Culture

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, medical experts have stressed the importance of having a plan in the event of a positive test result. Where should you self-isolate? Do you have personal protective equipment for family members? Who should you notify about your diagnosis? An overwhelming 96% of healthy, educated adults surveyed by University of Houston researchers in the early stages of the pandemic did not have a comprehensive plan in mind, while 62% didn't have a plan at all.

"What that suggests is that it was difficult even for very high functioning people to digest and use all the complex information that was quickly emerging about COVID. They were largely unprepared and unsure how to proceed," said Steven Woods, UH psychology professor and corresponding author of the study published in the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology.

The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Woods and Michelle A. Babicz, first author and UH clinical psychology doctoral student, spoke to 217 participants by phone between April 23 and May 21, 2020. Survey participants completed standard measures of neurocognition, health literacy, intelligence, personality and anxiety, while also answering questions about their COVID-19 information seeking skills, knowledge and adherence to recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, such as wearing masks and social distancing.

"The surprising outcome confirms the importance of building basic health literacy skills, because people's ability to understand numbers and medical terms was associated with how effectively they looked for credible COVID-19 information on the internet, how much they learned about COVID-19, and how they used that information to keep themselves and others safe," explained Woods, who runs the Cognitive Neuropsychology of Daily Life Laboratory in the UH College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.

Researchers point out that if these healthy individuals had a challenging time absorbing COVID-related information, then such challenges may be even greater in people with limited educational opportunities or with neurocognitive disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease or a brain injury, due to low health literacy and impaired memory.

"People with lower neurocognitive ability may be at higher risk for acquiring and using misinformation about COVID-19, which could have downstream implications for both personal and public health," said Babicz.

The researchers offer an array of effective techniques for individuals to improve their ability to learn and remember health information, including spacing, which is processing new information over time rather than cramming it in all at once. In addition, they suggest using flash cards to test knowledge recall and elaboration -- the practice of building a story around what one has learned.

"The findings may also help with the development and targeting of information campaigns as new public health crises inevitably emerge," Babicz added. "We suggest these campaigns use language and constructs that are accessible to persons with low levels of health literacy, perhaps through community-based participatory research approaches."

Following the first wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections in spring 2020, Europe experienced a resurgence of the virus starting late summer. Although it appears clear that travel had a significant impact on the circulation of the virus, it remains challenging to assess how it may have restructured and reignited the epidemic in the different European countries.

In a new study published in the journal Nature this June 30th, 2021, Philippe Lemey - Rega Institute, KU Leuven, Simon Dellicour - SpELL, Spatial Epidemiology Lab, Université Libre de Bruxelles, and their collaborators, built a phylogeographic model to assess how newly introduced viral lineages, as opposed to persisting ones, contributed to the resurgence of COVID-19 in Europe. Their model was informed using epidemiological, mobility, and viral genomic data from ten European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom, Switzerland).

Their analyses show that in the majority of the countries under investigation, more than half of the lineages circulating at the end of the summer resulted from new introductions since June 15. The researchers also show that the success of transmission of the newly introduced lineages was predicted by the local incidence of COVID-19: in countries that experienced a relatively higher summer incidence (e.g. Spain, Portugal, Belgium and France), the introduction events led to proportionately fewer active transmission chains after August 15.

For instance, their results also indicate that introductions in the UK were particularly successful in establishing local transmission chains, with a considerable fraction of introductions originating from Spain.

"Imagine a fire: if there are already quite a few outbreaks in a forest, lighting a few more will not change the fate of the forest; the fire will spread anyway. On the opposite, if there are only a few sporadic fire spots, then lighting new ones can accelerate and increase the violence of the overall fire to come" explains Simon Dellicour - author of the article, FNRS Research Associate at the ULB.

These results illustrate the threat of viral spread via international travel, a threat that must be carefully considered by strategies to control the current spread of variants that are more transmissible and/or evade immunity.

The pandemic exit strategy offered by vaccination programs is a source of optimism that also sparked proposals by EU member states to issue vaccine passports in a bid to revive travel and rekindle the economy. In addition to implementation challenges and issues of fairness, there are risks associated with such strategies when immunization is incomplete, as likely will be the case for the European population this summer.

The authors of the study conclude that conditions similar to those demonstrated in their study could provide fertile ground for viral dissemination and resurgence, which may now also involve the spread of variants that evade immune responses triggered by vaccines and previous infections. They hope that a well-coordinated, unified implementation of European strategies to mitigate the spread of SARS-CoV-2 will reduce the chances of future waves of infection.

Levelling up access to finance so that poorer countries can afford the funds needed to switch to renewable energy could see regions like Africa reaching net zero emissions a decade earlier, according to a study led by UCL researchers.

Access to finance (credit) is vital for the green energy transition needed to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, as laid out in the Paris Agreement. But access to low-cost finance is uneven, with the cost of securing capital to help reach net zero differing substantially between regions.

Modelling created for the study, Higher cost of finance exacerbates a climate investment trap in developing economies, published in Nature Communications, shows the road to decarbonisation for developing economies is disproportionately impacted by differences in the weighted average cost of capital (WACC). This is a financial ratio used to calculate how much a company or organisation pays to finance its operations, whether through debt, equity or both. The lower the value, the easier the company or government can access funds.

In the case of Africa, and a scenario where global warming this century is kept at 2°C, researchers calculated that current unfavourable WACC values will stunt the region's green electricity production by 35%.

The study is a collaboration between researchers from the UCL Institute of Sustainable Resources and the UCL Energy Institute, both of which sit with in UCL's Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment. It makes the case for policy interventions to lower WACC values for low-carbon technologies by 2050. This would allow Africa to reach net-zero emissions approximately 10 years earlier than if reductions in the cost of capital are not considered, so 2058 rather than 2066.

It describes the 'climate investment trap' that developing economies are faced with when climate-related investments remain chronically insufficient. These regions of the world already pay a high cost of finance for low-carbon investments, delaying the energy system transition and the reduction of emissions. Yet, unchecked climate change would lead to greater impacts in these regions, raising the cost of capital and discouraging investment even further. The trap is so binding in itself that poorer countries will struggle to escape it - especially in the aftermath of COVID-19 and its impact on their economies.

