Innovation by Necessity

There’s a lot to cover this week. There has been an absolutely stunning story on California COVID data, but I’m still trying to dig up more details on it before I talk through it. It deserves time and careful thought. Maybe for Friday.

For today, even as we’re still struggling to control COVID outbreaks in the US, I’m really quite overwhelmed by how much good news there is. We have gotten rapid-fire good news on the technology and innovation front that will save lives and allow us to recover faster. And we might even be better prepared for the next pandemic.

• The Grand Matriarch of Invention

• A New Kind of Vaccine

• Innovation vs COVID

• Disney Shorts: Pluto’s Dream House

The Grand Matriarch of Invention

If you’re into the history of technology, I highly recommend Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid. You’re looking for Rise of the Machines, the book. Not the movie.

This book is an absolutely fascinating review of the birth and development of several of the computing technologies that led to our current digital age. One of the themes of the book is about how innovation comes out of need. It starts shortly before World War 2 when a few forward-looking researchers realized the impact that high-altitude aircraft would have on war.

Hitting the machines directly with artillery shells that exploded on impact was practically impossible. The shells needed to be timed so that they would detonate close enough to the target to bring it down. Yet correctly setting the time fuse became ever harder as speed and distances increased.

The number of problems that needed to be solved were overwhelming. These planes were so high in the sky that by the time the human eye could register them, it was almost too late to prepare for a bombing. So they had to develop radar systems to track the aircraft further than the eye could see.

But the guns were too heavy to quickly aim. So they developed hydraulics to point the guns in the right direction. But the aircraft were so far away, they might fly over 2 miles between the time a shell was fired and when it would reach the bomber. So they developed predictive computation to determine where the aircraft would be when the shell reached it and proximity fuses so that the shell would explode only when it got close to a target.

The list of technical challenges goes on and on and every one is fascinating. It really digs deep into the concept that necessity is the mother of invention. We can’t really simulate necessity. These challenges don’t necessarily come at us when we are ready for them and we don’t always solve them. The Axis never did figure out proximity fuses or microwave radar, thank God. But there are these times when we absolutely positively must figure something out and fast.

I’ll bet you can guess where this is going.

A New Kind of Vaccine

In my conversation with epidemiologist Kevin Wilson a few weeks ago, Kevin mentioned that “the research community super wants to kill this virus” and that the money for research is essentially unlimited.

The result is what I believe is the beginning of a boom of innovation in how we do viral testing and intervention.

First of all, we’re developing a COVID vaccine in a way that is very different from how we typically develop vaccines. Vaccines work by imitating infection. The first vaccine was for smallpox and involved injecting people with cowpox, a less deadly form of the virus. The resulting mild illness gave people immunity to the much more deadly version.

This is how all vaccines work; they train the body to fight infection. The may use live (but weakened) forms of the alien agent or dead versions or partial versions. The idea is to give people enough of the foreign DNA/RNA to let their body learn how to fight it without the deadly sickness part.

But the most promising COVID vaccines operate differently. In this very informative thread, Dr Jen Heemstra walks us through a concept I will attempt to summarize.

Jen Heemstra @jenheemstra

Vaccines usually take over 10 years to develop, test, and mass produce. But, scientists predict we could have an effective vaccine for Covid-19 by early 2021. How is this possible? They’re betting on a new vaccine strategy. If successful, it could be transformative. A thread.

Basically, instead of trying create a vaccine that will protect against the damaging core of the virus, the COVID vaccines are trying to protect against the “spike proteins”. Spike proteins latch onto our cell walls and allow the virus to enter our cells and infect us. If our immune system can be trained to resist the spike protein, then the deadly part of the virus can’t infect and maybe we don’t need “traditional” immunity.

But even the spike protein is complex enough that it would take a lot of time to generate enough of it in a form stable enough for a mass market vaccine. A team at the University of Texas is developing one vaccine focused on exactly this problem. Their solution was to design a substitution protein that still gives immunity, but is easier to generate, freeze, thaw, and store.

But what Dr Heemstra is talking about is something much more grand. She’s talking about COVID vaccines that actually teach your body to self-generate proteins that look like COVID spike proteins and then defend itself from them. So your body is actually making these new viral proteins for no other purpose than to resist them for practice.

This is, if I understand correctly, an incredibly innovative and wholly new method of vaccine development. It could be a breakthrough that adds a powerful new tool to our disease-fighting toolkit. It would have astounding implications for vaccine development since vaccine manufacture is such a big technical hurdle when it comes to a new vaccine.

And if I don’t understand this correctly and you do, please don’t hesitate to let me know what I got wrong.

Innovation vs COVID

In addition to this new type of vaccine, we also got some great news this week when the director of the NIH announced that since they started their Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) program, they have gotten hundreds of proposals for new and innovative testing procedures to help us quickly identify even asymptomatic COVID cases. From these proposals, they’ve selected 100 that went through a one week “shark-tank” evaluation process. And in the three months since they started this program, they have 7 technologies in phase 2, which means they can start scaling up these promising diagnostic technologies for wider use.

These innovations include hand-held tests that provide results in minutes and large-scale lab solutions that could increase our testing capacity by hundreds of thousands of tests per day in the next few months. You can watch the video below for details, it’s extremely involved.

Additionally, researchers have gone full-throttle on identifying existing drugs that could be repurposed to treat COVID. Using a high-throughput screening process, Hong Kong researchers screened almost 12,000 existing drug compounds and winnowed that list down to 100 that show promise in limiting COVID growth in an infected individual.

It’s hard to describe how crazy fast this is. The FDA process for doing this for a single drug typically takes multiple years and millions of dollars. What we’re seeing in these few months in medical device development, vaccine trials, and drug repurposing is like watching someone do a cannonball run in a rocketship.

It’s still to early to tell, but I suspect there will be a lot of calls from the research community to continue this kind of untethered innovation long after after all this is behind us. This could be starting point of medical innovation revolution that kick-starts a generation of rapid development in life-saving technologies.

Disney Short: Pluto’s Dream House

Mickey decides to build Pluto a new doghouse and, as they are breaking ground, they unearth a magic lamp. Mickey, sensing the opportunity here, wished for the lamp to build Pluto’s house for him.

The result is cute, the lamp causes all the tools to come alive and construct an luxurious and gaudy dwelling place for Pluto, whereupon Mickey sets it to the task of bathing Pluto. The short descends into a delightful absurdist slapstick when Mickey’s radio breaks and the lamp misinterprets the shifting radio stations as additional instructions from Mickey.

There’s a lot of setup to get to the really fun silliness in the last third of this short. I like it, but it reminds me a little bit of some of the Looney Tunes that really reveled in absurdist humor. This feels like Disney is trying to get into that silliness but is determined to hold fast to the narrative structure that he has pioneered for his shorts over the last 15 years.