#10 | A Headset For Alzheimer's

Quote of the Week 💬 

A Headset Designed For Alzheimer's Disease

⌛ The Seven Second Summary: Cognito Therapeutics is a neurotechnology company developing a headset device to treat Alzheimer’s disease. Results from their Phase II clinical trial were published last week, documenting the safety and efficacy of their therapeutic treatments.

🔬 How It Was Done:

• 74 patients diagnosed with mild to moderate symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease were enrolled in this trial.

• Patients were randomly assigned to receive daily, one-hour treatments from either Cognito Therapeutics’ device, or a placebo device.

• The headset consists of a pair of glasses and headphones. When worn, the device emits flashing lights and sounds at 40 hertz, or 40 flashes and sounds per second. This specific frequency is chosen for the treatment because it closely matches the natural rhythm of neural activity responsible for various cognitive functions.

• Thus, the hope is a treatment at this frequency will stimulate neurons and strengthen their ability to transmit signals to each other, thereby improving the brain’s cognitive abilities.

🧮 Key Results:

• The patient group using Cognito Therapeutics’ headset did not show significant differences from the placebo group in their ability to complete everyday tasks independently, such as dressing, eating, or bathing.

• However, when compared to the control group, patients using the company’s headset did experience a 69% slowing of brain atrophy and some significant reductions in cognitive decline metrics.

💡 Why This May Matter: While the results of this study are inconclusive, they are encouraging. A safe, effective, non-invasive and drug-free treatment for Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases would be a remarkable scientific achievement. This story is yet another indication that hardware products are advancing at a breakneck pace, similar to AI and other software products.

🔎 Elements To Consider: The therapy resulted in just 3 moderate or severe adverse events in patients over the 6-month course of treatment. This paves the way for a larger Phase III trial to proceed, where more conclusive results may be obtained

📚 Learn More: Cognito Therapeutics. Frontiers.

Stat of the Week 📊 

AI Phone App Accurately Diagnoses Ear Infections

93%

⌛ The Seven Second Summary: Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh developed a smartphone app to accurately diagnose ear infections in children.

🔬 How It Was Done:

• Videos of children with healthy and infected ears were captured by connecting an otoscope to a smartphone device.

• The researchers annotated a library of 1,151 eardrums videos from 635 different children to train 2 AI models to identify a specific type of ear infection.

🧮 Key Results: When tested on 230 videos the models had not seen before, they were highly accurate and produced sensitivity and specificity values greater than 93%. For reference, the researchers mentioned previous studies where clinicians diagnosed the same type of ear infection and their diagnostic accuracy ranged from 30% - 84%.

💡 Why This May Matter: This solution did not require an obscene amount of data, nor was it computationally intensive or particularly cost prohibitive. Despite its simplicity, or perhaps because of its simplicity, this tool may now serve as a valuable resource for this clinic and others in the future. Yet another example of how AI can produce meaningful outcomes for people when used in creative ways.

🔎 Elements To Consider: Since this AI was only trained and tested on a limited set of labeled data, it is unclear how reliable it would be with a large and diverse set of unlabeled data.

📚 Learn More: UPMC. JAMA Network.

AI x Science 🤖

Anthropic Introduces Its Next Generation Of AI Models

Anthropic unveiled its Claude 3 series of AI models: Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku. Opus is the most advanced of the three and is best used for in-depth processing and machine reasoning tasks. Haiku is the fastest and most cost-effective model in the family, and Sonnet is intended to strike the balance between speed, price and effectiveness for the trio.

The results from evaluation tests thus far are impressive. Hugging Face’s crowdsourced leaderboard for large language models rates Opus at nearly the same level as Chat GPT-4’s most advanced models. Furthermore, the results from a series of benchmark tests that Anthropic performed between their new models, Chat GPT-4 and Gemini 1.0 demonstrated Opus outperformed all models in every test. This suggests Opus is at least on par with the very best models, and is possibly the best available model for completing specific tasks, whether it be in reasoning, coding, mathematics or something else.

Not enough time has passed for the dust to settle, so the answers to these questions have not fully revealed themselves yet. Nevertheless, in due time, it will become clear which models produce the best results for specific tasks in the least amount of time and for the least amount of money. As such, the horse race continues with the AI landscape as vibrant and competitive as ever. Anthropic.