While developing economies require the bulk of low-carbon investment, and developed countries are where the most financial capital is, the former currently appear to be left out by the main current sustainable finance efforts and initiatives.

The authors of the report suggest that radical changes are needed such as helping to underwrite the perceived greater risks of low carbon investments in such regions.' So that capital is more equitably distributed and all regions, not just those in the global north, can afford to work towards net zero at the rate needed to tackle climate change for the benefit of everyone.

International organisations such as the IMF, investors and policymakers can all take responsibility for lowering the costs of capital in Africa.

Lead author Dr Nadia Ameli (UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources) said: "Our research shows how earlier action to improve financing conditions could have a significant impact on the speed and timing of the transition to renewable energy in lower and middle-income countries which, in turn, will significantly help to protect our planet.

"We don't believe it is fair that regions where people are already losing their lives and livelihoods because of the severe impacts of climate change also have to pay a high cost of finance to switch to renewables. Radical changes in finance frameworks are needed to better allocate capital to the regions that most need it. We should take the opportunity to reframe international market finance, where lower cost of capital for developing economies would allow for low-carbon development at a more internationally equitable cost. The sooner we act the better."

Co-author Professor Michael Grubb (UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources) said: "There is a growing belief that, with the dramatic decline in the global average cost of renewable, it will be much easier for the developing world to decarbonise. Our analysis shows that major obstacles remain, particularly given the difficulties that many of these countries have in accessing capital on the same terms. Appropriate international financial support remains vital to accelerate global decarbonisation."

Co-author Dr Hugues Chenet (UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources) said: "Our analysis shows the additional difficulty for least developed economies to access capital to finance their decarbonation. Sadly, we see that these countries are literally left aside by new sustainable finance policy frameworks such as the European Union Sustainable Finance Action Plan, which ignores parts of the world that need it most."

Co-author Dr Matt Winning (UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources) said: "Often developing economies are simply disadvantaged when it comes to decarbonisation simply because they are that, developing. Even with abundant renewable resources, developing region capital costs can be higher simply because of the risks involved in investing there. Our results show that policies to achieve a more level playing field for climate finance for those economies can make a significant impact."

Earlier this month UCL and University of Exeter academics joined with the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) to launch a 1.5 Degree Charter to highlight to global leaders how breaching the 1.5?C target for warming this century, outlined in the Paris Agreement, will cost far more than paying poorer nations to help reach it.

Bioplastics -- biodegradable plastics made from biological substances rather than petroleum -- can be created in a more economical and environmentally friendly way from the byproducts of corn stubble, grasses and mesquite agricultural production, according to a new study by a Texas A&M AgriLife Research scientist.

green tractor pulling a red cart through a field of bioenergy sorghum that is taller than the tractor

A bioenergy sorghum crop is harvested near College Station. (Texas A&M AgriLife photo)

This new approach involves a "plug-in" preconditioning process, a simple adjustment for biofuel refineries, said Joshua Yuan, Ph.D., AgriLife Research scientist, professor and chair of Synthetic Biology and Renewable Products in the Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Department of Plant Pathology. These "plug-in" technologies allow for optimization of sustainable, cost-effective lignin -- the key component of bioplastics used in food packaging and other everyday items.

The $2.4 million project is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Bioenergy Technologies Office. The research has recently been published in Nature Communications.

Yuan and researchers are submitting next-phase requests for additional project funding.

An adaptable process

head shot of a man in glasses - Joshua Yuan.
Joshua Yuan, Ph.D. (Texas A&M AgriLife photo)

Efficient extraction and use of lignin is a major challenge for biofuel refineries, Yuan said.

"Our process takes five conventional pretreatment technologies and modifies them to produce biofuel and plastics together at a lower cost."

Yuan's research builds on previous work investigating enhanced extraction methods for lignin.

The new method, named "plug-in preconditioning processes of lignin," or PIPOL, can be directly added into current biorefineries and is not cost prohibitive, Yuan said. PIPOL is designed to integrate dissolving, conditioning and fermenting lignin, turning it into energy and making it easily adaptable to biorefinery designs.

Bioeconomy 'a federal priority'

Yuan said the bioeconomy and biomanufacturing sectors are a federal priority as the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy points to bioeconomy infrastructure, innovation, products, technology and data to enhance U.S. economic growth.

a picture of a sorghum head after seeds were removed as well as a stock and a small glass container with seed in it

A high-yielding perennial sorghum forage hybrid can be used as a feedstock to create bioplastics in a more economical and environmentally friendly way. (Texas A&M AgriLife photo by Kay Ledbetter)

The bioeconomy supports some 285,000 jobs and generates $48 billion in annual revenue.

"Innovation is the key to achieving growth and a more widespread use of biodegradable plastics. Lignocellulosic biorefinery commercialization is hindered by limited value-added products from biomass, lack of lignin utilization for fungible products and overall low-value output with ethanol as primary products," he said. "This recent discovery will make significant strides to overcome some of these challenges."

Yuan also touted the research for its environmentally friendly aspects.

"We are producing over 300 million tons of plastics each year," he said. "It's critical to replace those with biodegradable plastics. This work provides a path to produce bioplastics from common agriculture waste like [that from production of] corn and other grasses and wood.

"We think this research is very industrially relevant and could only help enable the biorefinery and polymer industries to [attain] greater efficiencies and economic opportunity."

The role of agriculture byproducts

AgriLife Research and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences share a commitment to seek solutions through science to solve environmental challenges. Their research has already found that sustainable products such as mesquite and high-tonnage sorghum can be used as feedstock for biofuel production.

Agricultural byproducts such as corn stubble and other grasses are alternative feedstock sources for biofuel plants, Yuan said. These create potential new revenue streams for farmers as well as the transportation sector that transports harvested feedstock and byproduct crops to refinery operations.

"We have shown that bioplastics from lignocellulosic biorefineries can be more economically beneficial, which opens new avenues to use agricultural waste to produce biodegradable plastics," Yuan said. "The discovery will mitigate global climate changes via replacing fossil fuel and nondegradable plastics by renewable and biodegradable plastics."

