Before we begin, what is biotechnology?

Biotechnology is broadly the alteration of living organisms or biological systems to develop or make products that help us. It therefore also involves the use of selective breeding and genetic modification techniques in farming.

Update on Sarah Gilbert and the Oxford vaccine…
                                                                                              By Priya (Editor)

In the last issue of TechTalk, we discussed how Sarah Gilbert and her team at Oxford University have been working hard at creating a life-saving vaccine for the new virus, COVID-19.

I previously mentioned that she was of the view that she could deliver a vaccine to the world by September 2020. Whilst the vaccine didn’t arrive in that ambitious timescale, as you will have read in the news the vaccine was granted approval on 30th December 2020 – on the same day that this article has been written.

In an interview on the day of this announcement, the director of the Oxford vaccine group, Andrew Pollard, stated that “I think this is an incredibly exciting moment for human health.”

Many had doubted whether the vaccine would be ready this year. Even the Chief Medical Officer warned the UK that it was unlikely there would be a vaccine before the winter of 2021.

A professor of vaccinology at the university, Sarah Gilbert was the lead researcher of the trial.

She first read on New Year’s Day in 2020 about a new virus emerging in China, and spent much of the rest of the year working with her team to create a vaccine.

How incredible that from the moment of Gilbert first reading about the virus to the final authorisation for Emergency Use, the amount of time that passed was one day less than one year!

The mother of grown-up triplets said she knew she could work without much rest and endured some sleepless nights along the way this year.

The full results of the Oxford trials, published on July 20, showed that initial trials on 1,077 British adults found that the vaccine induced strong antibody and T-cell responses, which may improve further after a booster jab. Additionally, out of tens of thousands of people who underwent the trial, none were hospitalised after receiving the vaccine.

The discovery is promising because separate studies have suggested that antibodies may fade away within months while T-cells can stay in circulation for years.

Britain has signed a deal with AstraZeneca (Oxford University’s partner) for 100 million doses of this vaccine, enough to vaccinate 50 million people. The great news for other parts of the world is that the vaccine will be provided at no profit to billions of people. In India, for example, mass production has already started.

For further information on the vaccine, I have included the video below, which although slightly dated, has a great overview on the huge task of creating a vaccine.

Without doubt, Sarah Gilbert and her colleagues at Oxford University’s Jenner Institute have the world’s gratitude for their colossal achievement.

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Click here for more information about Sarah Gilbert!

Click here for the latest update on the vaccine approval!

Map to show where COVID-19 cases in the UK are most prominent.

COVID-19 coronavirus is seen in yellow, emerging from cells (in blue and pink) cultured in the lab. This image is from a scanning electron microscope. It looks colourful - but it is fatal.

An example of a COVID-19 vaccine vial.

All you need to know about the ‘Pfizer’ vaccine...                                                                                  By Priya (Editor)

The moment billions of people have been waiting for… It has finally arrived.

On 2nd December 2020, the UK became the first country on the planet to administer the ‘Pfizer’ vaccine, that has its own name of BNT162, (using the Emergency Use Authorisation), marking an incredibly historic and long-awaited moment in the fight against COVID-19.

Whilst the world thinks of this drug as one that was developed by Pfizer, the global pharmaceutical company, the technology behind the scenes that led to the creation of this society-changing innovation actually came from a brilliant, yet humble husband and wife team called Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci. They are the cofounders of a small German biotech company called BioNTech.

Both Şahin and Türeci are the children of Turkish immigrants to Germany, but neither of them allowed this to stop them in their efforts to try and develop cancer fighting antibodies through their first business, Ganymed Pharmaceuticals.

Through this, the couple were able to establish and develop BioNTech, which they cofounded in 2008 and whose primary focus was still cancer treatments and immunology. However, they always knew that the technology they were developing  could also be broadened to cover other illnesses and medical mysteries. In fact, some of BioNTech’s early focuses of study looked at mRNA, a messenger substance to put genetic instructions into cells. As we know now, this research became crucial to the current situation we find ourselves in today, for the making of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, as this mRNA technology plays a huge part in its percentage of effectiveness and protection against the fatal virus.

In January, when Şahin and Türeci came across a scientific paper on the new coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, they noticed how small the difference was between anti-cancer mRNA drugs and mRNA viral vaccines. A vaccine task force was then set up, and all their 500 staff were assigned to the project.

BioNTech then decided to pair with the giant pharmaceutical company Pfizer in March.

