A new vaccine for a newish viral disease

Plus microbes that eat plastic and India's health time bomb.

I hope you have been well and had a great Diwali. I’m going to feign ignorance of this last weekend and pretend that I don’t know what happened at a cutting-edge AI startup in the Bay Area or in sports in a large stadium in India. Selective memory loss can’t come soon enough.

Instead I’ll update you on a couple of other things I’ve been reading and writing about that are more positively focused. We could all use some good news around here.

First, up getting rid of plastics.

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Will microbes save us from plastic pollution? The answer may surprise you.

Very recently I wrote about microbes that eat plastic. Here’s the gist —

Plastic pollution is a big problem for the environment. Plastics are used in products because they're cheap and convenient, but they last for a very long time and are hard to get rid of. They pile up and harm animals, plants, and even our own health. We make a lot of plastic every year and much of it ends up as waste, filling up landfills or littering nature.

One of the most common plastics we use is called PET, and we find it in things like clothing and bottles. Scientists have been wondering for a long time if there are natural ways to break down plastics. A breakthrough came in 2001 when researchers in Japan found bacteria that could eat away at plastics, turning them into basic substances.

This discovery didn't get much attention at first because people didn't realize how big of a problem microplastics were. But in 2016, the same Japanese scientists published their used special enzymes to eat PET. This spurred more research, and soon scientists around the world were finding other bacteria that could break down plastics.

The next big step was to make these plastic-eating bacteria better so they could be used on a large scale. By 2020, scientists made an enzyme that worked much faster to break down PET. Their work showed that this broken-down plastic could be made into new, high-quality PET, offering a way to recycle plastics more efficiently.

In 2022, another team of scientists used machine learning to create even better PET-chomping enzymes. These new enzymes could quickly break down various types of PET, including colored plastics. This meant that we could recycle plastics into clear, high-quality materials again.

Fast forward to today and research is moving quickly. Just recently, a team of scientists showed that certain bacteria could turn PET into even more useful materials. These bacteria could eat the chemicals that come from breaking down PET and turn them into things that we can use again, like biodegradable plastics and other materials.

These scientific advances are exciting because they offer new ways to deal with plastic waste. If these bacteria and enzymes can be used on a big scale, we can transform old plastics into useful products instead of just throwing them away. This will change how we think about recycling and waste management.

The future looks bright for solving our plastic problem. And scientists are working on finding ways to break down other types of plastics too.

There’s a famous line from the movie "The Graduate" about the future being plastics. Now, the future could be using microbes to clean up our plastic mess.

What else is good news?

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A chikungunya vaccine may be on the way.

A few days ago, the US approved the first vaccine for chikungunya, a virus spread by mosquitoes.

Could India’s vaccine be next? Here’s a link to my science column.

Here’s where we stand right now— Chikungunya is a debilitating disease has affected millions in the last 15 years. The word chikungunya means "to become contorted" in the Makonde language, because of the severe joint pain it causes.

The virus was first found in Tanzania in 1952 and has since spread worldwide. It's carried by the same mosquitoes that spread dengue and Zika viruses. In India, chikungunya first appeared in the 1960s and returned in 2005-2006. Climate change and changes in the virus have made outbreaks more common globally.

In 2018, India had thousands of confirmed cases (and 100,000s of suspected ones), and in 2022, the numbers were still high. The spread of chikungunya is a big health issue in India. A vaccine could really help.

With the US vaccine approved, there's hope for other vaccines in development. In India, Bharat Biotech is working on its own vaccine, which might be ready soon. This is an exciting time as we look forward to vaccines to control this painful disease.

And finally…

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India’s Obesity Time Bomb

This is not great news, but still something we can do something about.

That’s all for now.

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Stay well!

Anirban