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AI Is Building Highly Effective Antibodies That Humans Can’t Even Imagine - WIRED   

At an old biscuit factory in South London, giant mixers and industrial ovens have been replaced by robotic arms, incubators, and DNA sequencing machines. James Field and his company LabGenius aren't making sweet treats; they're cooking up a revolutionary, AI-powered approach to engineering new medical antibodies.

In nature, antibodies are the body's response to disease and serve as the immune system's front-line troops. They're strands of protein that are specially shaped to stick to foreign invaders so that they can be flushed from the system. Since the 1980s, pharmaceutical companies have been making synthetic antibodies to treat diseases like cancer, and to reduce the chance of transplanted organs being rejected.

But designing these antibodies is a slow process for humans—protein designers must wade through the millions of potential combinations of amino acids to find the ones that will fold together in exactly the right way, and then test them all experimentally, tweaking some variables to improve some characteristics of the treatment while hoping that doesn't make it worse in other ways. "If you want to create a new therapeutic antibody, somewhere in this infinite space of potential molecules sits the molecule you want to find," says Field, the founder and CEO of LabGenius.

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America’s missing doctors - The Economist   

IN 1920 THERE were 5m people in America over the age of 65, around 5% of the total. Today there are 56m, and the proportion has risen to 17%. Similarly dramatic shifts in demographics are happening worldwide: the UN predicts that 25% of people in North America and Europe could be over 65 by 2050. Demand for doctors specialising in geriatric medicine, then, is on the rise—and in many places the supply is rising to match. But not in America. Geriatrics is the least popular specialisation in internal medicine (see chart), and the country is facing a shortage. Why?

Shortages are looming in a range of fields. And around two in five American doctors are expected to reach retirement age in the next decade, which could exacerbate the problem. But the outlook in geriatric medicine is particularly alarming. According to the National Resident Matching Programme, which matches student doctors with hospitals, only 177 of the 411 spaces on fellowship programmes for geriatric medicine were filled in America this year. By contrast some fellowships, such as those in oncology and cardiovascular diseases, were entirely filled.

The American Geriatrics Society expects that 12,320 geriatricians will be needed to care for elderly Americans by 2030, but that only 7,580 will be practising. Part of the problem is that student doctors find working with older patients less rewarding than treating younger ones: old people often have complex, long-term conditions and cannot be restored to full health. Still, in other countries, particularly in Europe, recruitment is far less troublesome. In Finland, for example, the number of geriatricians rose by 70% between 2010 and 2020.

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In America, lots of usable organs go unrecovered or get binned - The Economist   

When the phone rings at LiveOnNY, death turns to opportunity. The organisation fields calls from 100 or so hospitals in and around New York City about every dead or dying person on a ventilator: stroke patients, gunshot victims, car-crash fatalities. Their organs might save sick people’s lives. But most are not registered donors, so staff at LiveOnNY must persuade their families to donate, then rush the organs to transplant centres. Time is precious. A heart can go no more than six hours outside the body. Kidneys last longer, and can fly commercial.

LiveOnNY is one node in a network that gets organs from dead bodies into sick patients. America has more deceased donors, relative to its population, than any other country, but that does not adjust for type of death. Take into account America’s surfeit of drug overdoses, car crashes, suicides and shootings—which tend to be more conducive to donation—and the country probably looks less exceptional. 

Last year more than 36,000 organs from deceased donors were transplanted, though the pool of unrecovered, potentially usable organs is estimated to be at least double that. Tapping that supply would help meet a vast demand: 103,000 people are waiting for an organ. Last year about a tenth died while waiting or were delisted because they were too ill. Ignoring the “gap between the donors that we know are out there and the donors that we’re actually finding”, says Seth Karp, director of Vanderbilt University’s transplant centre, is “kind of unconscionable”. Modest increases could eliminate heart, lung and liver waiting-list deaths, and reduce the wait for a kidney, which averages four years.

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