DH24004 Cancer Treatments V01 040624

 At last the techniques of treating cancer by the cut (surgery), poison (chemotherapy) and burn (radiotherapy) medical interventions is being superseded by a new digital approach based upon getting the patients immune system to kill the mutant cancer cells. By analysing a biopsy of the mutant cancer cells for each patient an inactive copy can be made which triggers the patient’s own immune system to attack and kill it along with the real cancer cells. Its applying the principles of immunisation to defeating cancer using a vaccination technique. The essence is being able to digitally model the chemical components (Periodic Table), DNA/RNA digital structure and physical appearance, think electron microscope spatial photographs. In considering living cells the actual spatial structure of these cells is becoming a more significant aspect in their analysis with the depth of interrogation now down to atomic levels and below. What ChatGPT has to say on the spatial subject below :-

In biology, spatial appearance refers to the physical organization and distribution of structures within an organism.This can encompass various scales, from cellular and tissue organization to the layout of entire biological systems. Here are some key aspects:-

 

Cellular and Subcellular Level

1. Cell Morphology. The shape and structure of cells, which can vary widely among different cell types (e.g., spherical, elongated, or irregular). This morphology is crucial for the cell’s function.

2.Organelle Distribution: The arrangement of organelles within a cell, which affects cellular processes. For example, the positioning of mitochondria near areas of high ATP demand.

3.Cytoskeleton A network of protein filaments that gives the cell its shape and helps organize cellular components.

Tissue and Organ Level

1. Histology: The study of the microscopic structure of tissues. Different tissues have distinct spatial organizations, such as the layers in the skin or the branching pattern of blood vessels.

2. Organ Structure: The arrangement of different tissues to form organs, each with a unique spatial configuration that supports its specific function (e.g., the alveoli in lungs for gas exchange).

 

Organism Level

1.Body Plan: The overall layout of an organism's body structure. This includes symmetry (e.g., bilateral or radial), segmentation, and the relative positioning of body parts.
2. Developmental Biology: The study of how spatial patterns emerge during development, such as the formation of the vertebrate limb or the patterning of flower petals.

Importance of Spatial Appearance 

Understanding spatial appearance in biology is crucial for many reasons:

Functionality: The spatial arrangement of biological structures is often closely tied to their function.

 Health and Disease: Abnormal spatial arrangements can indicate disease, such as the disorganized growth of cancer cells.

Ecological Interactions: The spatial distribution of organisms affects ecological interactions like predation, competition, and symbiosis.

Conservation Effective conservation strategies often depend on understanding the spatial needs and distributions of species and ecosystems.

 So what triggered this post today is an event recorded in The Times that took place at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, United Kingdom very near to where I live.

 

Copyright Acknowledged as The Times, Newspaper.

 

Cancer vaccine is “Landmark moment’ for NHS”

Eleanor Hayward - Health Editor, Chicago

 

The NHS has begun vaccinating patients against their own cancer, in a “landmark moment” that ushers in a new era of treatment.

 

Thousands of people will have access to personalised cancer vaccines over the next year as part of an NHS scheme launched to fast-track patients on to clinical trials. Elliot Pfebve, a 55-yearold father of four with bowel cancer, was the first patient to receive a cancer vaccine on the NHS, at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham.

The new therapies involve “cutting and pasting” mutations from a patient’s tumour to create a custom-made vaccine, designed to trigger the immune system to kill any cancer cells and prevent the disease returning after surgery.

NHS leaders hope this developing class of medicine will soon be part of routine care, providing a new weapon against many types of cancer including bowel, lung and pancreatic.

 The health service announced its plan for a national launch of the vaccines on the eve of the world’s largest cancer conference, held in Chicago by the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Details of several groundbreaking trials involving vaccines for skin, bowel and lung cancer will be announced at the conference, which begins today.