Newly published research shows that a screening program in the University of Cincinnati Medical Center Emergency Department helped detect an outbreak of HIV among persons who inject drugs in Hamilton County, Ohio, from 2014-18.

The study was published in PLOS ONE.

The results of the study highlight UC contributions to public health surveillance as yet another reason why emergency departments should be screening for undiagnosed HIV infections, according to Michael Lyons, MD, associate professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the UC College of Medicine.

"The importance of emergency department screening has been established for over 20 years," says Lyons. "Diagnosing people as early as possible allows for changes in behavior to stop spreading the illness and treatment that improves their health and makes them much less infectious to others."

Since 2015, an increasing number of HIV outbreaks among those who inject drugs have been reported in the United States. The study found this single testing site contributed 20% of new HIV diagnoses regionally during a period of rapidly increasing HIV infection in that group.

An Early Intervention Program (EIP) was founded at UC in 1998, the first program of its kind in the country. The EIP offers HIV intervention/prevention counseling, testing, linkage to care and many other services to assist individuals.

"Everyone understands that early diagnosis of HIV is critical for individuals and public health," says Lyons. "Everyone knows that when you screen, that data goes into surveillance systems. This study highlights that a contribution to surveillance is an important public health outcome. In this case, it helped public health authorities to identify a serious HIV outbreak and trigger a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigation and response planning. That's not to say that we solved this public health problem, but your chances of helping are a lot better if you know about the crisis than if you don't."

The screening is done through a blood test or an oral swab. The blood test method is the most common, and the sample is sent to the lab, with results returned typically in 90 minutes. If the patient has been discharged, the emergency staff follows up with them later. The health department is notified of all positive results for surveillance and to facilitate partner counseling and referral services.

Lyons says the screening program at UC follows a few different program models. They have publicly funded health promotion advocates who are adjunct health care workers in the department who help with screening. There are also integrated screening workflows in the electronic health record where the nurses and providers are prompted to order testing as well.

Lyons and the other researchers would like to see this study have an impact on public health policy as well as the frequency of HIV screening in emergency departments across the country.

"I hope that public health and policymakers continue to realize that understanding disease epidemiology through surveillance data is essential for fighting infectious disease and that emergency department data is very important to those surveillance efforts," says Lyons. "I also hope that emergency departments are even more motivated to expand HIV screening given their role in monitoring trends in epidemiology that guide public health response."

Study authors included representatives from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Ohio Department of Health and Hamilton County Public Health.

Some people casually smoke cigarettes for a while and then stop without a problem, while others develop long-term, several packs-per-day habits. A complex mix of environmental, behavioral and genetic factors appear to raise this risk for nicotine dependence.

Studies of groups of twins suggest that 40 to 70 percent of the risk factors are heritable. Until recently, however, studies have only explained about 1 percent of the observed variation in liability to nicotine dependence, using a genetic score based on how many cigarettes a person smokes per day.

A new study led by psychologists at Emory University offers a new model for examining this genetic risk. It leveraged genome wide association studies for a range of different traits and disorders correlated with nicotine dependence and explained 3.6 percent of the variation in nicotine dependence.

The journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research published the finding.

Higher polygenetic scores for a risk for schizophrenia, depression, neuroticism, self-reported risk-taking, a high body mass index, alcohol use disorder, along with a higher number of cigarettes smoked per day were all indicators of a higher risk for nicotine dependence, the study found. And polygenetic scores associated with higher education attainment lowered the risk for nicotine dependence, the results showed.

"If you look at the joint effect of all of these characteristics, our model accounts for nearly 4 percent of the variation in nicotine dependence, or nearly four times as much as what we learn when relying solely on a genetic index for the number of cigarettes someone smokes daily," says Rohan Palmer, senior author of the study and assistant professor in Emory's Department of Psychology, where he heads the Behavioral Genetics of Addiction Laboratory.

"What we're finding," Palmer adds, "is that to better leverage genetic information, we need to go beyond individual human traits and disorders and think about how risk for different behaviors and traits are interrelated. This broader approach can give us a much better measure for whether someone is at risk for a mental disorder, such as nicotine dependence."

"All of the traits and diseases we looked at are polygenic, involving multiple genes," adds Victoria Risner, first author of the study, who did the work as an Emory undergraduate majoring in neuroscience and behavioral biology. "That means that millions of genetic variants likely go into a complete picture for all of the heritable risks for nicotine dependence."

The researchers hope that others will build on their multi-trait, polygenetic model and continue to boost the understanding of the risk for such complex disorders. "The more we learn, the closer we can get to one day having a genetic test that clinicians can use to inform their assessment of someone's risk for nicotine dependence," Palmer says.

Although the hazards of smoking are well established, about 14 percent of Americans report daily use of tobacco. Around 500,000 people die each year in the United States from smoking or exposure to smoke, and another 16 million live with serious illnesses caused by tobacco use, including cancer, cardiovascular disease and pulmonary disease. While the toxic chemicals produced during smoking and vaping are what cause harmful health effects, it's the addictive component of nicotine that hooks people on these habits.

Risner worked on the current paper for her honors thesis. "Nicotine dependence was interesting to me because the vaping scene was just arriving while I was an undergraduate," she says. "I saw some of my own friends who were into vaping quickly becoming dependent on it, while some others who were using the same products didn't. I was curious about the genetic underpinnings of this difference."

The project leveraged genome-wide association studies for a range of traits and disorders. The researchers then looked for matching variants in genetic data from a national representative sample of Americans diagnosed with nicotine dependence. The results showed how polygenetic scores for the different traits and disorders either raised or lowered the risk for that dependence. The number of cigarettes smoked per day, self-perceived risk-taking and educational attainment were the most robust predictors.

The multi-variant, polygenetic model offers a road map for future studies. A clearer picture of heritability for nicotine dependence, for instance, may be gained by adding more risk associations to the model (such as nicotine metabolism) and clusters of polygenic traits (such as anxiety along with neuroticism).

