In the fields of medicine and pharmacology, drugs have historically been discovered either by identifying active ingredients from traditional remedies, or by serendipity, similar to how penicillin was discovered in 1928. But modern scientists have found an alternative method that makes the hunt for new pharmaceuticals quicker, cheaper and more effective. AI, or artificial intelligence, can be found in everything from chess-playing computers, to self-driving cars, to the maps application on your phone when it's calculating directions. And AI has found a new home: discovering new drugs. It currently takes on average 10 years and over $2 billion to create a new drug and get it approved.

So lately I've been commenting on a terrific book written by Professor John Lennox. It's called 2084; It's all about the development of Artificial Intelligence. Today, I wanted to discuss some of these incredible advances but more specifically how they will benefit the medical industry. I didn't realize just how far we had come in the past few years with Artificial Intelligence. In his book 2084, Lennox reports that at the University of Toronto, engineers have harnessed the powers of machine learning in generating X-rays which augment training sets.

Part of the FDA's action plan includes support for the development of machine learning best practices to evaluate and improve ML algorithms for topics such as data management, interpretability and documentation, as well as advancing real-world performance monitoring pilots. The FDA also noted that the action plan would continue to evolve to stay current with developments in the field of AI/ML-based software as a medical device (SaMD). As the agency pointed out in an April 2019 discussion paper, the potential power of AI/ML-based SaMD lies within its ability to continuously learn, where the adaptation or change to the algorithm is realized after the SaMD is distributed for use and has learned from real-world experience. READ MORE: AI can increase efficiency in healthcare, even in a pandemic. In turn, the autonomous and adaptive nature of these tools requires a new, total product lifecycle regulatory approach that supports a rapid cycle of product improvement, allowing SaMD to continually improve.

"Digital transformation since the pandemic has been massive. Telehealth has gone from being a novelty to a necessity. Having said that, we need to be reliant on healthcare institutions to get cured and we need technology to make it better," said Mitali Dutta, head of data science and predictive analysis, group IT information and data management, Philips Innovation Campus, at her session at The Rising 2021 by Analytics India Magazine. She pointed at a rise in chronic diseases and healthcare costs, a scarcity of healthcare professionals in India. According to Dutta, the healthcare industry has to focus on the following four aspects, which she called Quadruple AIM of India's healthcare system: To achieve all the above, India needs artificial intelligence.

A check up by Khosla Ventures determined that Docbot Inc. was healthy enough for the prominent biotech investor to take the lead in a $4 million series A round. The new funds bring the artificial intelligence company to a total of $8.5 million in capital raised to date. Other participants included Bold Capital Partners, Collaborative Fund and Boutique Venture Partners. Docbot's platform, Ultivision AI, uses artificial intelligence to enhance detection of gastrointestinal (GI) disease. The Irvine, Calif.-based company is targeting identification and classification of polyps, Barrett's esophagus, and ulcerative colitis to start.

