Weekly Dose of Optimism #96

Diabetes Cure, Semaglutide (Cont),Bird Eyes, Indian Rockets, Solar

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 96th Weekly Dose of Optimism.

The verdict is in. The jury found us guilty on all 34 counts… 😔

… of being too optimistic about the dope stuff humans keep pulling off 😄 Lock us up!

Anywho… the best thing about long weekends is short work weeks. This one went by quickly, but thankfully was still jammed packed with some optimistic news.

Let’s get to it.

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(1) Chinese scientists develop cure for diabetes, insulin patient becomes medicine-free in just 3 months

From the Economic Times

Chinese scientists achieve diabetes cure through innovative cell therapy, detailed in Cell Discovery. Patient, treated in July 2021, no longer requires insulin after eleven weeks, and is now medication-free for 33 months. The breakthrough, praised by Timothy Kieffer, signifies a major advancement in diabetes treatment. This novel approach utilizes the body's regenerative abilities and could alleviate China's healthcare burden. Further studies are needed for validation.

Well, well, well it appears as if diabetes’ days may be numbered. A report out of China shows that a new cell therapy may not only treat, but fully cure diabetes in patients. The new therapy programs the patient's blood cells to recreate pancreatic islet tissue, restoring pancreatic function and eliminating the need for insulin and oral medication. The approach harnesses the body's ability to regenerate damaged tissues.

While the potential cure has worldwide implications, it could have a particularly large impact in China. 140 million people in China have diabetes, and about 40 million rely on insulin injections. That’s a ton of people and assuming each patient gets one daily injection (which is a conservative estimate), that’s 14.6B insulin injections each year in China. And with an estimated production cost of $3-$6 per injection, China is spending $45-$90B each year on insulin injections. The new cell therapy could significantly reduce the need for insulin and, in the process, lower the cost burden and improve the quality of life for millions of patients.

To be clear, this result was for one patient. It’s likely very expensive. The result will need to be replicated in more patients and cell therapies will need to become less expensive before we get too excited about diabetes being cured.

But it’s a great example of why Elliot wrote that cell therapies will be Medicine’s Endgame, and of the importance of figuring out solutions to the bottlenecks in cell therapy manufacturing.

(2) Ozempic keeps wowing: trial data show benefits for kidney disease

Rachel Fairbank for Nature

Researchers presented clinical-trial data today at a conference in Stockholm, showing that it significantly reduces the risk of kidney failure and death for people with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease. Scientists are thrilled with the result, and think that the drug, otherwise known by its generic name, semaglutide, will eventually be proved to help a more general population of people with kidney disease.

Speaking of diabetes treatments, semaglutide can't stop, won’t stop. The drug, which was originally developed as a diabetes treatment, rose to fame as a weight loss drug, and has since been proven to treat a wide array of potential ailments, can now add kidney disease to its list.

Earlier this week, researchers shared clinical trial data showing that semaglutide significantly reduces the risk of kidney failure and death for people with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease…which as discussed above, impacts a ton of people globally. The shared data does not come as much of a surprise, as a kidney disease trial was halted early last year after the initial results were so positive that it didn’t make sense to continue the trial. Yet, this is the first look into just how positive those results are:

• 24% less major kidney disease events (including kidney failure) with semaglutide vs. placebo.

• 29% reduction in cardiovascular deaths and major incidents; 20% reduction in overall mortality.

• Significant benefits for patients with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease.

It’s semaglutide’s world, we’re just living in it (thanks to semaglutide). Once again, GLP-won.

(3) Avian eye–inspired perovskite artificial vision system for foveated and multispectral imaging

Park et al for Science

Inspired by these avian eyes, Park et al. developed an artificial vision system for foveated and multispectral imaging. The system was composed of an artificial Gaussian-shaped fovea that could magnify and focus an object similarly to a zoom lens and a vertically stacked perovskite photodetector array that could detect R, G, B, and UV light without filters. This vision system is particularly promising in uncrewed aerial vehicles for detecting target objects and their motion.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s an uncrewed aerial vehicle using bird-inspired vision systems!

Researchers have developed an artificial vision system inspired by bird eyes. Bird eyes, which is news to me, have specialized regions for magnification and can see ultraviolet light. The new system uses a unique design to mimic the way birds focus and detect different colors without filters. It combines an artificial fovea, which acts like a zoom lens to magnify images, with vertically stacked photodetectors that capture red, green, blue, and ultraviolet light, allowing it to create detailed, multispectral images.