There is often much confusion surrounding this collaboration. To make things clear, below is an outline and a short summary of the roles of both, separate companies:

BioNTech is a small, German, biotechnology business with 500 staff. It is BioNtech that formulated and discovered the life-saving technology and the actual formula for this vaccine.

Pfizer is a large, American-based, multinational pharmaceutical company with 90,000 employees globally. They were in charge of running the complex and comprehensive trials for the vaccine, manufacturing it and as of 8th December, when Margaret Keenan received the first dose in the world outside of a clinical trial, they are now also in charge of distributing the long-awaited vaccine.

(It is also interesting to note that as this article is being written, 91-year-old Margaret Keenan has just, today, received her second dose of the COVID-19 BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine!)

Overall, it is fair to say that we are all very thankful for the “injection” of hope that these two companies have brought to us during these unprecedented and desperate times. Technology is the way out of this awful crisis, as we finally take a glance at the possible restoration of normality that is now in sight.

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See below for an insight into how an RNA (the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna) vaccine would work...

What is RNA?

Ribonucleic acid, or RNA is one of the three major biological macromolecules that are essential for all known forms of life (along with DNA and proteins).

3 Types of RNA:

There are three types of RNA involved in gene expression:

mRNA - Messenger RNA is a linear molecule which carries a copy of the gene to be expressed from the nucleus. Every group of three bases (a 'triplet') is described as a codon because each one codes for an amino acid. This is the principle technology involved in the Pfizer (and the Moderna) vaccine.

tRNA - Transfer RNA has a cloverleaf shape. It is made from a single strand of RNA which folds due to base pairing to form this unusual shape. It has a triplet anti-codon site and an attachment site for a specific amino acid.

rRNA - Ribosomal RNA and proteins form the ribosome. The ribosome is the structure where protein synthesis takes place.

Has this type of vaccine ever been used before?

The BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine is the first RNA vaccine to be approved for use in humans.

The concept has been researched before and people have been given them in clinical trials for other diseases.

The vaccine will be considered by regulatory agencies around the world, who will decide whether the jab can be approved for use.

Read the diagram on the left for more precise details on the exact process of how an RNA vaccine will work!

Why has it taken such a short time to create the COVID-19 vaccines?

Although the process of creating, manufacturing and distributing a new vaccine usually takes around 10-15 years, the first COVID-19 vaccine was produced in under a year!

The reason why the process usually takes a much longer time is because the majority of this time is often taken up waiting for approval for the vaccine to be given to the public. Of course, during these times, the waiting time for approval was very short, especially as having a vaccine for the world was at the top of the priority list.

An interview with Laura Turkington

Carrying on with our "Women in Tech Series", here we have an online interview that I took with another amazing lady in tech, Laura Turkington. She is the global director of corporate responsibility at Ernst and Young. In this interview, Laura describes what her job involves, and gives her honest opinion on the role of women in technology. She answers questions on quite a few topics, which range from her inspirations when entering this field, to the coolest gadgets available!

Thank you Laura for taking part in this interview!

Can we really trust AI to make decisions?      By Teniola 

Technology today is advancing extremely quickly. There have been many breakthroughs in the field of deep land machine learning which has allowed machines to process and analyze information in ways that we could never have envisioned. With this, Artificial intelligence started to run basic parts of our lives, from diagnosing illnesses to choosing when a plane needs fixing. However, artificial intelligence today still has to go a very long way to match the human brain’s potential. Can we really expect them to make important decisions?

When it comes to people making important decision making, we expect logic to be a major weighing factor. A logical decision-maker uses evidence and develops arguments and reasons to draw conclusions and eventually make decisions. Artificial intelligence can quickly analyse data and their surrounding environments, enabling them to make decisive logical decisions, sometimes even better than a human would. However, most of the decisions we make, are not made logically. It’s essential in most aspects of life, but many of our decisions include an emotional aspect. Computers are being trained to learn patterns of body language to analyse how someone feels. But logical analysis of patterns of behaviour cannot substitute for empathy. 
 
Empathy is the ability to understand and share feelings with another and there are three parts to it: affective empathy -the capacity to respond with the appropriate emotion; somatic empathy - the physical reaction associated with the empathy process and cognitive empathy-which is our ability to understand what is going in someone else’s mind. Cognitive empathy, also known as empathetic accuracy is necessary for us to relate to other people. This ability to understand another person’s frame of reference is crucial for ethical decision making as it helps to draw our attention to moral issues and highlight the moral imperative in situations. 
 
