapsed building, then drive and “walk” around confining obstacles until it locates survivors and alerts first responders. 

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NASA’s supersonic plane has moved closer to the runway in preparation for its debut flight. 

New photos show the X-59 supersonic plane parked on the flight line — the space between the hangar and the runway —  at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California. The plane was moved from its construction site to the flight line on June 19, according to a statement from NASA. 

This milestone kicks off a series of ground tests to ensure the X-59 is safe and ready to fly as part of NASA’s Quesst mission, which aims to demonstrate that the aircraft can fly faster than the speed of sound (or Mach 1) without generating the loud sonic booms generally produced by supersonic planes. 

Related: Watch NASA’s supersonic X-59 jet come together in Lockheed Martin’s new video

“NASA will then fly the X-59 over several communities to gather data on human responses to the sound generated during supersonic flight,” officials said in the statement from the space agency. “NASA will deliver that data set to U.S. and international regulators to possibly enable commercial supersonic flight over land.” 

The X-59 supersonic jet is expected to produce only a gentle thump, or the equivalent of a nearby car door slamming, for people on the ground. In comparison, previous generations of supersonic aircraft are known to rattle windows when flying over the speed of sound. 

Therefore, the X-59 could lead to new sound-based rules regarding supersonic flight over land, opening new doors for faster commercial cargo and passenger air travel. 

The plane will remain parked near the runway during its ground and initial flight tests by Lockheed Martin. The 99.7-foot-long, 29.5-foot-wide aircraft is powered by a single jet engine, which was built by General Electric Aviation, a subsidiary of General Electric. It is designed to reach a speed of Mach 1.4, or 925 mph, flying at an altitude of 55,000 feet (16,764 meters).

If all goes according to plan, the X-59 will fly over select U.S. cities starting in 2024. Residents will be able to share their responses to the sound produced by the X-59 aircraft. Then, data collected from the flights will be shared with American and international regulators in 2027, when the Quesst mission comes to a close. 

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Chinese commercial launch firm Landspace is preparing for the second test flight of its Zhuque-2 rocket, setting the stage for a groundbreaking achievement, should the methane-fueled rocket successfully reach orbit.

Zhuque-2, meaning “Vermillion Bird-2,” is scheduled to launch on July 12, 2023, at 2:00 a.m. ET from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert, according to NextSpaceflight. The rocket’s success could usher in a new era of methalox-powered rocket engines for orbital and interplanetary transportation. The global spaceflight community will undoubtedly be keeping a close eye on this upcoming launch as Landspace seeks to demonstrate the viability of methalox rocket fuel. As of yet, no information has been disclosed about the rocket’s payloads.

Methalox is fast becoming the preferred rocket fuel for launch providers. The benefits of methalox (a methane-oxygen mixture) are deemed to be more attractive than conventional liquid fuels like kerosene due to its cleaner, safer properties, and is deemed particularly suitable for reusable rockets. And conceivably, it could be manufactured off planet, including on Mars. Several prominent space companies are developing rockets that will use the fuel, including SpaceX’s Starship, Rocket Lab’s Neutron, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, and Relativity Space’s Terran R.

The first launch of the 162-foot-tall (49.5 meters) rocket didn’t go so well. Zhuque-2 failed to reach orbit during its maiden flight on December 14, 2022, resulting in the destruction of all 14 satellites on board. Investigations traced the issue to a faulty second-stage liquid oxygen inlet pipe, as reported by SpaceNews. A successful mission this time would see Landspace becoming the second private Chinese company to conduct a successful launch with a liquid propellant rocket, after Space Pioneer achieved the feat in April with its Tianlong-2 rocket.

Equipped with gas generator engines, the Zhuque-2 is capable of producing 243 metric tons of thrust, and it boasts a payload capacity of 6 metric tons to low Earth orbit—or a reduced payload capacity of 4 metric tons to a Sun-synchronous orbit, the company claims.

The evolution of the Zhuque-2 represents a significant shift in Landspace’s strategy, which earlier focused on solid propellants like the one used in the three-stage Zhuque-1 rocket, which failed to reach orbit during its first and only launch. Landspace and the Zhuque-2 are products of the Chinese government’s commitment to opening up the space sector to private industry, a process that began nearly 10 years ago.

