Science Friday - New Rule Sets Stage For Electric Grid Update | Harnessing Nanoparticles For Vaccines

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

Upgrades to the power grid under a new rule could help accommodate an increasing renewable energy supply and meet data center demands. Also, extremely small particles might help scientists develop vaccines that are stable at room temperature and easier to administer.New Rule Sets Stage For Electric Grid UpdateThe US electric grid is straining to keep up with demand. For starters, our warming climate means more electricity is needed to keep people cool. Last summer—which was the hottest on record—energy demand in the US experienced an all-time hourly peak. And even though more renewable energy is being produced, our current grid, largely built in the 1960s and 1970s, was not built to handle those needs. Increased use of AI and cryptocurrency, which require power-hungry data centers, have only increased the burden on the grid.But on Monday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved new rules to upgrade the grid to accommodate rising demands. The policy includes approval for the construction of new transmission lines and modification of existing transmission facilities.Casey Crownhart, climate reporter for the MIT Technology Review, joins Ira to talk about this and other science stories of the week, including how a recent ocean heatwave will impact ocean life and the upcoming hurricane season, a new self-collection test for cervical cancer, and how a tiny beetle uses audio mimicry to avoid being eaten by bats.Could Vaccines Of The Future Be Made With Nanoparticles?In 2021, vaccines for COVID-19 were released, a little over a year after the SARS-CoV-2 virus triggered a global pandemic. Their remarkably short production time wasn’t the result of a rush-job, but a culmination of decades of advancements in infrastructure, basic science, and mRNA technology.But despite the years of innovations that allowed those vaccines to be developed and mass-produced so quickly, their delivery method—an injection—still has some drawbacks. Most injected vaccines need to be kept cold, and some require multiple trips to a pharmacy. And people with needle phobias may be reluctant to get them altogether. So what could the vaccines of the future look like?Dr. Balaji Narasimhan, distinguished professor and director of the Nanovaccine Institute at Iowa State University, joins Ira Flatow onstage in Ames, Iowa, to talk about how his lab is using nanotechnology to develop the next generation of vaccines, and how they could be more effective than current vaccines in the face of the next pandemic.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

The vaccine of the future could look a lot different than the ones today. This vaccine could be delivered to your home, and you could take a sniff of this vaccine and go back to work. It's Friday, May 17th, and it's also Science Friday. I'm Cyfry producer, D. Peter Schmidt. Today's vaccines are a bit of a modern miracle, as we saw in 2021 when the COVID-MRNA vaccines were released, just a year after the pandemic began. But despite the years of innovations that allowed these vaccines to be developed and mass-produced relatively quickly, their delivery method and injection is a pretty old technology that has some drawbacks.

So what could the vaccine of the future look like? But first, Ira Flato discusses the biggest news in science this week. It's no secret that the U.S. needs to update its electric grid. As our climate gets warmer, more electricity is required to keep people cool. And even though more renewable energy is being produced, our current grid largely built in the 1960s and 70s was not meant to handle those needs, especially now that AI and crypto mining are eating up so much juice. The good news, last Monday new federal rules were approved to upgrade the grid to accommodate those new demands. So what are they and when will they be implemented?

Here to tell us more about this and other news this week is Casey Crownheart, climate reporter for the MIT Technology Review. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me back. Happy to be here. Nice to have you. Okay, so tell us about these new rules. Yeah. So like you said, these are from the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and they're basically designed to help overhaul our grid. We have a massive line of new projects waiting to connect. We just need to build a lot more transmission. So basically, the commission has addressed the need for long-term planning in these rules. It requires people who own, you know, transmission infrastructure to conduct, you know, long-term 20-year plans. to kind of figure out what is needed in the future for the grid, and then also help to kind of

solve the problem of who pays for upgrades to the grid. So it'll, you know, make them make plans in advance for that sort of thing. So it could really help kind of build out our grid. Yeah, that's something that we really need, isn't it? Absolutely. Like you said, just between, you know, more energy needed for air conditioning, we're electrifying a lot of stuff, you know, being able to charge electric vehicles, data centers. There's just, we need a lot more. capacity on the grid. Yeah, that's, that's true. All right, let's turn towards the ocean. And now, I'm not surprised that it just broke a record heat wave, right? Yeah, it's been pretty constantly hot in the ocean, pretty much around the world. But especially in the North Atlantic,

there was this streak for over a year where every single day, the temperatures broke a new record. So we're seeing the ocean heating up. You know, there's a lot of climate change has to do with it. But also, there's a lot of other stuff. And scientists, actually aren't entirely sure why the ocean is getting as hot as it is. Could this then lead to a very dangerous hurricane season that we're going to be entering into? Absolutely. So we've started to see research groups release their predictions for this year's hurricane season. And pretty much everybody is saying that we're going to see a more active season than average.