If we wish to approach artificial general intelligence, empathy is essential. However, emotions are often not a flat construct. When we experience one emotion, we often experience a multitude of other emotions as well. In order for Artificial Intelligence to understand and share the feelings of human emotions, artificial intelligence must develop a method of learning about the range of emotions that human’s experience. 
 
AI researchers have focused on embedding systems that affect both cognitive and emotional processes into the “artificial brain”, to help move towards understanding human intelligence better. What makes human intelligence unique is that it is upheld by conceptual feelings such as self-awareness, inspiration and passion that enable humans to accomplish complex cognitive tasks. 
 
Roger Penrose, an Oxford Mathematician, draws a distinction between intelligence and Sentience in his book “Shadows of the Mind and the Road to Reality”, where he claims that human sentience is not replicable algorithmically. In this book Roger discusses how Computational neuroscience (and Artificial Intelligence) treats the brain as a computer: either there is a neuronal signal or not, very much similar to the 0 and 1 binary scheme. But that algorithmic representation can't be truly faithful to what's really going on in the human brain. 

Penrose then argues, that there's a deeper level of information processing in the brain. Deeper than neural networks. He states that other qualities of consciousness can't be simply explained by algorithms. This raises the question of how far we can really rely on AI to help support all decision making.
 
All that said, AI continues to transform the world significantly and continues to create efficiency and ease of doing things in several aspects of our lives. It enables us to rethink how we integrate information, analyse data and use the results to a large extent to assist in decision making. It is however not a replacement for human intelligence. 

Teniola - Year 13

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Some more "very" interesting links (related to biotechnology).......

1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55094301

A new blood test has been designed that will be able to detect more than 50 types of cancer at an early stage! It will be trialled by the NHS, and it is predicted that more than 165,000 people in England will be offered the tests from next year. If this proves to be successful, the NHS hope to give the new blood test to approximately 1,000,000 people by 2024 - how exciting!

As Sir Simon Stevens, NHS England chief executive, stated in an interview, the new blood test could most certainly be a "game-changer in cancer care", as it will help thousands across the country, and eventually across the globe, to have successful treatments, resulting in the saving of a multitude of lives in our planet.

Here is a picture of pancreatic cancer cells at Stage IV, meaning that the cancer has spread from where it started to at least one other body organ.

2. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-55133972

This image shows a DeepMind model of a protein from the Legionnaire's disease bacteria (Casp-14), which is a form of atypical pneumonia caused by any species of Legionella bacteria.

This news story is just one fantastic example of how artificial intelligence is changing and imapacting society for the better. Click the link above to read about how one of biology's biggest mysteries, which surrounds the folding of a protein into a unique three-dimensional shape, has finally been revealed through an incredible AI-generated program!

Click the button below for more information about Google's DeepMind company, the technology behind the discovery.

Click here for more information about DeepMind!

3. https://scitechdaily.com/new-class-of-dual-acting-antibiotics-active-against-a-wide-range-of-bacteria/

Scientists from Wistar Institute have discovered a new class of dual-acting immuno-antibiotics that can be used against a much wider range of bacteria than ever seen before - how amazing!

By 2050, antibiotic-resistant infections are predicted to claim 10 million lives each year, but with the new class of antibiotics slowly becoming more availabe to the public, these vast figures should hopefully decrease.

Click the attatched link above for more information about the discovery, told by the Wistar Institute scientists themselves.

This is an image of bacteria, taken by The Wistar Institute.

Is the Neuralink a good thing?                             By Annika 

The Neuralink is the first neural implant that will allow for you to control any computer including your smart phone with your brain. It connects micron-scale threads to areas of the brain that control movement and each thread contains electrodes for detecting neural signals. The threads are so fine and flexible that even the human hand cannot insert them into the brain, so robots are being developed for more accurate placement for where they need to go. Once installed into your skull the device would be able to send and receive electrical signals through your brain.

The Link undoubtedly has many advantages. People suffering from paralysis would be able to control a computer mouse or keyboard and information can be written to the brain for example, restoring the sense of touch. Imagine having superhuman vision or being able to download your brain to a computer or playing your favourite album in your head. Surgery could be performed more painlessly than ever and human hearing would be extended to new frequencies.