Two other methalox-driven rockets failed to reach orbit during their maiden flights, namely SpaceX’s Starship and Relativity Space’s 3D-printed Terran-1, the latter being retired and replaced with Terran-R. A private launch provider, one would think, will eventually hoist a methane-fueled rocket to orbit. This coming Wednesday, it could very well be Landspace.

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In February 2021, a scientific paper came out that caused a sensation in the world of obesity research. It detailed the first results from studying weekly injections of the drug semaglutide—the generic name for Ozempic or Wegovy—to treat obesity. The paper showed that people taking the drug lost on average 15 percent of their body weight—a level of weight loss practically unheard-of for an anti-obesity medicine.

The paper, and the subsequent approval of Wegovy for weight management, kicked off an unprecedented clamor for this new generation of drugs. Demand for the injectables is so high that in May 2023, Wegovy manufacturer Novo Nordisk paused television advertising in order to buy itself time to produce more of the drug. Semaglutide is also used to treat type 2 diabetes, and in the UK patients have found it difficult to access the drug as Novo Nordisk struggled to keep up supply.

As demand for the drugs has risen, some have pointed out that for people to keep the weight off, they will likely have to stay on these drugs forever. That’s not surprising—the same is true for other weight loss interventions—but it raises a potentially vexing problem. The data we have suggests that a significant number of people stop taking these drugs after relatively short spans. We might have near-miraculous weight loss drugs, but what happens to the people who can’t stay on them?

These new drugs are part of a group called GLP-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 RAs). They work by mimicking a hormone that regulates blood sugar levels and suppresses appetite by slowing down the rate at which food leaves the stomach. While using them to treat obesity is pretty novel, they’ve been approved for type 2 diabetes for a while. The first GLP-1 RA was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2005. That means we have some decent real-world data about how long people stay on GLP-1 RAs and the reasons they quit them.

One study looked at GLP-1 RAs prescribed in the UK between 2009 and 2017. Out of the 589 patients who started taking a GLP-RA, 45 percent stopped taking the drug within 12 months, and 65 percent within 24 months. The same group of scientists also looked at people taking GLP-1 RAs in the US across a similar period of time. That study included a much larger group of diabetes patients but found that people quit taking the drugs at a similar rate as in the UK. Within 12 months, 47 percent of patients stopped taking their GLP-1 AR; after 24 months that figure was 70 percent. On average, people in that study spent around 13 months using the drug before they stopped taking it.

Other real-world findings paint a similar picture. About half of Spanish patients taking a GLP-1 RA had stopped taking the drug after two years—a higher dropout rate than for other diabetes drugs. In Denmark, around 45 percent of diabetes patients stopped taking GLP-1 RAs within five years of starting the therapy, although a quarter of them started again within the following year. In lots of these studies, the scientists note that people quit these drugs at much higher rates than they do during clinical trials.

Staggering growth in Starlink collision-avoidance maneuvers in the past six months is sparking concerns over the long-term sustainability of satellite operations as thousands of new spacecraft are poised to launch into orbit in the coming years.

SpaceX‘s Starlink broadband satellites were forced to swerve more than 25,000 times between Dec. 1, 2022, and May 31, 2023 to avoid potentially dangerous approaches to other spacecraft and orbital debris, according to a report filed by SpaceX with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on June 30. That’s about double the number of avoidance maneuvers reported by SpaceX in the previous six-month period that ran from June to November 2022. Since the launch of the first Starlink spacecraft in 2019, the SpaceX satellites have been forced to move over 50,000 times to prevent collisions.

The steep increase in the number of maneuvers worries experts because it follows an exponential curve, leading to concerns that safety of operations in the orbital environment might soon get out of hand.

“Right now, the number of maneuvers is growing exponentially,” Hugh Lewis, a professor of astronautics at the University of Southampton in the U.K. and a leading expert on the impact of megaconstellations on orbital safety, told Space.com. “It’s been doubling every six months, and the problem with exponential trends is that they get to very large numbers very quickly.”

Related: How many satellites can we safely fit in Earth orbit?

1 million maneuvers by 2028 

Data compiled by Lewis shows that, in the first half of 2021, Starlink satellites conducted 2,219 collision-avoidance maneuvers. The number grew to 3,333 in the following six-month period ending in December 2021 and then doubled to 6,873 between December 2021 and June 2022. In the second half of 2022, SpaceX had to alter the paths of its satellites 13,612 times to avoid potential collisions. In the latest report to the FCC, the company declared 25,299 collision-avoidance maneuvers over the past six months, with every satellite having been made to move an average of 12 times. 