"As we continue to zero in on who is most at risk for becoming nicotine dependent, and what inter-related factors, whether genetic or environmental, may raise their risk, that could help determine what intervention might work best for an individual," Palmer says.

"Just a few decades ago, it was not well understood that nicotine dependence could have a genetic component," Risner says. "Genetic studies may help reduce some of the stigma society has against substance use disorders, while also making treatment more accessible."

Risner graduated from Emory in 2019 and is now in medical school at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. This summer, she's applying the coding and analytical skills she learned at Emory to conduct research into genetic factors that may raise the risk for pre-term births.

A new way to target a mutant protein which can cause the deadliest of cancers in humans has been uncovered by scientists at the University of Leeds.
The mutated form of the RAS protein has been referred to as the "Death Star" because of its ability to resist treatments and is found in 96% of pancreatic cancers and 54% of colorectal cancers.

RAS is a protein important for health but in its mutated form it can be switched on for longer, leading to the growth of tumours.

One drug has already been approved for treatment but it can only tackle a small subset of the total number of cancers driven by RAS.

Now a team from the University of Leeds' School of Molecular and Cellular Biology has gone further and found a new way to target the protein to pave the way for a greater range of treatments for more patients.

Lead author of the report, Dr Darren Tomlinson, of the Astbury Centre for Structural and Molecular Biology, said: "The RAS protein has been referred to as the Death Star with good reason and that's because it's spherical and impenetrable, essentially preventing drugs binding and inhibiting it. We've identified a further chink in the Death Star that can be used to develop new drugs beyond the ones already in development."

The researchers used the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology's own patented Affimer biotechnology platform to pinpoint druggable "pockets" on the protein to allow effective treatment to take place.

The study was funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council, the Technology Strategy Board and Avacta and is published today (30 June 2021) in the journal, Nature Communications.

Dr Tomlinson added: "This work opens up the door for the hundreds of other disease targets. We could effectively probe any protein involved in any disease for druggable pockets in the future."

Co-first author of the report and PhD student, Amy Turner, from the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology, said: "Because it causes 20-30% of all known cancers, RAS really is the Holy Grail of therapeutic targets. The fact that it has previously been termed "undruggable" has allowed us to demonstrate the huge impact that our Affimer technology can have when it comes to treating challenging pathologies. We have already identified small molecules that bind to RAS, so it will be very exciting to be involved in developing these over the next few years."

The researchers say work on expanding more ways to target RAS is still in its early stages but they believe their discovery could lead to new treatments, putting Leeds at the forefront of the fight against cancer.

When it comes to understanding and predicting trends in energy use, the internet is a tough nut to crack. So say energy researchers Eric Masanet, of UC Santa Barbara, and Jonathan Koomey, of Koomey Analytics. The two just published a peer-reviewed commentary in the journal Joule discussing the pitfalls that plague estimates of the internet's energy and carbon impacts.

The paper describes how these errors can lead well-intentioned studies to predict massive energy growth in the information technology (IT) sector, which often doesn't materialize. "We're not saying the energy use of the internet isn't a problem, or that we shouldn't worry about it," Masanet explained. "Rather, our main message is that we all need to get better at analyzing internet energy use and avoiding these pitfalls moving forward."

Masanet, the Mellichamp Chair in Sustainability Science for Emerging Technologies at UCSB's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, has researched energy analysis of IT systems for more than 15 years. Koomey, who has studied the subject for over three decades, was for many years a staff scientist and group leader at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and has served as a visiting professor at Stanford University, Yale University and UC Berkeley. The article, which has no external funding source, arose out of their combined experiences and observations and was motivated by the rising public interest in internet energy use. Although the piece contains no new data or conclusions about the current energy use or environmental impacts of different technologies and sectors, it raises some important technical issues the field currently faces.

Masanet and Koomey's work involves gathering data and building models of energy use to understand trends and make predictions. Unfortunately, IT systems are complicated and data is scarce. "The internet is a really complex system of technologies and it changes fast," Masanet said. What's more, in the competitive tech industry, companies often guard energy and performance data as proprietary trade secrets. "There's a lot of engineering that goes into their operations," he added, "and they often don't want to give that up."

Four fallacies

This feeds directly into the first of four major pitfalls the two researchers identified: oversimplification. Every model is a simplification of a real-world system. It has to be. But simplification becomes a pitfall when analysts overlook important aspects of the system. For example, models that underestimate improvements to data center efficiency often overestimate growth in their energy use.

Some simplification is understandable, said Koomey, since often researchers simply don't have enough data. But too much simplification runs the risk of producing inaccurate results, he stressed.

The second pitfall is essentially the conflation of internet usage with energy demand: data traffic and energy use are not equivalent. "It seems rational to say that a 20% increase in data traffic would lead to a 20% increase in the energy use of the internet," Masanet said, "but that's not the way the system works." Networks have high fixed energy use, so energy demand doesn't change much when data traffic changes.

Imagine data throughput on the internet as passengers on a train. Most of the energy goes into moving the train. Doubling the number of people on the train won't double the amount of energy the train requires. "So there's this smaller, marginal effect that's well known to network engineers but is not always known among energy analysts," Masanet said.

The pace and nature of changes in internet technologies and data demand bring about the third pitfall: Projecting too far into the future. In a retrospective study(link is external) published in 2020 Masanet, Koomey and their colleagues found that earlier projections overestimated data center energy growth. They didn't foresee large increases in IT virtualization or shifts of workloads to the cloud.

Not only do we develop new and improved technologies, but industry structures and consumer demands often change as well. For instance, few people could have predicted the massive amounts of processing power now devoted to bitcoin mining just 5 years ago. That said, the researchers caution against extrapolating such early growth trends too far into the future. "When the internet was growing rapidly in the late 1990s, some analysts projected that IT would account for half of U.S. electricity use within a decade," Koomey said.

Given all this uncertainty, it's no wonder that analysts can miss the mark in their predictions. IT changes so rapidly that projections simply won't be accurate beyond a few years, Masanet said. In contrast, projecting decades out is common in other domains of energy analysis. It can be crucial for planning power grid capacity or transportation infrastructure, to name a few. This can lead to unrealistic expectations when it comes to forecasting IT energy use, which is much more rapid and unpredictable.

