Snippets—of speech, superbatteries, luna landings and metabolic miracles

Today is mostly about exciting ways to make the world a better place, but also a brief update on the BA.2.86 SARS-CoV variant I mentioned the other day.

Let’s get that one over with first. The new variant (unofficially ‘Pirola’) is already widespread and gaining ground. No one knows how severe its effects will be, and won’t for a while, but it’s already obvious that there will be massive immune escape—this is not what the about-to-be-released new Covid vaccine was aimed at. (That jab is still very much worth getting, though, because right now it’s a good match to the current most prevalent strains, both XBB descendants.) So this is going to be one of those ‘take precautions and fall back on your T-cells’ situations. Eric Topol has a good explainer here.

The Economist is pretty excited about a new generation of superbatteries that will transform the electric vehicle landscape. These are solid-state lithium-ion batteries that will be able to store massive amounts of power in a relatively small space. Toyota “claims its new battery will provide an ev with a range of around 1,200km (746 miles), which is about twice that of many existing models, and can be recharged in around ten minutes.”

People in India are pretty excited, too: India just because the first country to land a vehicle close to the moon’s south pole—and just the fourth country to manage a controlled landing on the lunar surface. It was an uncrewed mission (India does not yet have the capability to send people to the moon) but pretty impressive.

Nature published two papers from two different research groups showing that people who lost their original ability to speak due to ALS or brainstem stroke can now communicate via artificial speech produced by brain implants and AI. Right now it’s rather slow—both cases still under 80 words a minute—but still “It is now possible to imagine a future where we can restore fluid conversation to someone with paralysis, enabling them to freely say whatever they want to say with an accuracy high enough to be understood reliably,” said Francis Willett, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California. This really is a big leap forward.

But what’s got me super seriously excited is a study published this morning in the New England Journal of Medicine, Semaglutide in Patients with Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction and Obesity. Doesn’t sound that exciting, does it? But it’s massive, it’s huge, it’s sort of miraculous, frankly. It’s hard to know where to begin in terms of which bit is most amazing.

Okay, first, semaglutide is also known as Wegovy, an FDA-approved drug prescribed usually for weight-loss; it has an excellent safety profile. It is also known as Ozempic, which is approved, per the FDA, to “lower blood sugar levels in adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus, in addition to diet and exercise. Ozempic is also approved to reduce the risk of heart attack, stroke, or death in adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus and known heart disease.” It also has an excellent safety profile—which is no surprise because Wegovy and Ozempic are exactly the same drug that works in exactly the same way. It is a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists—it mimics the GLP-1 hormone that the guts release when we eat. One of the things it does is prompt the body to produce more insulin, which reduces blood glucose (sugar). GLP-1 in higher amounts also interacts with the parts of the brain that reduce appetite and signal a feeling of fullness. Still not that thrilling, right? But, oh but but but! This new, gold-standard—double-blinded placebo-controlled randomised clinical trial of 529 adults over one year—shows that semaglutide reduces the symptoms of the most common and difficult to treat heart failure. And it doesn’t improve it just a bit, but a lot. It also improved mobility significantly and (to no one’s surprise) led to weight loss.

But the most exciting part? Those effects increased with time. Basically, this drug improves metabolic syndrome; it treats metabolic and inflammatory abnormalities. The longer you take it, the better you get—and it’s a very safe drug. (No drug is perfectly safe but this one is comparatively benign.) Heart failure. Type 2 diabetes. Blood pressure. Cholesterol. Mobility. Weight. All improved, with not much down side. That, in an of itself, is worth celebrating. This drug is going to change so many lives—save so many lives. One thing I haven’t mentioned so far, though, might be the most exciting for me: a possible connection to lipid metabolism that might lie at the heart of multiple sclerosis. But that is something for another time.

Have a great weekend. I plan to!