Early results show that the vaccines significantly boost patients’ survival rates. None have yet been approved by medical regulators because the technology is so new, but the NHS has decided to make them available “as widely as possible” through clinical trials.

A new Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad programme will “match-make” eligible patients with suitable trials. The first trial is for a bowel cancer vaccine, codeveloped by the pharmaceutical companies BioNTech and Genentech. Dozens of bowel cancer patients have been enlisted, with 30 hospitals in England signed up to the vaccine scheme.

 

Amanda Pritchard, the chief executive of NHS England, said: “Seeing Elliot receive his first treatment as part of the Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad is a landmark moment for patients and the health service as we seek to develop better and more effective ways to stop this disease.

 

“Thanks to advances in care and treatment, cancer survival is at an all-time high in this country, but these vaccine trials could one day offer us a way of vaccinating people against their own cancer to help save more lives.”

 

Cancer patients who want the chance to benefit will be referred to their nearest participating NHS hospital, where their eligibility will be checked with a blood test and sample of their cancer tissue.

While other vaccines protect against disease, personalised cancer vaccines are for people who already have cancer, representing a new type of immunotherapy treatment. Each patient has their own vaccine manufactured within weeks, using mRNA genetic code found in their tumours. It is delivered in several doses via an infusion into the arm. This instructs the body to create proteins identical to those found on the surface of tumours, triggering an immune response.

 

The treatment puts the immune system on high alert to detect and destroy any “rogue” cancer cells that remain in the bloodstream after surgery. It is based on the same mRNA technology first used in the Pfizer- BioNTech Covid jab, which was developed in 2020.

 

Professor Peter Johnson, the NHS national clinical director for cancer, said he hoped that vaccines would soon be part of routine care for several common cancers. He said the BioNTech bowel cancer vaccine was leading the way, and the NHS was hoping to enrol patients in trials for other types of cancer such as breast, lung and bladder over the next few months.

DH24003 Spring 2024 COVID-19 Vaccination for the Over 75. V01 290424

Up pops on my iPhone the NHS Seasonal Vaccination Invitation for a Spring 2024 COVID-19 Vaccination for over 75 year olds. So down to the Local Health Centre on Thursday 25^th April for a quickly administered jab in the arm. Its my 7^th COVID-19 jab since my first in February 2021.

All mine have been using the latest mRNA technology and fortunately I have had no adverse side effects. This is obviously not true for everybody with a few cases within my family members refusing to have any more due to the adverse effects of having previous COVID-19 jabs. In my case I am sure if I had a very bad experience after a jab I would choose not to put myself through it again. Why self-inflict this on yourself? Or could it be just a case of if you did catch COVID-19 then the way your body is reacting to the jab may indicate if you did catch it you could be at high risk of it killing you. Or is it just your body badly reacting to the injected man-made chemical concoction emulating the same physical appearance attributes of COVID-19?. Unlike COVID-19 this chemical concoction is dead and not a living entity. It is just there to help your immune system to learn how to spot it. The immune system remembers how it looks and so when a real COVID-19 virus turns up it more quickly kills it. The immune system maintains a huge memory list of things it needs to attack. Unfortunately sometimes this immune system memory gets mistaken and attacks parts of your own body thinking they are the attackers. This causes the auto-immune diseases where you body sets out destroying itself.

This is why immunisation remains a still undefinable and so indeterminate medical treatment. You cannot accurately predict for each person how the body will react to a newly introduced chemical concoction. The outcomes can only really be defined in a statistical manner and if you are unfortunate enough to become one of the statistical failures there is nothing you can do about it. In my way of thinking the fact that this injected concoction now is structured very near to the fundamental mRNA that is our fundamental biological recipe for building real biological cells makes it as near to the right tool to do the job of protecting me from the living virus.