The final pitfall the duo identified stemmed from a lack of proper scope: overgeneralization. When data is scarce, it's tempting to apply growth rates from one part of a system to the system as a whole. Masanet offered the rise of cloud computing as one example. Although the energy use of many cloud companies grew rapidly over the last decade, this wasn't the whole picture for data centers. The energy use of traditional data centers fell concurrently as that part of the sector shrank, keeping the overall energy use of data centers in check during that same time period.

Similarly, while the rise in streaming video may drive up energy use for data centers, it could reduce home energy use by decreasing the number of TV set-top boxes, Koomey explained.

"You've got to look at the whole system and avoid extrapolating from just one part," Masanet said.

Going forward

In addition to dealing with a dearth of data and a complex system, tech companies and analysts don't have any standards for reporting internet energy use. Automobiles have miles per gallon -- the agreed upon efficiency metric in the U.S.-- but there's no analogue for data centers yet. One reason is that every data center is different: It's difficult to compare a center primarily engaged in scientific computing with another that mostly handles web hosting, Masanet pointed out.

Congress recently passed the Energy Act of 2020, which has provisions for data centers. "It's a positive sign that we're moving toward having those benchmarks that could enable more reporting from companies, at least in the U.S.," Masanet said.

"One thing the research community can do is help develop these metrics so that if companies do want to report and still stay confidential, they can have standard, agreed-upon, scientific metrics to use," he added.

"The world needs better IT energy predictions, and the analysis community needs to get a lot better at producing these, ourselves included," Masanet continued. "We've encountered these pitfalls in our own work.

"Now we need to recognize them and figure out how to avoid them in the future so that the we all can provide more rigorous outputs, because those outputs are becoming more and more important."

Koomey emphasized the importance of exercising restraint when confronting complex systems with persistent data gaps. While it can be appealing to make assumptions when data doesn't exist, that's not the best approach, he said. It's better to collect more data, acknowledge caveats and remain modest when making claims.

"Our goal is to promote accurate analysis of information technology, so that policymakers can make judgments based on reality rather than misconceptions," he said. "Data on IT electricity use will always lag behind reality because much relevant data are closely-guarded secrets, and these systems change so quickly. Analysts need to accept these inherent limitations and not make strong claims based on speculation or too many assumptions."

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- The chance of detecting the virus that causes COVID-19 increases with more frequent testing, no matter the type of test, a new study found. Both polymerase chain reaction and antigen tests, paired with rapid results reporting, can achieve 98% sensitivity if deployed at least every three days.

"This study shows that frequent testing can be really effective at catching COVID-19 infections and potentially blocking transmission," said study leader Christopher Brooke, a virologist and professor of microbiology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. "There are many places where vaccination is not yet widespread. With the rise of variants, testing remains an important tool for blocking the spread of the virus."

Part of the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics Tech program of the National Institutes of Health, the study brought together researchers at Illinois; the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester; Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore; and the NIH National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. The researchers published their results in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Students and employees at the U. of I. who had tested positive for COVID-19 or were identified as close contacts of a person who tested positive were invited to participate. Because of the SHIELD Illinois screening program, which required students and employees to take multiple saliva-based tests each week and returned results in less than 24 hours, the university provided an ideal location for identifying cases before they became symptomatic, the researchers said.

The 43 study participants received three tests daily for 14 days: a PCR nasal swab, a PCR saliva test and an antigen nasal swab. The results of each were compared with live viral cultures taken from the PCR nasal swab, which show when a person is actively infectious. The study also examined how the frequency of testing affected each method's efficacy at detecting an infection.

"Different tests have different advantages and limitations. Antigen tests are fast and cheap, but they are not as sensitive as PCR tests. PCR are the gold standard, but they take some time to return results and are more expensive," said Rebecca Lee Smith, a professor of epidemiology at Illinois and the first author of the study. "This study was to show, based on real data, which test is best under which circumstances and for what purpose."

The results showed that the PCR tests - particularly saliva-based ones - were best at detecting cases before the person had an infectious viral load, a key to isolating individuals before they can spread the virus, Smith said. For all three methods, testing every three days had 98% sensitivity to detecting infection.

If that testing frequency declined to once a week, the PCR methods maintained their high sensitivity but the antigen tests dropped to around 80%. That means organizations that wish to deploy antigen testing as part of a reopening strategy or individuals who wish to monitor their status at home should use antigen tests multiple times each week to achieve similar results to PCR testing, the researchers said.

"This work also shows how the PCR and antigen tests could be used in combination," Smith said. "For example, I work with a lot of school districts, helping them to plan for fall, since vaccines are not yet available to those under 12 years old. If a student had a known exposure or comes to school symptomatic, give them both tests. Antigen tests are really good at finding those highly infectious people, so that can tell administrators right away if the child needs to be sent home, rather than waiting 24 hours for PCR results. If the antigen test is negative, the PCR test is a backup, as it may detect the infection earlier than an antigen test would, before the student becomes contagious."

The results of the study helped inform the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's recommendations and instructions on how to use at-home antigen tests that recently received emergency use authorization. The researchers said they hope the results assist schools, businesses and other organizations as they reopen.

"If you are in a situation where you have the resources and capacity to do large-scale PCR testing with rapid results reporting like we did here at Illinois, you can identify infections early and potentially isolate people before they become contagious," Brooke said. "In places where PCR testing is not readily available or rapid results reporting is not possible, but the cheaper and more rapid tests are available, our data show how those tests can be deployed in a way that can increase their sensitivity - through repeated serial testing, ideally three times a week or more."

Key Takeaways:

Research reveals consumer demand declines when product packaging and marketing materials removed the claim, "Made in USA" and increase when the claim was featured.

The impact on sales is insufficient to convince some companies to manufacture more products in the United States but enough to incentivize companies to make deceptive "Made in USA" claims.

CATONSVILLE, MD, June 30, 2021 - Pick up any product in just about any store and you're likely to find information that indicates the country of origin of the product. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires this for any imported product, but not for products made in the United States. When you see the words "Made in USA" on a product, it's purely for marketing purposes. So, does it work?

