The year 2023 was, to a large extent, the year of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its applications in the daily lives of those who can access it. And that is something that the two main refereed scientific magazines in the world agree on: Science and Nature, which published their analyzes regarding scientific, medical and technological production in the year that has just ended. And also what lines of research and development will be the most powerful in this newly released 2024.
The rise of ChatGPT had a profound effect on various activities, from study to content creation (as debatable and risky as the latter is), to scientific work. It is expected that at the end of 2024 its creator (the OpenAI company based in San Francisco, United States) will launch GPT-5, the next generation of the AI model that underpins the chatbot. But scientists are also awaiting the launch of Gemini, Google’s GPT-4 competitor.
According to Nature, this year that has just begun will also arrive a new version of Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold artificial intelligence tool, which researchers have already used to visualize and analyze the 3D shapes of proteins. “AI will be able to model interactions between proteins, nucleic acids and other molecules with atomic precision, which could open new possibilities in drug design and discovery,” they say.
But AI is not naive or innocent, for the simple fact that at its origins there are human beings. So regulations will not be long in coming: the United Nations High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence will share its final report in mid-2024, establishing guidelines for the international regulation of AI.
Diabetes and obesity
For Science, the scientific protagonist of the year were “glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonists”: in short, the new drugs that were approved by both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of the United States and other drug regulatory agencies. and foods to treat first type 2 diabetes and then obesity. “Glucagon-like peptide 1, or GLP-1 for short, is often called the gut hormone, but it ultimately affects organs throughout the body, from the stomach to the brain. Early in the hormone’s research it became clear that it plays an important role in regulating blood sugar, which led to diabetes drugs that mimic its effects by activating the GLP-1 receptor. These drugs have become known as GLP-1 receptor agonists,” summarizes Couzin-Frankel from Science.
The boom in these drugs is due to the fact that doctors also noticed that people who were treated with them also lost weight. This is how in 2014, the FDA approved the first of them. But it wasn’t until the development of a version that is treated weekly instead of daily, that GLP-1 receptor agonists became successful as weight-loss medications.
“These new therapies are reshaping not only how obesity is treated, but also how it is understood: as a chronic disease with biological roots, not as a simple lack of willpower,” says Couzin-Frankel. Clinical trials suggest that glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonists improve heart health and kidney disease in people with obesity or diabetes, and they are also being tested in other conditions, including drug addiction.
But it is essential to be very careful not to turn these medications into “cure-all” drugs. And such is the boom that they are being used not only by diabetic or obese people, but also by people of all kinds who simply want to lose weight. So much so that in mid-2023 there was a shortage of remedies for those who need them specifically for health reasons: users “for aesthetics” had wiped out stocks in several countries. And, as expected, contributed to increasing its price.
Immunotherapies and Alzheimer’s
January 2023 marked the beginning of a new era for the treatment of this disease, when the FDA gave the green light to lecanemab, the second antibody targeting β-amyloid to obtain such approval after the controversial approval of aducanumab. Approval of another, donanemab, is believed to come soon. These two newer antibodies demonstrated their merits in clinical trials, albeit modestly, slowing the loss of cognition by 27% to 35%. As it is, they are far from a cure and carry serious risks. In particular, inflammation and hemorrhage of the brain; In rare cases, these side effects were fatal.
Furthermore, as Todd Golde and Allan Levey point out in Perspective for Science, “a glaring weakness of many of these trials was the lack of racial diversity among participants.” In fact, many questions remain, including whether treatments can actually delay the onset of symptoms, and not just slow their progression.
Malaria and mosquitoes
During 2023, not only a large trial of the first malaria vaccine was carried out with good results, but a trial of another cheaper vaccine also provided more than encouraging data, to the point of earning the support of the World Organization. of Health (WHO).
What to expect in 2024? The Global Mosquito Program will begin producing insects capable of freeing themselves from transmitting diseases in a factory in Brazil from a bacterial strain that prevents them from functioning as vectors of pathogenic viruses. In this way, specialists believe, up to 70 million people could be protected from diseases such as dengue and Zika. The non-profit organization will produce up to five billion mosquitoes infected with bacteria per year over the next decade.
The Moon and beyond
For the first time since the 1970s, NASA will launch a manned lunar mission in November of this year. Artemis II will carry four astronauts (three men and one woman) aboard the Orion spacecraft for a ten-day flyby around Earth’s natural satellite. The goal is that Artemis II lays the foundation for the subsequent Artemis III mission, which will take the first woman and the next man to the Moon. China is also preparing to launch its Chang’e-6 lunar sample return mission in 2024. If successful, the mission will be the first to collect samples from the far side of the Moon.
Missions to explore moons in the outer Solar System include NASA’s Clipper spacecraft, which will depart for Jupiter’s moon Europa in October. Their goal is to determine if the underground ocean could support life. The Japanese Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission, scheduled for 2024, will visit the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos. It will land on Phobos and collect samples from the surface to return to Earth in 2029.
Climate crisis
Several studies this year indicate that the inverted global circulation – a huge “carbon pump” that helps the ocean capture a third of humanity’s annual emissions – is slowing. In the second half of 2024, the International Court of Justice in The Hague could issue an opinion on nations’ legal obligations to combat climate change.
On the other hand, negotiations for the UN plastics treaty will end this year, which seeks to establish a binding international agreement to eliminate plastic pollution. Since the 1950s, the world has produced 10 billion tonnes of plastic, of which more than 7 billion tonnes is now waste, much of which pollutes the oceans and harms wildlife.
Supercomputers
Exascale computers, which can perform quintillions (a trillion trillion) mathematical operations per second, arrived in 2023. They have already made it possible to perfect weather forecasts and design new materials. This year a group of scientists will begin using Jupiter, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer. Researchers will use the machine to create “digital twin” models of the human heart and brain for medical purposes and to run high-resolution simulations of Earth’s climate.
US researchers will install two exascale machines in 2024: Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, and El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Scientists will use Aurora to create maps of the brain’s neural circuits and El Capitan to simulate the effects of nuclear weapons explosions.
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