The news last week that the compound 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), popularly called ecstasy, alleviated post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in a phase 3 trial was a milestone in efforts to turn psychedelic drugs into mainstream treatments. It also highlighted a therapeutic marriage that is getting increasing attention: providing a mind-altering drug while a patient receives care from a trained therapist. “This is really kind of a new zeitgeist in psychiatry,” says Barbara Rothbaum, a clinical psychologist at Emory University. Researchers funded by the nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) reported in Nature Medicine that after “MDMA-assisted therapy,” two-thirds of treated participants no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD. MAPS hopes to confirm the results in an ongoing second study and seek approval for the therapy from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as early as 2023. In 2017, the agency granted MDMA a “breakthrough” designation, which comes with extra guidance during the trial process and an expedited review. The idea that psychedelic drugs and talk therapy work in synergy raises complex questions about how to optimize—and regulate—the drug experience. “It's not understood what the role of MDMA or [another] psychedelic is in facilitating the psychotherapy, and what's happening neurobiologically,” says Atheir Abbas, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at Oregon Health & Science University. Because taking psychedelics without guidance can lead to negative experiences, “a guided, more psychotherapy-oriented approach is probably warranted,” he says. “But it's not clear what aspects of that guidance are critical.” As MDMA and other tightly controlled psychedelic compounds inch closer to regulatory approval, careful supervision from therapists may help overcome their reputation as illicit substances and fears of indiscriminate use. “MAPS has done very well to really emphasize that they're not just trying to promote a compound,” says Rachel Yehuda, who directs the Center for Psychedelic Psychotherapy and Trauma Research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. MAPS researchers have worked for more than 3 decades to turn MDMA into a prescription medicine. The substance doesn't produce the vivid hallucinations associated with either LSD or psilocybin, found in magic mushrooms. But it increases the brain's levels of certain neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine, to create a sense of well-being and heightened empathy. That might allow trauma survivors who face intrusive flashbacks to reflect on disturbing memories with less fear and judgement. “It gives you this fascinating ability toward self-compassion,” says Jennifer Mitchell, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, and an investigator in the MAPS trial. The psychotherapy the trial used looks different from the most thoroughly studied PTSD psychotherapies. Many of these direct a patient to confront painful memories. In one such approach, called prolonged exposure therapy, “we have them go back in their mind's eye to the time of the traumatic event and recount it out loud, in the present tense, over and over,” Rothbaum says. “It's a good therapy, but it's also a hard therapy.” In the MAPS approach, therapists are advised not to steer the conversation toward trauma, but to create a safe space to “support the participant's own unfolding experience,” according to MAPS's manual. The manual also describes carefully curated surroundings for patients, advising “fresh flowers and artwork.” Rothbaum, who studies and practices prolonged exposure therapy, describes MAPS sessions as “the sweetest therapy in the world for PTSD.” In the trial, 79 participants underwent three 90-minute preparatory therapy sessions; three 8-hour “experimental sessions” with either MDMA or a placebo, spaced about 1 month apart; and nine 90-minute “integration sessions” to process their experiences. Of 42 people who got MDMA, 67% no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD 2 months after their last experimental session. For the placebo group, that rate was 32%. Improvements in the placebo recipients were comparable to those observed in studies of existing approaches such as exposure therapy, says MAPS's chief scientific officer, Berra Yazar-Klosinski. Yehuda, who has long worried that prolonged exposure therapy can retraumatize some patients and discourage them from continuing treatment, says the research offers a new direction. But MDMA-assisted therapy needs to go head to head in clinical trials with established psychotherapies and the antidepressant drugs already approved for PTSD, says Arash Javanbakht, who directs the Stress, Trauma, and Anxiety Research Clinic at Wayne State University. Others want to test MDMA alongside more mainstream talk therapies. Rothbaum's team hopes to launch a pilot study this year that combines the drug with prolonged exposure therapy. Psychologist Anne Wagner of the mental health clinic Remedy is preparing to launch a pilot study that brings an approach called cognitive processing therapy into the preand post-MDMA sessions. Adding this more structured psychotherapy might improve results for some patients, she says. Should MDMA win FDA approval, the MAPS psychotherapy approach is likely to dominate at least at first. FDA doesn't regulate psychotherapy, but Yazar-Klosinski says FDA has indicated any approval would stipulate that the drug be used alongside therapy from trained providers. (FDA declined to comment on how it might address supportive therapy in an approval.) A subsidiary of MAPS would manufacture the drug and hopes to receive a 5-year exclusivity period on marketing the drug for PTSD. It would sell MDMA only to providers who undergo MAPS's 100-hour training program. Uncertainty about the right talk therapy pairings extends to research on other psychedelic drugs. Albert Garcia-Romeu, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is testing psilocybin-assisted addiction treatment. For a recent study of cigarette smokers, the team made “kind of our best guess” to pair the drug with cognitive behavioral therapy, a common addiction talk therapy, he says. Potential FDA decisions on psilocybin and MDMA are still years off. But in November 2020, Oregon became the first state to legalize psilocybin for therapeutic use. It has appointed an advisory board to help make a plan for regulating the compound by December 2022. Oregon's measure describes a system of state-licensed providers and “a multisession, facilitator-guided, psychotherapy-type experience,” says Abbas, who sits on the advisory board but was speaking only for himself. What type of psychotherapy experience should that be? And what qualifies a facilitator? “That's something the board is likely to have to tackle.”

