“At Tampa General Hospital in Florida, a real-time data platform is changing how doctors spot one of medicine’s deadliest conditions. The system, developed with Palantir, pulls together data from across the hospital – vital signs, lab results, clinician notes – and analyzes it continuously to flag early signs of sepsis. Since it was introduced, staff say they are catching sepsis earlier and seeing fewer patients die from it.

The system is estimated to have helped save 886 lives since August 2022. Sepsis is notoriously difficult to catch early. It can begin with small shifts in vital signs that do not immediately stand out – slight increases in heart rate, minor temperature changes, subtle indicators that can easily be lost in the noise of a busy hospital floor. Once it takes hold, though, it can escalate quickly, triggering organ failure and, in many cases, death. Roughly one in five patients diagnosed with sepsis does not survive.

The approach at Tampa General is built around catching early signals before they develop into a crisis. The hospital partnered with Palantir to use its Foundry platform alongside existing clinical systems.

The result is a continuous stream of aggregated data pulled from electronic health records, lab results, clinician notes and bedside monitors. Instead of sitting in separate systems, that data is unified and presented in real time through a centralized dashboard that tracks roughly 1,000 patients at once.

From there, the software looks for patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. When those patterns suggest the early stages of sepsis, alerts are sent to a rapid response team, giving clinicians a chance to act before the condition worsens. At Tampa General, patients flagged with suspected sepsis get antibiotics within an hour.”

From TechSpot.

“We study trends, causes, and consequences of U.S. drinking water pollution, using 266 million readings on 1,250 pollutants over decades that we obtained from 48 states via dozens of Freedom of Information Act and associated requests. We link pollution to administrative Medicare data on older Americans’ health outcomes. Three findings emerge. First, U.S. drinking water pollution has declined rapidly; the share of readings exceeding current health standards fell by half from 2003–2019. Unregulated pollutants declined more slowly. Low-income areas have higher pollution; Black and Hispanic communities have more complex patterns. Second, loans provided by the Safe Drinking Water Act to water systems reduce pollution. At the estimated average loan cost-effectiveness, these loans could eliminate pollution above health standards for $46 annually per person. Third, these loans reduce mortality rates of older Americans.”

From Joseph S. Shapiro.

“Often described as ‘Goldilocks drugs,’ macrocyclic peptides are smaller than biologics like antibodies but larger than small molecules. With their just-right size, macrocyclic peptides can travel into spaces too small for biologics to reach and, thanks to their structural rings of amino acids, can target protein-protein interactions that evade small molecules.

Researchers at the biopharmaceutical company Merck have taken advantage of macrocyclic peptides’ unique properties to develop enlicitide decanoate (enlicitide), an oral macrocyclic peptide drug that lowers ‘bad’ cholesterol by inhibiting proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9)…

The only problem is that enlicitide is a very complicated drug to make. ‘This is a monster of a molecule,’ said Alison Narayan, a chemist focused on biocatalysis at the University of Michigan.

Recently, researchers at Merck developed a vastly more efficient and sustainable way of synthesizing enlicitide using engineered enzymes to catalyze different reaction steps, a process called biocatalysis. The new method reduced the number of synthesis steps by more than half and led to a 39 percent yield of the molecule on a multi-kilogram-scale. The team published their findings in Science.

From The Scientist.

“Test time has arrived: the first person has been treated in a highly anticipated gene-therapy trial that aims to coax aged cells to take on a younger identity.

The clinical trial is testing an innovative technique that involves turning on three genes that can ‘partially reprogram’ old cells, allowing them to behave as if they were young again. Some scientists argue that partial reprogramming could rejuvenate old organs. But this trial will test the activation of these three genes as an approach for treating disease — in this case, a form of glaucoma, a condition that can cause blindness.

The hope is that the proteins encoded by the genes will enable regeneration of neurons in the optic nerve, which connects the eye to the brain and is damaged in people with glaucoma. These neurons are not normally capable of regeneration. The company sponsoring the trial, Life Biosciences in Boston, Massachusetts, announced today that it had treated its first participant.”

From Nature.