One mistake made by the public is to think that immunisation is a modern medical approach. In fact in 1721 a deadly smallpox epidemic broke out in London and in Boston, Massachusetts, America. There was a debate at the time about the technique of inoculation that started in Turkey where the pus from festering victims was forced into the tissues of healthy people. It was proved that it protected these healthy people from the disease. Inevitably, not unlike these days, there were believers and non-believers in this approach. In fact as an approach it emulates exactly how the body builds up immunity from birth where both viruses and bacteria entering the body are dealt with by the immune system developing to kill them. In fact encouraging the mixing of children with symptoms with those without was considered by many an effective way of building up this immune system protection. But inoculation is different to immunisation.

So let us use some AI to describe the difference between inoculation and immunisation.

So ChatGPT says:-

Inoculation and immunisation are related but slightly different terms. Inoculation typically refers to the introduction of a small amount of a pathogen into the body to trigger an immune response, often used historically before vaccines were developed. Immunisation, on the other hand, involves the administration of a vaccine to stimulate the immune system to develop immunity against specific diseases. So, while both aim to protect against disease, inoculation is an older term often associated with deliberate exposure, while immunisation involves the use of vaccines.

DH24002 Baillie Gifford Article November 2021 V01 080124

 

Article published by Baillie Gifford in November 2021.

Written by Rose Nguyen and Julia Angeles.

Disclaimer at the end of the article.

 

Businesses Exploiting the beginnings of the Digital Human Concept

Businesses : - Verve, Denali and Grail

What do Grail, Verve and Denali have in common? The ability to turn biology into information science and put it to revolutionary use transforming our health and wellbeing.

Throughout modern human history, there have been periods of great technological innovations that have radically disrupted and changed the ways in which societies and economies work. From the steam engine to electricity to computing, these incredible inventions which were the hallmarks of the previous industrial revolutions have completely transformed our lives over the past two centuries. We believe that another revolution is underway – this time in relation to biology. If the previous industrial revolutions were about inventing new things to make our lives better, then the biological revolution is about pushing our understanding of biology and unpacking millions of years of evolution, the insights from which will transform healthcare and redefine our health and wellbeing. 

The facts of life

For millennia, much of biology has remained a black box. The complexity, sophistication, and intricacy of the human body has prevented us from making significant inroads into reducing the number of deaths from cancers, heart diseases, Alzheimer’s and so on. Cardiovascular disease remains the number one killer globally, claiming approximately 18 million lives per year. One in two people in the UK will develop cancer over their lifetime. And if we are lucky enough to live beyond 80 years, one in six of us in the UK will develop dementia.

These are grim statistics, but our hope is that the figures will dramatically reduce as the biological revolution unfolds, and we will return to specific examples of companies radically improving the outcomes in these areas later in the paper. Before exploring where a biological revolution could lead, it is helpful first to understand where it has come from.

The study of life

The biological revolution has been in the making for a long time. Biology in Greek means “the study of life”, and this subject has always been at the centre of human interests. However, there have been many false premises and setbacks along the way.

An example is Pythagoras’ theory of ‘spermism’. His hypothesis was that babies were created purely from male sperms, which circulated around the male body to gather instructions about making different body parts. From there the sperms were nurtured and matured in the woman’s womb. The problem with this theory, as Aristotle identified two centuries later, was that the sperms couldn’t possibly produce female babies simply because men don’t have female parts. Looking back, such theories might sound absurd, but it is hard to blame the thinkers when they lacked the proper tools and technologies we now have to study life.

Things began to change with the invention of the microscope. For the first time, we were able to see the components of life and other microorganisms which we didn’t know existed. This led to a burst of new knowledge, the ‘Cambrian explosion’ moment of biology.  As the technologies have improved over time, it is now possible to observe the cellular machinery, how different proteins interact with each other, leading to a much better understanding of biology and how to manipulate it.