But what to do with these bird-like systems…to start, drone surveillance and search-and-rescue operations, where precise object detection and tracking are critical. Its ability to capture a wide range of light spectra also makes it beneficial for environmental monitoring and scientific research, providing detailed visual information about objects and their surroundings.

Let’s just hope one of these drones don’t come crashing into your sliding glass door.

(4) Space startup Agnikul Cosmos flies world’s first 3D-printed rocket engine in fifth attempt

Anonna Dutt for the Indian Express

Indian space startup Agnikul Cosmos on Thursday successfully launched its first sub-orbital test vehicle powered by the world’s first single-piece 3D-printed rocket engine, after calling off its launch at least four times previously.

Chalo!

Indian space startup Agnikul Cosmos successfully launched its test vehicle, which sports the world’s first single-piece 3D-printed semi-cryogenic rocket engine. Semi-cryogenic means that the rocket uses both gas and liquid fuel.

The event also marks only the second ever launch by a private company in India, and the first to blast off from a privately-owned launch pad….which from what I can tell from the pictures looks too be located on a lovely beach.

Agnikul Cosmos aims to offer affordable launch services for nano and micro satellites…sound familiar? SpaceX wedged its way into the market with a similar strategy, using rocket reusability as a way to significantly lower costs and make it affordable to launch more things into space.

Agnikul Cosmos is trying to lower its costs by using 3D-printed parts, like Relativity Space in the US, which printed ~85% of its Terran 1 rocket. Typically, rocket engine parts are manufactured separately and later assembled. Its 3D manufacturing processes are aimed at lowering costs and assembly times, and with lower costs, the company hopes to make it affordable to launch nano and micro satellites “up to 300 kg to orbits around 700 km high.”

Agnikul’s rockets can be configured based on customer needs — remove an engine, add some engines. This one shows the configuration to launch 100kg to space.

Then, strap it to a truck, carry it to your closest spaceport, and launch. Easy as that.

(5) The solar industrial revolution is the biggest investment opportunity in history

By Casey Handmer

Solar is in the process of shearing off the base of the entire global industrial stack – energy – and the tech sector still lacks a unified thesis for how to best enable, accelerate, and exploit this transition. There is a bitter lesson here – solar is all you need.

This is not a Casey Handmer blog, but you wouldn’t know that if you’re a frequent reader. Casey is the founder and CEO of Terraform Industries, a company making synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air. He was also a major contributor in the Vesuvius Challenge. He’s generally doing and writing about cool stuff, so we feature him in the Weekly Dose.

This week, Casey dropped an essay on the history and potential of solar. His thesis: Solar energy's inevitable dominance will revolutionize global industries, creating unparalleled investment opportunities.

The solar industrial revolution, according to Casey, is poised to become the biggest investment opportunity in history, as solar energy rapidly becomes the cheapest and most efficient energy source, surpassing fossil fuels. In his words:

Solar PV is not just a partial substitute for oil, it’s a cheaper and better energy source in every way that matters.

Corollary: Our techno-capital machine is a thermodynamic mechanism that systematically hunts for and then maximally exploits the cheapest energy it can find. When it unlocks cheaper energy, first coal, then oil, then gas, and now solar, it drives up the rate of economic growth, due to an expanded spread between energy cost and application value.

In other words, we’re now about a decade into a three decade process (the ~sixth industrial revolution) where the entire world economy and its industrial stack is eagerly switching to solar PV as its preferred source of cheap energy, creating enormous value.

Hell yeah. During this process, solar will disrupt big, important industries such as data centers, desalination, synthetic fuels, cement production, plastics, supersonic flight, chemicals… name an industry, and Casey argues, with data, that there’s an opportunity to use sunlight to reshape it.

That is to say, solar will transform the physical world around us and create a ton of valuable new companies in the process.

Casey argues what we’ve been trying to say: Tech is Going to Get Much Bigger because Better Tools, Bigger Companies. He cites ~$50 trillion worth of industry to be improved.

We’re quite bullish on solar as well. Its learning curve is both hard to ignore and fun to forecast off of…what will society, and the industries that power it, look like as solar continues to get cheaper and more efficient? How val will the companies that harness practically free solar energy become?

Speaking of solar. We have a few sunny, perfect weather days in NYC coming up this weekend that we’d like to get to. So that’s all for this week — go out there and catch some rays.

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We’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday.

Thanks for reading,

Packy + Dan