According to a new research study, yes, it does. Seeing "Made in USA" does in fact affect consumer purchasing. However, some products falsely claim to be American made.

The study to be published in the July issue of the INFORMS journal Marketing Science, "Do 'Made in USA' Claims Matter?" is authored by Xinyao Kong and Anita Rao, both of the University of Chicago.

Since 2010, the FTC investigated more than 150 cases of deceptive or misleading claims about products made in the United States. For a brand to make the "Made in USA" claim, the FTC requires that the product be "all or virtually all" made in the United States with no or negligible foreign content.

For this study, the researchers focused on four of the cases that were found not to fit the FTC's criteria for allowing claims of being made in the United States. The researchers were able to examine and compare sales of the products before and after the information was removed from products, packaging, advertising, websites and other marketing channels.

"We focused our attention on four brands that included Gorilla Glue, Loctite Glue, Gorilla Tape and Tramontina cookware," said Kong. "For three of the four brands, the removal of the information had a negative impact on sales. Tramontina cookware saw a 19.5% decline in weekly store sales; Loctite Glue experienced a 6.1% decline; and Gorilla Glue suffered a 1.9% decline. The fourth brand we studied, Gorilla Tape, experienced a 'trend decline' following the FTC decision."

In addition to the study of those four brands, the authors also ran a field experiment on eBay where they were able to run more than 900 auctions over the course of three months, varying only whether a product was advertised with or without the "Made in USA" claim. This was done to learn more about whether the American-made claims provided significantly higher incentive to include that information.

The experiment showed the claims did matter. Auction transaction prices were 28% higher with the "Made in USA" claim, indicating that resellers and auctioneers have more incentive to display that information.

"In the field experiments, we chose a product category in which demand was already high on eBay," said Kong. "We then offered two variants of the product, one with the country-of-origin information, and one without. The products we chose were screen protectors for handheld devices. We eventually sold 912 screen protectors using three-day auctions on eBay."

The "Made in USA" claim on the auction prices placed significant price premium on products.

"While the increase in sales is not sufficient to justify the economics of relocating manufacturing operations to the United States, it is enough to incentivize some firms to engage in making improper and deceptive country-of-origin claims," added Rao.

When it comes to defense, the body relies on attack thanks to the lymphatic and immune systems. The immune system is like the body's own personal police force as it hunts down and eliminates pathogenic villains.

"The body's immune system is very good at identifying cells that are acting strangely. These include cells that could develop into tumors or cancer in the future," says Federica Eduati from the department of Biomedical Engineering at TU/e. "Once detected, the immune system strikes and kills the cells."

Stopping the attack

But it's not always so straightforward as tumor cells can develop ways to hide themselves from the immune system.

"Unfortunately, tumor cells can block the natural immune response. Proteins on the surface of a tumor cell can turn off the immune cells and effectively put them in sleep mode," says Oscar Lapuente-Santana, PhD researcher in the Computational Biology group.

Fortunately, there is a way to wake up the immune cells and restore their antitumor immunity, and it's based on immunotherapy.

Introducing immunotherapy

Immunotherapy is a cancer treatment that assists the immune system in its fight against cancer cells. One type of immunotherapy involves immune checkpoint blockers (ICB), which are drugs that tell the immune cells to ignore the shutdown orders coming from cancer cells.

The discovery of ICB has been revolutionary for cancer treatment, with James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo jointly awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on ICB.

Although ICB has been successfully used to treat plenty of patients and different cancer types, only one-third of patients respond to the treatment.

"ICB has had a big impact, but it could be bigger if we could figure out quickly which patients are most likely to respond to the treatment," says Eduati. "And it would also be great if we could understand why other patients are not responding to ICB."

To solve this problem, Lapuente-Santana and Eduati, along with colleagues Maisa van Genderen (TU/e), Peter Hilbers (TU/e) and Francesca Finotello (Medical University of Innsbruck), turned to machine learning to predict how patients might respond to ICB. Their work has just been published in the journal Patterns.

Searching the tumor microenvironment

To predict whether a patient will respond to ICB, the researchers first needed to find particular biomarkers in tumor samples from the patients.

"Tumors contain more than just tumour cells, they also contain several different types of immune cells and fibroblasts, which can have a pro- or anti-tumour role, and they communicatie with each other", explains Lapuente-Santana. "We needed to find out how complex regulatory mechanisms in the tumor microenvironment affect response to ICB. We turned to RNA-sequencing datasets to provide a high-level representation of several aspects of the tumor microenvironment."

To find the right mechanisms that could serve as biomarkers to predict patients' response to ICB, the team searched the microenvironment of tumors using computational algorithms and datasets from previous clinical patient care.

"RNA-sequencing datasets are publicly available, but the information about which patients responded to ICB therapy is only available for a small subset of patients and cancer types," says Eduati. "So, we used a trick to solve the data problem."

The trick

For their trick, instead of looking for the actual biological response to ICB treatment, the researchers picked out several substitute immune responses from the same datasets. Despite not being the primary response to ICB, together they could be used as an indicator of the effectiveness of ICB.

Thanks to this approach, the team could use a large public dataset with thousands of patient samples to robustly train machine learning models.

"A significant challenge with this work was the proper training of the machine learning models. By looking at substitute immune responses during the training process, we were able to solve this," says Lapuente-Santana.

With the machine learning models in place, the researchers then tested the accuracy of the model on different datasets where the actual response to ICB treatment was known. "We found that overall, our machine learning model outperforms biomarkers currently used in clinical settings to assess ICB treatments," says Eduati.

But why are Eduati, Lapuente-Santana, and their colleagues turning to mathematical models to solve a medical treatment problem? Will this replace the doctor? "Mathematical models can provide a big picture of how individual molecules and cells are interconnected, while at the same time approximate the behavior of tumors in a particular patient. In clinical settings, this means that immunotherapy treatment with ICB can be personalized to a patient. It's important to remember that the models can help doctors with their decisions on the best treatment, they won't replace them." says Eduati.