“Right now, every six months, the number of maneuvers that are being made doubles,” said Lewis. “It has gone up by a factor of 10 in just two years, and if you project that out, you’ll have 50,000 within the next six-month period, then 100,000 within the next, then 200,000, and so on.”

If the trend continues, by 2028, Starlink satellites will have to maneuver nearly a million times in a half-year to minimize the risk of orbital collisions. And Lewis doesn’t expect such growth to slow down any time soon. SpaceX has so far deployed about one-third of its planned first-generation constellation of 12,000 spacecraft and has been launching at a regular pace of over 800 satellites per year, a trend that is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. 

The first-generation Starlink constellation is, however, just the beginning. The FCC has partially approved plans for the second-generation Starlink constellation, which could consist of up to 30,000 satellites. And other players all over the world, including Amazon with its Project Kuiper and China with Guowang, are scrambling to secure orbital slots with their respective regulators. 

Like swerving on a highway every 10 meters

According to Joanne Wheeler, a satellite regulations expert at Alden Legal and chair of the U.K.-based Satellite Finance Network, more than 1.7 million satellites have been registered with the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations’ agency overseeing the use of radio frequencies by satellites. Although not all of those plans are likely to come to fruition, the numbers in question are so high that experts such as Lewis question whether order in orbit can be maintained. 

“If we’re expecting by the end of this decade to have 100,000 active satellites, then my suspicion is that the number of maneuvers collectively that all spacecraft operators will be making will be just enormous,” Lewis said. “You’re making maneuvers to mitigate the high-risk events, but it’s like driving down the highway and swerving every 10 meters to avoid a collision. It’s arguably not safe.”

Currently there are about 10,500 satellites orbiting our planet, 8,100 of which are operational, according to the European Space Agency. Things only started to get so congested fairly recently. For example in 2019, there were only about 2,300 active satellites circling the planet, according to Statista. The main driver of the growth is Starlink, by far the largest satellite constellation ever assembled.

New satellites are not the only cause behind the increasing need for orbital swerving. The amount of space debris  — defunct spacecraft, old rocket stages and various fragments — also continues to grow, making it increasingly difficult for operators to keep their spacecraft safe. 

SpaceX currently conducts an avoidance maneuver every time orbital models show a probability higher than 1 in 100,000 that one of the Starlink satellites will cross another object’s path. That threshold is 10 times lower than the standard upheld by NASA and other international agencies. 

Lewis, however, questions whether SpaceX will be able to maintain such a high standard as the number of “conjunction alerts” continues to snowball. He adds that, despite the company’s efforts, the residual risk of a collision will continue to rise as well.

Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and another frequently heard voice of caution in the satellite megaconstellations debate, agrees with Lewis: “SpaceX are convinced that they can handle the increasing maneuver load,” McDowell told Space.com in an email. “I am not convinced that SpaceX have properly taken into account the non-statistical errors (the potential for independent and unpredictable screwups combining to give a bad result – a collision) – so I am concerned that we are operating at the edge of what is safe.”

Starlink relies on an autonomous collision avoidance system that instructs satellites to maneuver based on models of orbital trajectories of objects in space. These models provide alerts several days in advance and may not always get it right. Moreover, other factors, such as the changes in the density of Earth’s atmosphere at high altitudes caused by space weather, may affect the accuracy of these calculations.

“There is a concern about the conjunctions that are occurring where no maneuvers are being made,” said Lewis. “You could argue that the probability [of a collision in these cases] is very low, but given the very large number of them, they represent a quite substantial risk. It’s like buying a ticket in a lottery. If you buy just one, you are unlikely to win, but if you buy a million tickets, you stand a pretty good chance.”

Lewis expects that, unless regulators cap the number of satellites in orbit, collisions will soon become a regular part of the space business. Such collisions would lead to rapid growth in the amount of space debris fragments that are completely out of control, which would lead to more and more collisions. The end point of this process might be the Kessler Syndrome, a scenario predicted in the late 1970s by former NASA physicist Donald Kessler. Depicted in the 2013 Oscar-winning movie “Gravity,” the Kessler Syndrome is an unstoppable cascade of collisions that might render parts of the orbital environment completely unusable.