Yeah, they're talking about numerous major hurricanes, right? Yes. So the long-term average is 14 named storms. So that's hurricanes plus tropical storms. Some scientists are saying, you know, we're going to get at least 20 named storms. One group actually even predicted up to 33 named storms. So, yeah, get ready for a pretty wild hurricane season. Yeah, add to that, we're heading into La Nina conditions and who knows.

Yeah, so that's part of it for sure is La Nina is, you know, one of those kind of natural shifts in climate and weather patterns. So we do usually see more active hurricane seasons in La Nina years. So that's definitely part of what's happening here. Now, I understand that another side effect of rising open temperatures could be something called gelification. Yes, yes. Another thing to be concerned about. So basically as the oceans, more close to the poles get warmer, some species of jellyfish and other kind of related creatures could expand towards the poles. And so this, I don't know, it may not sound like a big deal, but scientists say that as,

they've modeled this, they found that, you know, these jellyfish could cause a huge problem in some ecosystems. Because they're looking for colder water. Yes, they're, you know, they're used to a certain temperature. And as water gets warmer farther north, they'll kind of naturally expand a little bit. And this could be a problem because they can outcompete fish. You know, some of these bigger jellyfish will kind fill that same role. And so it could be a problem for a lot of fish. I can see a new movie, horror movie coming out, thinking on the sharks. Now, that's something else. Let's not go there. Let's stay with nature because last Friday we saw all these pictures of the colorful auroras on social media from many parts of the world where we don't usually see them and it was the result of a huge solar storm. And there was another flare on Tuesday.

Tell us about that. Yes, it's been wild on the sun. Basically, the sun has been really active. There are these kind of natural solar cycles. So every 11 years, you know, we get, you know, about four peaks in the sun. solar cycle. And so there are just naturally times when the sun is basically just flinging out these blobs of plasma. They have strong magnetic fields and it makes our Earth's magnetic field go a little haywire. Yeah, it was affecting, I understand, the GPS systems of tractors. Yes. When it going all over the field

instead of those neat little rows? Yeah. So I don't know how familiar you are with how farming works today, but it's really high tech, totally high tech. And so a lot of these GPS systems go down to like an inch so they can map where the tractor is going in a field and plant crops as close together as possible. And so part of the solar storm, it broke a lot of these kind of GPS systems, you know, as tractors talk to satellites and talk to equipment on the ground. So a lot of farmers had to stop planting or get delayed. You know, I have family in Wisconsin, so I was chatting with a friend there, and he was saying that they had to delay a lot of their planting, getting the corn in the ground. Who would a thunk? I know. Yeah, it's wild. Unexpected consequence. And well, just to be sure,

this solar activity is somewhat regular, right? It's part of an 11-year solar cycle. Yes. Yeah. So we do see kind of these natural ebbs and flows, but it's a little bit tricky to detect when these storms are going to be really strong. You know, we do kind of get a couple of days notice that scientists can try to predict when a solar storm is coming, but, you know, the intermachican nations of the sun are a little bit opaque. Yeah. This week, moving on, the FDA approved a self-collection screening for cervical cancer. Tell us what's significant about that. Explain that, please. Yeah. So cervical cancer is one of the most common types of cancer, and nearly all kinds of cervical cancer are caused by infection with HPV, the human papilloma virus. Anyone can contract this

virus and it can cause cervical cancer over time, usually, kind of a longstanding infection. There is a vaccine for cervical cancer and we do have screening tests for it, but there's a big kind of disparity in access to that, both to the vaccine and to screening. Usually the test for HPV is done in gynecologist office and for a lot of different reasons people might not go there. So the FDA wants to open up, you know, where and how people can get screened for HPV. And so does that mean at home or in health care facilities where? Yeah, so not quite home yet. So this move by the FDA opened up screening to allow patients to collect their own test

samples, so like just doing kind of the little swab. So patients will be able to do this, you know, in private rooms like at their primary care physician's office and an urgent care. Think like somewhere that you might give a urine sample. So not quite at home yet, but that could be kind of the next stage is allowing home testing for a HPB. That is really interesting and something that hopefully will be very useful. And sticking with health news for a bit, the first person to receive a kidney transplant

from a genetically modified pig has unfortunately passed away. Yeah, so kidneys are one of the most needed organs for people who need organ donors. There's a wait list of usually tens of thousands of people long in the U.S. to get a kidney. And so researchers have been looking into using pig organs. which tend to be around the right size to go into human patients that need them. The problem is that often, you know, your immune system would reject these organs. And so we have to kind of genetically tweak the pigs to make these organs work. So this patient, his name was Rick Sleman, received a kidney from a pig a couple of months ago.