In addition, the model also helps in understanding which biological mechanisms are important for the biological response. Understanding and identifying the mechanisms that mediate ICB response can guide how best to combine ICB with other treatments to improve its clinical efficacy. However, this will first require experimental validation of the identified mechanisms before translating these results to clinical settings.

Dare to DREAM

The machine learning approach presented in the paper was also used by some of the researchers to take part in a DREAM challenge called "Anti-PD1 Response Prediction DREAM Challenge".

DREAM is an organization dedicated to running crowd-sourced challenges involving algorithms in biomedicine. "We came first in one of the sub-challenges and competed under the name cSysImmunoOnco team," adds Eduati.

Our immune system might be an efficient detective and disease hunter, but every now and then it needs a helping hand to eradicate elusive villains like cancer cells. Immunotherapy using immune checkpoint blockers is one such approach, but it doesn't work for everyone.

Lapuente-Santana, Eduati, and colleagues have certainly dared to dream, and their work could prove pivotal in quickly identifying those who could be successfully treated with ICB in the future.

Thanks to machine learning, the researchers hope to rapidly deliver proper and effective cancer treatments to specific patients.

And for some cancer cells, it means that there could be no place to run, and no place to hide.

Researchers studying the intersection of politics and psychology have long documented a link between threat sensitivity and social conservatism: People who are more socially conservative tend to react more strongly to threats. Conversely, those who are more socially liberal tend to be less sensitive to threats, viewing the world as a generally safe place and embracing change to explore new possibilities.

These findings have held across a variety of events, but during the pandemic, U.S. polls show that Democrats, who tend to be more liberal, have generally been more concerned about the COVID-19 threat than Republicans, who tend to be more conservative. A new UCLA study explores this reversal, probing the relationship between innate dispositions toward threats, the social environment and responses to the pandemic.

Led by UCLA graduate student Theodore Samore, anthropology professor Daniel Fessler and postdoctoral scholar Adam Sparks, along with cognitive scientist Colin Holbrook from UC Merced, the study found that Republicans' and independents' inclinations to embrace protective behaviors in proportion to their degree of conservatism were overruled by distrust in science and in liberal or moderate information sources. Republicans and independents also focused on the negative economic impacts of the lockdowns and the perceived infringement upon personal liberties. Together, these factors led socially conservative Republicans and independents to take fewer precautionary measures, such as mask-wearing, physical distancing and sanitizing.

"The distrust of science and public health officials, as well as distrust of moderate and liberal media sources, actually countermanded responses that reflected people's underlying personality traits," Fessler said. "For example, we can think about how behaviors among Republicans and independents may have been different if evangelical church pastors had promoted mask-wearing to protect the elderly and most vulnerable. Instead, conservative Republicans and independents were influenced by high-profile individuals who downplayed the severity of the virus and undermined reliable information sources."

Both major political parties span a range of social perspectives. Democrats were less influenced by messaging that undercut scientists and moderate journalists. Socially conservative Democrats were more willing to adopt precautionary measures than more liberal party members, demonstrating the connection between social conservatism and threat reactivity.

"There's been a broad tendency to see partisan responses to the pandemic as existing along a simple left-right axis, where more liberal Americans have exhibited greater precautions than more conservative ones," Samore said. "However, we find that more socially conservative Democrats were taking greater COVID-19 precautions than more liberal ones, suggesting that these political dynamics are in fact more complex than is commonly presumed."

As Holbrook explained, "The data show that conservatives who trusted scientific authorities and media reporting that advised precaution actually took greater COVID-19 safety measures than progressives did, and these patterns are not explained by factors such as differences in age or employment."

The research raises disturbing implications. "The findings suggest that Republicans would have been substantially more careful had their media environment encouraged them to do so, plausibly saving many thousands of lives and preventing scores of long-term health problems related to COVID infection," Holbrook said.

The investigators note that today's media environment is a key factor in how people understand and respond to major events.

"As we flatten the information highway, giving everyone a voice on social media, we undermine or lose the authority of professional journalists and scientists," Fessler said. "There is great potential for misinformation about science to be disseminated, and for people to actually act against their gut instincts or self-interest."

The investigators ran two studies, using identical methods, six weeks apart to ensure results would not reflect a specific time period's social and political landscape. For each study, 1,000 paid participants were recruited through an online crowdsourcing platform. Survey questions asked about political party affiliation; hot-button political issues, such as abortion, tax rates and military intervention abroad; and attitudes toward social change more broadly. Other questions assessed participants' views on science and attitudes toward a variety of media sources, individual journalists, and prominent politicians and scientists. Participants also reported the extent to which they followed various COVID-19 protocols, such as hand-washing, physical distancing and mask-wearing.

The good news, Fessler said, is that individual decisions aren't necessarily set in stone.

"As the success of the ongoing U.S. vaccination campaign demonstrates, when people of diverse political orientations are able to unite in the face of danger, everyone benefits," he said. "Understanding how individuals differ in their reactions to threats, and how this interacts with their political leanings and information consumption, may provide a vital link to understanding and addressing shared challenges in our increasingly interconnected world."

URBANA, Ill. - Proteins have been quietly taking over our lives since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We've been living at the whim of the virus's so-called "spike" protein, which has mutated dozens of times to create increasingly deadly variants. But the truth is, we have always been ruled by proteins. At the cellular level, they're responsible for pretty much everything.

Proteins are so fundamental that DNA - the genetic material that makes each of us unique - is essentially just a long sequence of protein blueprints. That's true for animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, archaea, and even viruses. And just as those groups of organisms evolve and change over time, so too do proteins and their component parts.

A new study from University of Illinois researchers, published in Scientific Reports, maps the evolutionary history and interrelationships of protein domains, the subunits of protein molecules, over 3.8 billion years.

"Knowing how and why domains combine in proteins during evolution could help scientists understand and engineer the activity of proteins for medicine and bioengineering applications. For example, these insights could guide disease management, such as making better vaccines from the spike protein of COVID-19 viruses," says Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, professor in the Department of Crop Sciences, affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois, and senior author on the paper.