Dermatology Assist has not yet been given clearance by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use in the US, but a similar machine-learning model built by British firm Optellum was recently approved by the FDA for use as an assistant in the diagnosis of lung cancer.

We investigate molecular mechanisms of resistant or sensitive response of cancer drug combination therapies in an inductive and interpretable manner. Though deep learning algorithms are widely used in the drug synergy prediction problem, it is still an open problem to formulate the prediction model with biological meaning to investigate the mysterious mechanisms of synergy (MoS) for the human-AI collaboration in healthcare systems. To address the challenges, we propose a deep graph neural network, IDSP (Interpretable Deep Signaling Pathways), to incorporate the gene-gene as well as gene-drug regulatory relationships in synergic drug combination predictions. IDSP automatically learns weights of edges based on the gene and drug node relations, i.e., signaling interactions, by a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and aggregates information in an inductive manner. The proposed architecture generates interpretable drug synergy prediction by detecting important signaling interactions, and can be implemented when the underlying molecular mechanism encounters unseen genes or signaling pathways. We test IDWSP on signaling networks formulated by genes from 46 core cancer signaling pathways and drug combinations from NCI ALMANAC drug combination screening data. The experimental results demonstrated that 1) IDSP can learn from the underlying molecular mechanism to make prediction without additional drug chemical information while achieving highly comparable performance with current state-of-art methods; 2) IDSP show superior generality and flexibility to implement the synergy prediction task on both transductive tasks and inductive tasks. 3) IDSP can generate interpretable results by detecting different salient signaling patterns (i.e. MoS) for different cell lines.

