🌞 $25m for breast cancer research

Happy National Science Week! To celebrate, we’ve collected some science themed good news stories from the week. From research strides to new technologies, there’s a lot to be hopeful about.

Time to kick off a chain reaction! (I know, not my best but it’s a Sunday morning so please be kind, dear readers).

A “groundbreaking research program” aiming to halve breast cancer deaths has received a $25 million grant from the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF).

The Garvan Institute of Medical Research at UNSW will use the money to “develop new therapies and fast-track clinical trials.” While breast cancer has a national survival rate of 92%, the disease still kills more than 3,000 Australians annually.

Some of the new funding will be spent on advanced technologies to more accurately predict cancer recurrence, which impacts 15% of breast cancer survivors.

UNSW Associate Professor Christine Chaffer said: “This research will let us develop tools to predict who is most at risk of relapse and develop targeted therapies to eliminate these seeds of relapse, before they reawaken”. The funding is the NBCF’s largest-ever investment.

Venus and Jupiter were both seen in the early morning sky above Bavaria, Germany, this week.

📸 Karl-Josef Hildenbrand

Australia’s national science agency, the CSIRO, has opened a new facility in Canberra that will protect specimens from more than 13 million species against future disasters. The Government-funded building, aptly named ‘Diversity,’ has specialised vaults that will preserve these specimens, keeping them safe so they can continue to contribute to scientific progress.

It will house the Australian National Wildlife Collection and the Australian National Insect Collection, which have been collected over 150 years. These contain specimens of around 55,000 birds (99% of Australian bird species!), 17,000 orchids, and the largest collection of Australian insects, including more than 7 million beetles.

According to CSIRO Chief Executive Dr Doug Hilton, the building will allow researchers, the Government and industries to “protect endangered species, prevent disease and harness nature sustainably.”

Director of the CSIRO Australian National Wildlife Collection Dr Clare Holleley said these collections are a “library of life.”

Time’s almost up – Hommey’s Afterpay Day sale ends tomorrow!

This is your last chance to score up to 20% off everything, including their cult-favourite Versa Collection. That’s two looks in one doona cover (and a third of your life spent enjoying it) for even less.

Whether you’re after a full bedroom glow-up or just a cosy new quilt cover, everything is made from super-soft, planet-friendly organic cotton – so it’s comfort you can feel good about.

Allow us to introduce you to Aneeshwar! This 10-year-old conservationist from the UK shares his passion for wildlife on his Instagram account. It’s everything we like to see in this newsletter: informative, kind, and joyful.

Aneeshwar is not your ordinary 10-year-old. Through his conservation efforts, he has co-hosted a BBC show, written a book, and spoken at multiple international events. He also holds the Guinness World Record for being the youngest male documentary presenter, at the ripe age of seven!

Aneeshwar began his conservation journey when he saw a picture of a whale that had died because of plastic pollution. On his website, he writes: “Every animal has its own special super power… I think we humans have super powers too. We are SMART! If we can respect nature and strive to coexist with it rather than causing harm, we can achieve harmonious balance.”

You can see Aneeshwar in action on his show ‘Steve & Aneeshwar Go Wild’ on ABC iView.

The future of conservation is in good hands!

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed new ways to help people infected with two “hard-to-treat” diseases.

Antibiotics are medicines that help fight harmful microbes (bacteria or parasites).

Microbes can develop resistance to these treatments once exposed to them. Resistant microbes can become untreatable.

Common infections, such as golden staph and gonorrhoea, are becoming more resistant to antibiotics.

One strain of golden staph, called MRSA, is considered antibiotic-resistant.

It’s those two diseases that MIT researchers have used generative AI to design compounds to treat.

Through this process, they’ve discovered new antibiotics that could impact drug-resistant forms of gonorrhoea and MRSA.

The researchers used AI algorithms to design more than 36 million possible compounds and screened them for antimicrobial properties, discovering that the top contenders were “structurally distinct from any existing antibiotics”.

After rounds of research and analysis, researchers identified a fragment they named F1 (no, not that one) that “appeared to have promising activity against” gonorrhea. They used two generative AI algorithms to generate additional compounds using F1, finding one of them is “very effective at killing [the disease] in a lab dish”.

In the second round, researchers explored using generative AI “to freely design molecules,” finding one that could get rid of a MRSA infection “in a mouse model.” A nonprofit is working on modifying some of these compounds so they can be tested further.

Lead author James Collins said: “Our work shows the power of AI… and enables us to exploit much larger chemical spaces that were previously inaccessible.”