And unfortunately, yeah, he just passed away. Now, do we know if it had anything to do with the organ itself? Scientists haven't, they haven't said yet many details. There's no reason to think that there was anything in person. particular wrong with this. There were some signs of organ rejection about a week after his transplant, but he got treated with drugs and everything was fine. He actually got to go home for a little while. So it's not totally clear why this happened, but usually people who are doing these experimental medical procedures, you know, they tend to be kind of in a rough health situation. So.

Yeah. You know, Casey, this sounds really similar to a patient who got a genetically modified pig heart late last year and then passed away, right? Yes. So a couple of people got, yes, exactly, human. I I actually, when I saw this headline, I was confused because I remembered that story. But yeah, those were hearts. And yes, both patients who got those passed away a couple of months after their transplants as well. So we're still kind of working out how to make this work for people. Yeah. And it's unfortunate for these families. But, you know, again, these are people wouldn't probably have gotten a human kidney. So it's, you know, at least hopefully gave them a little bit more time. And the first human heart transplants were failures too. So it took a while to straighten all of that out.

So hopefully this will work. Finally, we've got a really interesting story here. It involves bats, beetles, and a battle of echolocation. Tell us what's going on. Yes. So this is a great story about acoustic camouflage. So usually when we think about animals trying to do camouflage, it involves looking like something else, you know, blending in or looking like something poisonous.

But researchers have found that some species of tiger beetles might be trying to sound like something else. So when Tiger Beetles hear the echo location clicks from bats, they release these high-pitched clicks that might be mimicking the noises that toxic moths make. So they're trying to fool the bats into thinking, hey, I don't taste good. I'm a poisonous moth. It's like radar jamming. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So actually some moths do have like sound absorbing wings and buzz on their on their wings or on their bodies, which helps them fool bat sonar. this is the first non-moth to use this sort of like acoustic trickery. And there's a somewhat related story that a new research out this week about how the body part

that beluga whales used for echolocation could have another purpose. Yes. This is, it's called their melon. Actually, it's a mass of fat tissue on their forehead that, like you said, it helps projects the sounds for echolocation. But researchers also think that beluga whales might be using these little four head bumps to communicate with each other. It's not totally clear if that's their intention, but researchers notice that these little melons, males tend to shake them around when they're courting

females. You know, they kind of push them out when they're trying to maybe be aggressive. So it's, hard to tell exactly what's going on, but yeah. So just to be clear, they can change the shape of their melon in communication? Yeah. So they can kind of like push it out, make it look a little bigger, or they can kind of like wobble it around. Yeah, just a way to kind of maybe communicate with each other. But researchers want to figure out if this is something just in this particular population of belugas they were looking at, if it's all beluga whales, what the deal is there.

That is really cool. You always bringing us cool stuff, Casey. Thanks for tech and have to be with us today. Thanks so much for having me back. Always a blast. Casey Crownhart, climate reporter for the MIT Technology Review. Hey, podcast listeners, Ira here. Science Friday has been receiving a lot of great feedback, and I want you to know that we hear you and I hear you. A lot of this feedback has been centered around our podcast and the switch we made to a daily podcast drop with shorter segments. We understand that this change has been welcome for some, but not for everybody. I want you to know that you can still find the full two-hour program, after it airs by going to our website, specifically ScienceFriiday.com slash episodes.

Importantly, we know that all the ads you hear in the podcast can be a bummer to the listening experience. Believe me, I get it. We are looking at alternatives, but wanted to let you know that our program depends on revenue from advertising. We took a pretty substantial hit to that advertising revenue in 2023 and are still suffering from it. Donations have helped, but in the meantime, we've had to explore different advertising channels and increase our ad inventory to bolster income. These are experiments, and who knows, maybe if more people donate and we increase listener support, this problem will disappear. Anyway, thank you for listening through it all and for sharing your thoughts with us. We count on

your listener feedback. And if you're inclined, you can make a donation today at ScienceFriiday.com com slash donate. Again, that's sciencefriday.com slash donate. And as always, thank you for your support. This is Science Friday on my reflato, live from Iowa State University in Ames. In 2021, vaccines for COVID-19 were released just a little over a year after the virus caused a global pandemic. Their remarkable short production time wasn't the result of a rush job, as you might have heard, but a culmination of decades of advancements in infrastructure, basic science, and mRNA technology. But despite the years of innovations that allowed those vaccines to be developed and mass produced in just a year, their delivery method, the needle, right? The needle, a dreaded