The code of life

One of the most important technologies in life sciences, the one that propelled our knowledge of biology to a new height, is gene sequencing. Gene sequencing allows us to read the code of life. It’s fascinating that despite the complexity of biology, the code of life is written with just 4 DNA letters – A, T, C and G. Hidden behind what seems to be the chaos and unpredictable emergent properties of biology is in fact a rather orderly information system. There is great potential to turn the anarchy of biology into an information science. By using experimental observations, machine learning, gene editing and other advanced techniques, we can start mapping out the genetic circuits within a cell and understand how different genes relate to each other at the tissue level, organ level, and eventually for the whole organism.

Over the past 20 years, the cost of sequencing a whole human genome has declined dramatically from over $100m to under $1000 today. If Illumina has led the charge in bringing down the costs of sequencing, then younger companies, such as 10X Genomics, have been striving to increase the resolution of sequencing. Now we can sequence at the individual cell level, and compare the genomes of healthy cells versus diseased cells to figure out what genes are responsible for the disease. Using single cell sequencing, we can also start to build a map of cell-to-cell interaction. Imagine for a moment, if we were to master human biology and learn to configure it like we would a computer. If a part goes awry, we know exactly what’s wrong and how to fix it. Developing a drug to treat a disease could be as simple as writing a new software to fix a computer virus.

The bright side of life

Whereas we normally associate revolutions with a big and transformative change, sometimes they are generated by the accumulation of gradual changes, imperceptible at the time. We believe that the life science industry is building momentum for a transformational change in the same spirit, with the biological revolution having been quietly gathering pace over the past decades.

During 2020, we witnessed this radical shift first-hand. The reason we could develop the vaccine against Covid-19 so rapidly was due to the accumulation of lots of tiny changes that have taken place across many different industries over the past few decades. These include material science, chemistry, biology, genomics and data science. On its own, each improvement would have been insufficient to move the dial, but in combination, it allowed companies to create effective vaccines at an unprecedented speed. Let’s explore a few other examples where we see the potential for transformational change in healthcare.

Specific Examples by Business

 

Cardiovascular (Verve Therapeutics)

Cardiovascular diseases are diseases of the heart and blood vessels, with lifestyle being a major risk factor.  What if we could mitigate the risks of suffering from heart diseases regardless of lifestyle? Or better still prevent heart diseases altogether?

Verve Therapeutics hopes to find out. It is developing a single-course gene-editing medicine to lower the risk of cardiovascular diseases. The company’s technology is based on advances in several areas.

First, large population genomic studies have revealed new insight that there are certain genetic variants that confer natural protection against cardiovascular diseases for some people. By manipulating the genes we’ve discovered that can lower or raise cholesterol, it is possible to provide a natural protection for those who are less fortunate. 

Second, ground-breaking gene editing tools, so-called base editing technology, enable us to manipulate genes precisely and efficiently.

And finally, biotech companies have made a lot of progress on how we deliver gene editing tools and other medicines to cells. Packaged within a lipid nanoparticle, mRNA (as used in some Covid-19 vaccines) codes the production of a gene editing tool: human cells have literally become the manufacturers of the gene-editing tool that then goes and modifies the targeted cells within their own body.

In isolation, each of these advances might not solve the enormous problem of cardiovascular diseases. However, when combined, they offer a step change in the way we can prevent and treat these diseases. 

Alzheimer’s (Denali Therapeutics)

Advances in many different sciences have enabled Denali Therapeutics to develop new approaches to the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. One of the longstanding challenges in addressing neurodegenerative diseases has been our inability to find a way to deliver large molecular drugs through the blood brain barrier (BBB). While the BBB helpfully stops harmful substances getting into the brain, it also unhelpfully prevents many drugs getting into the brain and therefore limits our abilities to treat and prevent Alzheimer’s and other conditions. 

Denali is making great progress in addressing this challenge and the company has already demonstrated its ability to get complex molecules into the brain. In addition to unlocking access to the brain, Denali is also leveraging on advances in genetics, pathology and cell biology to identify pathways that trigger neurodegeneration. This brings us closer to establishing what the underlying causes of diseases are and therefore increasing the chances of developing effective drugs. 