Our Full AI Index

• Research: Last October, researchers from Baker Lab released a preprint describing the results of their latest product, RoseTTAFold All-Atom. Their paper has now been peer reviewed and their project has since been open sourced, so researchers everywhere can use their AI system to expand their biomolecule designs to include proteins, as well as DNA and RNA. Science. Github. Institute for Protein Design.

• Open Source: A new large language model called SaulLM-7B has been tailor made open sourced for the legal domain. It has been trained on ~30 billion words worth of legal data, and outperforms similar models in several benchmark evaluations. arXiv. Hugging Face.

• Generative Software: NYU researchers utilized Chat GPT to design a software product for diabetes and found it reduced the time for cross-functional teams to develop the software by 80%.  NYU. JMIR Publications.

• AI Auditing: Over 200 leading AI researchers have signed an open letter urging companies like Meta, Google, and OpenAI to provide a legal and technical way for independent researchers to audit their systems for the benefit of public awareness, transparency and safety. MIT.

• Education: A study in Ghana found students who used Rori, an AI-powered chatbot math tutor, achieved significantly higher math scores compared to students who only received standard math lessons. arXiv.

Other Observations 📰

Children Born With HIV Surpass A Year Of Remission

Four children born with HIV were able to live virus-free for more than a year after their medication was paused. This study is one of the first of its kind, where researchers carefully prescribed intensive therapy treatments to 54 babies within 48 hours of their births in an effort to improve their bodies’ response to the virus.

By age 5, 6 children from the study were deemed eligible to interrupt their HIV treatment. Among the 6, 2 children did not experience remission. However, HIV was completely undetectable for 48 weeks and longer in the other four children. In fact, three children are still being monitored at this very moment while in remission for 48, 52 and 64 weeks, respectively. The fourth child experienced remission for 80 weeks before their HIV returned to detectable levels.

Unfortunately, the only known cures to HIV involve a bone marrow or blood stem cell transplant to effectively replace a patient’s entire immune system. If you recall, the 68-year-old we highlighted last week experienced this type of treatment, and is still on track to be cured of their leukemia and HIV now years later.

Nevertheless, this is still a promising step forward for these children. This study reinforces the importance of early, preventive and intensive care as a way to mitigate the effects of aggressive viruses and diseases. Northwestern. NIH. 

Our Full Science Index

• Cancer: The U.K NHS is rolling out a new immunotherapy to treat women with a specific type of womb cancer after clinical trials demonstrated the treatment’s use alongside chemotherapy was 2.5x more effective at preventing cancer progression than chemotherapy by itself. NHS England.

• Medical Approvals: The U.S. FDA approved Wegovy, a weight loss prescription drug, as a treatment option for serious heart problems in obese or overweight adults. The decision is based on the results of a large international study that found Wegovy cut the risk of serious heart problems — including heart attack, stroke and heart-related deaths — by 19% in overweight or obese patients when compared to a placebo. FDA. 

• Digital: The World Bank released its 2023 report of Digital Progress and Trends. One of many interesting stats in the report: the world gained 1.5 billion new Internet users between 2018 - 2022. World Bank.

• Energy: According to the IEA, advanced economies (the US, Canada, most of Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, and a few more) as a group saw a record decline in emissions in 2023, even as their economies grew. Their emissions are now back down to 1973 levels, and their coal demand is back down to levels not seen since 1900. IEA.

• Space: The first-ever satellite controlled by an environmental nonprofit is now in orbit. It can track comprehensive measurements of global methane emissions, which will allow businesses, regulators and citizens to identify the sources of large emitters. Environmental Defense Fund.

Media of the Week 📸 

Scientists CT Scanned Over 13,000 Vertebrate Specimens

The Florida Museum of Natural History have been working to create 3D reconstructions of every representative species across the vertebrate tree of life for 6 years alongside 18 other institutions. They recently share the results of their work, and the images + accompanying music = our favorite video of the week. Florida Museum. Bioscience. openVertebrate Project.

Webb Captures New Views Of Star-Forming Region

The James Webb Space Telescope does it again. This memorizing photo is of a cluster of dust and gas forming 2.73 million light-years away from Earth. The stars sprinkled within in this dusty envelope of gas are some of the hottest, most massive kinds of stars, all in the early stages of their lives. NASA.

This Week In The Cosmos 🪐

March 20: March Equinox. This marks the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere and the first day of fall in the Southern Hemisphere. The Sun will also shine directly on the equator on this day, which means there will be similar amounts of night and day experienced throughout the world.

Until Next Time 💭