needle is pretty old technology that has some significant drawbacks. So what could the vaccine, what could it look like? That's what we're going to talk. about with my next guest, Dr. Biology Nira Simmons, distinguished professor and director of the Nanovacine Institute at Iowa State University. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Okay, so vaccines are great, modern vaccines are great, but they have a few drawbacks. Tell us what you think they are. So first, thank you for having me on the show, Ira. So today's vaccines are being manufactured with what I would call legacy technologies, technologies that have been around 70, 80, 100 years. many of them use chicken eggs and grow viruses and chicken eggs,

and that is a technology that's old, and it takes a long time. Our vaccines are also made in a way that they'll only work if they're kept cold. Really cold, right? Really cold. So I don't know if you remember this, but you know, you mentioned 2021. So labs like mine were looking for, you know, equipping our labs with freezers. And guess what? Walgreens and CVS had all the deep freeze equipment in the country.

So labs like ours had to wait six, seven, eight months before we could get equipment because these vaccines need to be stored cold. And so that is a huge drawback because if you think about transporting these vaccines, if you think about, you know, doctors without barters, organizations like that, leaving a fridge open for five minutes, you have to throw that entire lot of vaccine away. Five minutes. Five minutes of exposure to room temperature is enough to destroy the performance of the vaccine. So that is another huge drop.

As we've learned during the evolution of COVID vaccines, these vaccines, the way they're made today, also need to be updated as we see more and more variants. We started off with the parent version of the virus, and then we all know there's a huge number of variants that have come down the pike. And the first vaccine that worked is not going to work against the variance of today. So these vaccines also need to be constantly updated. And as you pointed out, Ira, they need to be delivered with a needle, which, I think is also a drawback.

Okay, yes. I don't know about you, but I think it's a drawback. Well, let's talk about it because you are working on using nanoparticles that don't need a needle. Tell us how that works. Right. So the strategy that we use is we want to hit the virus where it resides, right? So if you look at respiratory infections like flu or SARS-Co2, which causes COVID-19 or RSV, those pathogens reside in our lungs.

Right. Right? So we want to go, hit those guys where they reside. So this is like, again, going back to a Star Wars analogy, right? You got to, in a new hope, what was the strategy? Go directly to the source. So that's what we did. These things hide out in our lungs. So that's the dead star for them.

And so we need to get our vaccines to where they reside so that they can get rid of those pathogens. So if you're looking at respiratory infections, what is the best way to get vaccines into the lungs? it is through the use of inhalers. So these nanoparticles that we synthesize in our lab are able to be delivered needle-free. So these are vaccines that you can inhale. You can inhale with a very commonly used inhaler type device, which I have an example of here, which I can see.

So this is just like any regular inhaler that we're used to, except that you inhale the vaccine through your nostril. And you can take a sniff of this vaccine, and you'll have immunity in a week. You'll have immunity that will also last for long time. Why does it last longer? Okay, that's a great question. So these particles that you referenced Ira, these particles degrade slowly over time.

So imagine a bar of soap. So as you keep using that soap, it erodes layer by layer and slowly shrinks in size, right? That's how these particles are. So they will slowly erode over time and they will release whatever payloads are inside the vaccines, which are typically proteins, proteins that are specific to the virus that are we're trying to neutralize. So if you want to design a flu vaccine, you put in flu proteins. If you want to design an RSV vaccine, you put in RSV proteins.

So it's because of their slow degradation that they're able to release their payload over a long period of time, which gives us immunity that lasts for a long period of time, in contrast to existing vaccines whose immunity wanes over time. So you don't need the booster shots? That's the goal, yes, is that you would need fewer booster shots or ideally none. One of the other properties of this vaccine, Ira, that I'm very excited about that I think is a game changer is that this vaccine is room temperature stable. Wow. Wow. And so if I had this nano vaccine in an inhaler like this and kept it here on May the 4th, Star Wars Day of 2024, and I came back here to Stephen's auditorium on May the 4th, 2025, 2026, took this inhaler and used this vaccine, it'll still work.

years later. That's what our data shows. You can take this vaccine and deliver it to your home. So whenever that future pandemic hits, we want to be ready with technologies like this, where the vaccine will be self-administered by yourself. You don't need a professional to come and give you a shot or two or three. This vaccine could be delivered to your home because it's room temperature stable, and you could take a sniff of this vaccine and go back to work. Wow. Wow. You know, That's the future. That's the future that we dream about and that makes us come to work every day morning. You know, not only did my mother tell me when something sounds too good to be true, not to believe it, but as a science journalist for many decades, I always know there is some drawback to everything.