SCI COMMUN ### Conservation President Joe Biden's administration moved last week to overturn a regulation adopted by his predecessor that eliminated sanctions against companies whose operations accidentally kill migratory birds. Trump administration officials had said the fines should be reserved for intentional deaths—an interpretation that broke with long-standing policy and would have prevented, for example, any penalties against the companies responsible for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that killed as many as 1 million birds. Wildlife biologists have said the original, broader enforcement was essential to curtail steep declines in populations of 1100 bird species covered by the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Biden's administration would replace Trump's regulation with a new one, which could take months to finalize. Conservation advocates have long proposed a permitting program that would protect companies from legal action for accidental deaths if they adopt practices and technology shown to prevent most bird deaths. ### Energy ![Figure][1] CREDITS: (GRAPHIC) N. CARY/ SCIENCE ; (DATA) GLOBAL ENERGY REVIEW 2021 , IEA Electricity production from renewable sources, led by solar photovoltaics and wind, continued years of steady growth globally during the COVID-19 pandemic, a report says. The production grew 7% in 2020, even as overall demand for electricity dropped and generation from fossil fuels declined. This year, as social restrictions ease and demand climbs, renewable electricity is expected to increase by 8%, the International Energy Agency said last month in its Global Energy Review 2021 . Overall, production from renewables, especially in China, is forecast to provide half the total increase in electricity this year. But power from fossil fuels will grow as well, and analysts say the switch away from coal and other carbon-emitting energy sources is not happening fast enough to reduce the effects of global warming. ### COVID-19 In a move that promises to increase the meager supply of COVID-19 vaccines in poorer countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) last week gave a Chinese-made product the green light. Sinopharm, which makes its vaccine by chemically inactivating the pandemic coronavirus, received an Emergency Use Listing (EUL), a designation WHO gives after reviewing efficacy, safety, and manufacturing practices. It allows the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) Facility, a global consortium promoting equity in vaccine distribution, to purchase and distribute Sinopharm's vaccine. COVAX and Sinopharm are still negotiating a price, and the company says it can increase production. More than 65 million doses have already been administered in 45 countries that have authorized its use. COVAX has struggled to buy affordable vaccines that have EULs—most are too expensive, or supplies were prepurchased by other countries. To date, COVAX has shipped fewer than 60 million doses. ### Vaccines After a protracted internal debate, the Biden administration last week said it supports a proposed international agreement to waive patents on the intellectual property used to make COVID-19 vaccines. The move was hailed by advocates of increased vaccine access and fairness in their distribution, who contend that it will attract new companies to help alleviate a global shortage and reduce costs. But many health officials and vaccinemakers caution that it will not increase supply for many months and that newcomers who want to produce the vaccines face bottlenecks including a lack of technical know-how and widespread shortage of raw materials. ### Public health U.S. regulators on 10 May authorized Pfizer and BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine for use in children ages 12 to 15, expanding availability beyond older teens and adults. The go-ahead is the first in the United States for this age group and a key step in restarting in-person schooling, team sports, and other group activities. The decision by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was expected after the companies announced in March results from a trial of 2260 adolescents in that age group; 18 who received a placebo developed COVID-19 versus none who received the vaccine. Pfizer has said it expects to obtain safety and efficacy data from clinical trials studying children ages 2 to 11 by September, when it plans to ask FDA to permit use in that age group. A small fraction of all Americans who have died from COVID-19 were under age 18, and children who contract COVID-19 tend to have milder symptoms, but some face long-term health problems. However, many U.S. parents remain hesitant to vaccinate their children because of misinformation and because FDA has only authorized COVID-19 vaccines for emergency use, not given them full approval. ### Virology The World Health Organization (WHO) on 10 May designated as a variant of concern a version of the pandemic coronavirus first identified in India in February. Evidence suggests the variant, B.1.617, now found in about 40 countries, is more transmissible than original strains of SARS-CoV-2, WHO said. It is the fourth variant to receive this WHO designation, following ones first found in Brazil, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. ### Governance To be better prepared for the next pandemic, the world needs a Global Health Threats Council akin to the United Nations Security Council, which would bring together country leaders from different regions along with representatives of the private sector and civil society, according to the first comprehensive review of the global response to COVID-19, released on 12 May. The 13-member Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, which was commissioned by the World Health Organization, also proposes creating an International Pandemic Financing Facility with annual funding of $5 billion to $10 billion and giving WHO a bigger budget, more independence, and new powers to investigate outbreaks anywhere in the world, among many other recommendations. The panel was led by two former heads of state, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia and Helen Clark of New Zealand, and included public health specialists, diplomats, and economists. “Pandemics pose potential existential threats to humanity and must be elevated to the highest level,” says the report, COVID-19: Make it the Last Pandemic . ### Public attitudes U.S. adults voice varying support for rules by