Cancer (Illumina/Grail)

Unfortunately, despite many decades of cancer research, the disease remains the second largest killer in the world. If we were able to diagnose cancer at an early stage, it could substantially improve the outcomes for patients and provide an opportunity to turn cancer into a chronic disease, rather than a killer. 

Grail is one of the leaders in the early diagnosis of cancer. The company provides a test, based on a single blood draw, that can diagnose dozens of cancers in their early stages. This test can be performed in the doctor’s office, possibly annually as part of the general health check-up for seniors. 

 

Grail’s achievement so far is already nothing short of transformational. What many have failed to appreciate is how powerful different technologies can be when they are brought together, leading to even more radical change than the sum of parts. In Grail’s case it has combined breakthroughs in genome sequencing and AI to great effect.

A new phase of life

While we have only highlighted a few disease areas, it is important to note that the biological revolution is impacting the entire spectrum of health. As investors in transformational health companies, we are excited about identifying and supporting innovative companies through the biological revolution.

Risk Factors and Important Information

The views expressed in this communication are those of Rose Nguyen and Julia Angeles and should not be considered as advice or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold a particular investment. They reflect personal opinion and should not be taken as statements of fact nor should any reliance be placed on them when making investment decisions.

This communication was produced and approved in November 2021 and has not been updated subsequently. It represents views held at the time of writing and may not reflect current thinking.

DH24001 Organ on a Chip V01 060124

Medical researchers are now making use of the “Organ on a Chip” technology to test out the impact of drugs on the cell structures relating to the workings of specific human organs. By isolating these localised organ cell structures and keeping them alive they allow for the testing of drugs against these specific cell structures particularly useful if they are from a human suffering an identified health problem. They can also with a healthy set of cells ensure that the drug under test does not introduce any new problems.

With me fully accepting that we as living humans are only a continuous chemical process whilst we are alive and just a handful of inert non-living chemicals when we are dead. See the Chemical Formula for a Human Being below and always remember you are only a complex chemical. It is that simple.

The Chemical Formulae for a Human Being 

Keeping a specific minor chemical process in our body alive on a chip is totally logical. But there has to be some rules governing how these chemical processes work and so we have small sets of chemical code inside us which are interpreted into the next chemical step that has to take place. It looks like DNA is the overall master plan but this has to copied into mRNA instructions with them telling the chemicals what to do step by step.

If we consider a biological cell as being a coded entity then the interaction of this code base with other cells will generate changed digital patterns. These coded patterns will be physically identifiable in the mRNA by their chemical structure at molecular and atomic levels.

It then seems totally possible that we can observe these human bodily processes in a digital way. Since DNA and it appears the majority of mRNA can be defined in a digital “on- off” two status binary code. But I suspect in areas like the brain aspects like consciousness or possibly the hormonal control areas of the body then binary coding will not be powerful enough to define these process areas. This is where quantum physics may be required with the more powerful qubit as the information definer to reflect the complexity of the processes.

So with the living cell processes interpreted into digital (bit) or quantum (qubit) patterns these can be Artificial Intelligence (AI) analysed to see how patterns correctly evolve or incorrectly evolve causing a health issue. This does reinforce the need for a Bio General Intelligence (BGI) being something defining the living matter whilst Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which will only cover non-living matter. (Read DH23005 posted 30/12/23).

 The ultimate objective would be to link all the individual processes together to create the complete “Digital Human” with it more likely to be a “Digital and Quantum Human.”

Included are some relevant links.

To Wikipedia on “Organ-on-Chip”

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ-on-a-chip

 To Wikipedia on “Qubits”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit

 To a Sales Brochure from a Company called Emulate that provides Organ on a Chip Technology.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jxE7xUqeWyfKIVwmbQHU7TKdEIyVLbWS/view?usp=sharing