You have to sacrifice something to get something. What's some of the drawbacks here? So first of all, as I mentioned, even though we manufacture the vaccine with a process that is very well known to the pharmaceutical industry. We manufacture the vaccine using a process called spray drying. We have to demonstrate that we can manufacture at scale, right? This is a country of 300 million plus people. We need to make vaccines in terms of doses, I'd say 10, 20, 30 million doses a day, right? So we have to demonstrate that these vaccines can be manufactured at scale. So that's number one. Number two, as I mentioned, today's vaccines are made using legacy technologies that are 70, 80, 90 years old.

Change in industry is a very, very slow ship. So that ship turns very slowly. And so in order to get the pharmaceutical industry, the vaccine industry, to buy into these new manufacturing methods, so that these vaccines can be made rapidly, especially in response to a pandemic, is a second challenge. The last one, which I'm actually pretty encouraged to see now, is what we have, IRA, is what I call a platform technology. So it's a platform technology because it's plug and play. We were working on a flu vaccine when COVID hit, and we literally got an opportunity to pivot to seeing if our plug and play that we claim works very well would work with our COVID vaccine. And it did.

Whenever that pandemic is going to hit, these platform technologies, which can be packaged in devices like this, is what's going to help us get vaccines fast and to people where it's needed. Let's go to a question from the audience over here. Thank you. So basically you told about how these nanoparticles were designed for COVID. But as you also mentioned, needles are a big fear of mind. So how able could these nanoparticles be designed to be any other vaccine that it's not only lung disease, basically any other vaccine that you could design for the body? So there are other ways of delivering vaccines without using needles.

Two examples. One is a patch. So companies like 3M have designed nicotine patches, right, that people use. use all the time. So you can deliver the vaccine through the skin by using patches like that. So if there are vaccines for conditions that are not necessarily affecting the lungs, you can use a patch to get this vaccine with no needles. And of course, you know, maybe there's a way by which you can pop a pill. That will be our vaccine too. So those are technologies or those are approaches that our lab and other labs are working on in order to make this vaccine get to different parts of the body

effectively. Well, speaking of that, can you use it not just for viruses but possibly anti-cancer? things, stuff like that? Yep. Great question, Ira. So one of the things that these vaccines of ours do very well is they activate certain kinds of immune cells called T cells. And these T cells are a very important weapon against cancer. So if you're looking for harnessing your own immune system to fight off that cancer, immunotherapy, which is where your T cells come in, are very important. So you can use these nanoparticle-based formulations for cancer immunotherapy. You can also use them to deliver small amounts of drug to the brain. Current treatments for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's are not effective

in that they only treat symptoms and they don't slow down the progression of disease. One of the problems is that the types of drugs you need to get into the brain require large doses of those drugs to be effective. And so by lowering the dose of the vaccine, we are able to get the vaccine or the drug to the right place at the right time. And that's what these particles can do. Interesting. Yes. Over here. Would this style of vaccine be more adaptable to new variants of viruses? Well, thank you for asking that wonderful question. So, yes, and the reason for that is the strategy we use in designing our vaccine is we use a combination of proteins that the virus does mutate.

Together with proteins that the virus does mutate. So the virus doesn't change what's inside it because the virus may believe that those are not being used to target. the virus. Alternatively, those proteins may be important for the virus to survive. So if the virus is not changing those, why don't we teach our immune system to recognize that virus using things that it doesn't change? And that's what makes this approach amenable to variance. My last question to you is how long until they're available? Hopefully before the next pandemic. Well, hope is not a policy, as they say, in my business. We're talking three or five years.

10 years? That's three, five years. Three to five years is the target. What needs approval? Anything needs approval with the FDA or any along the way? Yeah. So the process is something that the FDA would have to inspect. The quality control, when we manufacture this at scale,

would be something the FDA would have to approve, and obviously they'd have to see data in humans. So all of these things take time. They take resources. So I'd say three to five years is a good guess, Ira, to start getting these to the point where they are translatable to the clinic. Interesting stuff, biology. Thank you for taking time for doing this today.

Thank you so much. Dr. Bala, Genera 7, a distinguished professor and directed the Nanovacine Institute at Iowa State University. That's all the time we have today. Lots of folks help make the show happen, including Beth Rami. Santiago Flores. Diana Plasker. John Dancosky.

Robin Kassmer. In our next episode, we'll talk about new breast cancer screening guidelines and why they were updated. But for now, I'm SciFRI producer Dee Peter Schmidt. See you then.