governments and businesses that could require people to prove they received a COVID-19 vaccine before certain in-person activities, such as attending crowded events or entering their office, a Gallup poll reported last week. Most of the 3731 respondents surveyed in April favored proof to travel by airplane (57%) and attend large events such as concerts (55%). But support dipped below a majority for requiring proof to enter one's workplace (45%) or dine indoors at a restaurant (40%). Responses differed by political party affiliation and willingness to be vaccinated. ### Leadership Nancy Messonnier, a top official at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who drew the ire of former President Donald Trump in February 2020 for her unvarnished public warning about the impending coronavirus pandemic, will leave the agency on 14 May, she told colleagues last week in an email. Two weeks before the email, she had been reassigned from heading CDC's COVID-19 task force, Politico reported. She will join the Skoll Foundation as executive director for pandemics and health systems. At CDC since 1995, Messonnier led the launch of a low-cost meningitis vaccine in Africa and rose to head the agency's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. After she warned at a press conference 15 months ago that the pandemic might severely sicken many Americans, stock markets plunged, and she did not appear at any subsequent White House briefings. ### Seismology One of the largest seismic research projects in history, used to study structures in Earth's crust and mantle as deep as 3000 kilometers, is ending its run. Begun in 2004 and funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the several hundred seismic stations of the Transportable Array collected earthquake data as a way of peering deep inside Earth. The stations were deployed at first in the western states and then were moved east across the country every few years. In 2017, the project's final phase began when the network was transported to Alaska. Pandemic-related delays prompted an extra year of operation, but in early May, more than 80 stations went dark, awaiting collection this summer. Another 100 will remain in Alaska, many of them in remote, previously unmonitored regions, filling gaps in the state's seismic coverage. ### Drug development A psychedelic drug has passed a major milestone by showing evidence of benefit as a supplement to talk therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), researchers report this week. The results came from the first phase 3 clinical trial combining psychotherapy with the drug 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), popularly called ecstasy, for people with severe, chronic PTSD. The study, sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), recruited 90 people to receive talk therapy during 15 sessions, including three “experimental” ones in which they received either MDMA or a placebo. The MDMA group saw significantly greater improvements on a PTSD symptom scale, the researchers said in Nature Medicine . Two months after the final experimental session, 67% of those who got MDMA no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, versus 32% of those who got a placebo. MAPS aims to confirm those benefits in a 100-person trial now enrolling volunteers and, in 2023, to seek approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for MDMA-assisted therapy. ### Conservation Researchers are pressing Chile's government to increase protections for whales along its coast against deadly ship collisions. After three whales were found dead during just 8 days in April, 65 Chilean marine mammal specialists issued a public plea for the government to act. They called for rerouting ships away from sensitive regions, setting speed limits, and establishing an alert system to warn vessel pilots of nearby whales. Hundreds of vessels plying Chilean waters pose significant threats to the estimated 40% of the world's cetacean species that frequent them, researchers say. In 2008, Chile declared its entire 6500-kilometer-long coastline a whale sanctuary. But the country's protections for marine mammals still exist only on paper or lack details. The government says it is working to increase safety measures. But researchers say it must commit adequate funding to succeed. ### Space science NASA marked two milestones this week—the final tests on Earth of its next marquee space telescope, and the start of a long journey home for a trove of asteroid rocks. NASA engineers are wrapping up testing on the giant gold-tinted mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope. Afterward, the long-delayed, $9 billion observatory will be shipped off to French Guiana for launch on 31 October. Also this week, NASA's OSIRIS-REx probe began its 2-year flight back to Earth from the asteroid Bennu, carrying up to 400 grams of rocky chunks the spacecraft collected from its surface. It will be the largest U.S. haul of rocks collected in space since the Apollo program, and NASA's first from an asteroid. ### Aquaculture Nutrition expert Shakuntala Haraksingh Thilsted was awarded the World Food Prize this week for research that used aquaculture to improve the diets of millions of people across Asia and Africa. Thilsted, who began her career at Trinidad and Tobago's Ministry of Agriculture, Land & Fisheries, now heads nutrition research at WorldFish, a nonprofit research center in Penang state in Malaysia. In Bangladesh, she studied small, native fish species widely eaten by farmers. Thilsted identified micronutrients the fish contain and their valuable role in the healthy development of infants and toddlers; adding these fish also helps the body absorb other micronutrients in rice and vegetables. She developed ways to cheaply raise fish, combining large and small species in ponds, which increases production. These methods have helped make Bangladesh one of the world's top aquaculture producers. [1]: pending:yes

Half a year since launch, and it's still a challenge for a lot of us to get our hands on a next-gen console. Sony has reportedly said there will be supply constraints for the rest of the year, but we didn't even need to be told. If you've tried to buy an Xbox Series X or PS5, you've probably had to shop around (online, mostly) for stock. What have you missed out on? According to Jessica Conditt, our newest consoles are still finding their feet, with Sony and Microsoft's differing approaches still yet to yield anything conclusive.