The Long Road to Xenotransplants

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TL;DR

This week we discuss the sad news that David Bennett, the recipient of the first pig heart transplant, has passed away. We discuss Apple’s latest M1 ultra chip, and also discuss some recent advances in AI for biology. We end with some interesting science news from around the web.

Pig Heart Transplant Recipient Dies

In a recent post we covered the revolutionary transplant of a pig heart into a human patient.

A Dramatic Advance in Organ Transplantation

In sad news, the recipient, David Bennett has passed away after two months source. The road to safe xenotransplants remains long and challenging, especially since it is not clear if the FDA has sufficient data to authorize further xenotransplant clinical trials.

M1 Ultra: Apple’s New Chip

The M1 Ultra is an impressive new chip from Apple that poses a real challenge to Nvidia and AMD GPUs (source).

Apple has made major strides in chip design. Its latest effort, the M1 Ultra, may outperform both Nvidia and AMD’s best graphics GPUs. Apple’s increasingly sophisticated chip design teams pose major threats to Intel, Nvidia, and AMD product lines.

Apples claims the M1 Ultra outperforms Nvidia and AMD GPUs (source).

Predicting Gene Expression From Promoter Sequences

Figure 1 | Learning to predict gene expression. a) Vaishnav et al.1 created a library of 30 million promoters — 80-base-pair-long DNA sequences that drive gene expression. They measured how well each could drive expression of the gene that encodes yellow fluorescent protein (YFP) in yeast cells. b) The group used these data to train a neural network to predict how well different promoter sequences drive gene expression. c) The authors then tested the network's predictive ability. The group designed thousands more promoters (only one is shown here, for simplicity), and showed that the network could predict, extremely accurately, how well each promoter would drive gene expression. Caption and image from (source).

Researchers have trained a neural network to predict gene expression from promoter sequences. Improved understanding of gene expression could drive powerful advances in drug discovery, but more work will need to be done to validate the method in other cell lines.

Weekly News Roundup

• https://spectrum.ieee.org/cmos-image-sensor-pixel: Samsung and Omnivision (in parallel) succeed in shrinking camera pixels to .56 micrometers wide.

• https://spectrum.ieee.org/hard-drives-revived-2d-materials: Multiferroic-based hard drives could underpin the next generation of storage technologies.

• https://www.quantamagazine.org/in-new-math-proofs-artificial-intelligence-plays-to-win-20220307/: The use of AI methods in pure mathematics continues to mature

• https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/thread-your-proteins-through: Protein nanopore sequencing takes some major steps forward.

• https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/03/07/with-excelero-storage-nvidia-now-owns-a-nearly-complete-hpc-ai-stack/: Nvidia is taking steps to mature its high performance computing stack.

• https://www.thestreet.com/investing/heres-how-to-play-intel-in-race-against-nvidia-amd: Intel’s turnaround efforts face many challenges.

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Deep Into the Forest is a newsletter by Deep Forest Sciences, Inc. We’re a deep tech R&D company building an AI-powered scientific discovery engine. Deep Forest Sciences leads the development of the open source DeepChem ecosystem. Partner with us to apply our foundational AI technologies to hard real-world problems. Get in touch with us at partnerships@deepforestsci.com! 

Credits

Author: Bharath Ramsundar, Ph.D.

Editor: Sandya Subramanian, Ph.D.