Additionally, schooling will be completely unconventional. The Neuralink will allow data to be downloaded straight into your brain so our education system of memorizing information to copy down for an exam would be useless and ‘soft skills’ such as communication, leadership and teamwork will be more important to employers who can provide knowledge specific to the field of work.

However, ethically the Neuralink poses as a risk to privacy of people. We all know about the Cambridge Analytica scandal where governments were advertising political campaigns through social media platforms that collected data of users. They manipulated the public into voting for things such as Trump’s presidency and Brexit. Imagine our thoughts being manipulated by the powers that have access to the devices in our brains. Imagine every thought, every idea that comes to mind being recorded by computers. Imagine hackers tapping into your brains and controlling your movements.

Whilst the Neuralink could benefit some greatly, the possibilities are very dangerous and could society in peril.     

Annika - Year 12

Let's hear from Mrs Staves!

In this video, I interviewed Mrs Staves, one of our wonderful computer science teachers here at NLCS.

Here Mrs Staves talks about what inspired her to become a computer scientist and about her personal journey to becoming a computer science teacher. Mrs Staves also talks frankly about her thoughts of diversity in tech - and carry on watching to find out what she thinks the coolest gadget is!

The Use of Telemedicine and Artificial Intelligence in the Ageing Population                                                                       By Shriyaa 

The global demographic population is ageing at a rapid pace. In the UK alone, one-fifth of the population, roughly 11.8 million citizens are more than 65 years of age or older. This ever-growing elderly population suffer from multiple chronic diseases (multimorbidity) such as cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis and dementia. Although there has been an increase in life expectancy, the vast majority tend to live in ill health over the course of their lives. As a result, there is increased need for hospital visits and hospitalisation, placing a huge burden on the healthcare system.
 
Polypharmacy, the use of multiple drugs or more than medically appropriate, is a burgeoning concern amongst older patients with multimorbidity. The research undertaken by the National Institutes of Health has shown that polypharmacy has become increasingly and alarmingly common in older adults with the highest number of drugs taken by those residing in nursing homes. Nearly 50% of the elderly population take one or more medications that are not medically necessary. The increased use of polypharmacy by doctors and over-prescription of unnecessary medications leads to drug to drug interactions contributing to the increased risk of falls in the elderly population, delirium and other related healthcare complications. Current evidence in medical literature clearly establishes a strong link between polypharmacy and detrimental clinical consequences in later life. Due to this, hospitals see an increased number of hospital admissions and re-admissions. This increased healthcare demand places undue strain on NHS healthcare workforce and infrastructure leading to a supply and demand mismatch.
 
The advancements in digital health technologies such as Telemedicine and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has contributed to the use remote-monitoring devices in elderly patients. AI technologies and interconnected personal devices has made it possible to audit, analyse and assimilate extensive medical data throughout the elderly population. A research conducted by Professor Arnold Milstein at Stanford University using thermal imaging cameras and AI algorithms has identified patients at risk of falls and injuries in community thereby preventing these by district nurses visiting their homes before an event. The use of thermal imaging and other medical technologies has proven to show the reduction in hospital admissions due to prophylactic interventions beforehand and early treatment of infections such as urinary tract infections. This has also assisted remote monitoring of ageing and vulnerable patients, and has delivered highly targeted and direct diagnostics, healthcare and treatment. The use of technology in healthcare and AI has opened up access to personalised and precision medicine.
 
The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has pushed digital technology into the forefront of medicine through virtual clinics and telemonitoring of patients who are unable to visit hospital due to self-isolation and distancing measures. Broader use of this technology in the daily lives of elderly patients will help to identify those patients in need of help before they become unwell and needing hospital care. The use of Artificial Intelligence and remote monitoring of patients using advanced digital health technology will undeniably revolutionize healthcare delivery in the future by taking hospital care to the doorstep of communities.

Shriyaa - Year 10

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Thank you so much for reading this issue, which was focused on biotechnology - and thanks again to those that contributed. The articles were all fantastic! Next term, the theme will be AI and Robotics so I hope lots of you will get involved. If you want to contribute, (or if you have any questions about the topics mentioned in this issue), please email me (ModiPriya@nlcs.org.uk), but I will be sending out an email to the school soon about the Summer 2021 edition.

If you have time, I would really appreciate it if you could fill in the small survey below. It won't take long, and I would love to see your suggestions on the different topics I can include and the areas I need to work on in future editions.

Thank you!