Caetano-Anollés has studied the evolution of COVID mutations since the early stages of the pandemic, but that timeline represents a vanishingly tiny fraction of what he and doctoral student Fayez Aziz took on in their current study.

The researchers compiled sequences and structures of millions of protein sequences encoded in hundreds of genomes across all taxonomic groups, including higher organisms and microbes. They focused not on whole proteins, but instead on structural domains.

"Most proteins are made of more than one domain. These are compact structural units, or modules, that harbor specialized functions," Caetano-Anollés says. "More importantly, they are the units of evolution."

After sorting proteins into domains to build evolutionary trees, they set to work building a network to understand how domains have developed and been shared across proteins throughout billions of years of evolution.

"We built a time series of networks that describe how domains have accumulated and how proteins have rearranged their domains through evolution. This is the first time such a network of 'domain organization' has been studied as an evolutionary chronology," Fayez Aziz says. "Our survey revealed there is a vast evolving network describing how domains combine with each other in proteins."

Each link of the network represents a moment when a particular domain was recruited into a protein, typically to perform a new function.

"This fact alone strongly suggests domain recruitment is a powerful force in nature," Fayez Aziz says. The chronology also revealed which domains contributed important protein functions. For example, the researchers were able to trace the origins of domains responsible for environmental sensing as well as secondary metabolites, or toxins used in bacterial and plant defenses.

The analysis showed domains started to combine early in protein evolution, but there were also periods of explosive network growth. For example, the researchers describe a "big bang" of domain combinations 1.5 billion years ago, coinciding with the rise of multicellular organisms and eukaryotes, organisms with membrane-bound nuclei that include humans.

The existence of biological big bangs is not new. Caetano-Anollés' team previously reported the massive and early origin of metabolism, and they recently found it again when tracking the history of metabolic networks.

The historical record of a big bang describing the evolutionary patchwork of proteins provides new tools to understand protein makeup.

"This could help identify, for example, why structural variations and genomic recombinations occur often in SARS-CoV-2," Caetano-Anollés says.

He adds that this new way of understanding proteins could help prevent pandemics by dissecting how virus diseases originate. It could also help mitigate disease by improving vaccine design when outbreaks occur.

A pair of College of Business professors and their doctoral student at The University of Texas at Arlington are exploring how ransomware attacks sometimes pit organizations against the law enforcement agencies trying to protect them.

Kay-Yut Chen, Jingguo Wang and Yan Lang are authors of a new study in the journal Management Science titled "Coping with Digital Extortion: An Experimental Study on Benefit Appeals and Normative Appeals." Chen and Wang are professors of information systems and operations management at UTA. Lang is a doctoral student in the department.

A ransomware attack is like a cyber hijacking, with criminals infiltrating and seizing an organization's data or computer systems and demanding a payment or ransom to restore access.

In its study, the UTA trio explains that companies are finding that it makes sense to negotiate with their attackers to drive down the cost of the ransom. But such behavior in turn incentivizes attackers to continue their illegal activities and runs counter to FBI guidance.

"From a policy perspective, the FBI is telling businesses not to give in," Wang said. "But we've found that when you're trying to run a business, there is almost always a ransom that becomes similar to a break-even point."

This study investigates in part how to nudge companies toward adopting strategies that decrease the risk of digital extortion. The researchers used behavioral game theory to study tactics such as investing in cybersecurity or refusing to pay ransoms and used human subject experiments to analyze strategic decisions made by interacting players.

"We reason that when companies are hit with ransomware attacks, even if they pay the ransom, they still must pay for added security," Chen said.

National data shows these ransomware attacks are spiking, with experts saying an organization is attacked by ransomware every 40 seconds. Earlier this year, one of the nation's largest pipelines, carrying gasoline and jet fuel from Texas to the East Coast, shut down after a ransomware attack.

"We must convince companies that just because the bad actors come down on the ransom, it doesn't make it right to pay them--and you'll probably continue to have problems," Wang said. "We need to encourage firms to do the right thing in security investing. Recognizing the long-term benefits of this approach could help other companies come to the right decision."

Elevated levels of three specific circulating proteins are associated with protection against kidney failure in diabetes, according to research from the Joslin Diabetes Center that will be published 30th June in Science Translational Medicine.

"As well as acting as biomarkers for advancing kidney disease risk in diabetes, the proteins may also serve as the basis for future therapies against progression to the most serious types of kidney disease," said Andrzej S. Krolewski MD, PhD, senior author on the publication, senior investigator at Joslin Diabetes Center and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. This would likely include the delay and prevention of end stage renal disease (ESRD), which is the most serious and advanced stage of diabetic kidney disease.

The study marks a move towards looking for markers associated with protection against, rather than increased individual risk, for the rapid progression of diabetic kidney disease. This should more directly derive potential targets for slowing progression since it is based on the thinking that individuals with slow progression will have protective factors of some sort.

"Our research became possible only recently," said Dr. Krolewski. "We were able to search for these markers thanks to the development of high-throughput proteomic platforms. More importantly, the availability of biobank specimens that we established many years ago in the Joslin Kidney Study was critical."

According to the report, the researchers profiled levels of just over 1000 proteins in the plasma samples that were taken at baseline in the original study. All of them had diabetes and moderately impaired kidney function. They used two cohorts of individuals with either type 1 or type 2 diabetes that were followed for between 7 and 15 years.

The main aim was to identify proteins that were elevated in individuals with slow or minimal decline in kidney function over the follow-up period. Notably they did validate the initial findings in a further cohort of individuals with type 1 diabetes.

Working through potential candidate proteins, they found three proteins that appeared to offer protection against progressive decline. These were fibroblast growth factor 20 (FGF20), angiopoietin-1 (ANGPT1) and tumor necrosis factor ligand superfamily member 12 (TNFSF12).

In each case elevated circulating levels reduced odds of progressive kidney decline and progression towards ESRD. The combined effect of having elevated levels of all three proteins translated to very low risk for ESRD.

"The protective effects of these proteins seem to be independent, which suggests that there are multiple mechanisms involved. They may be causally related to the disease process or represent as-yet unidentified pathways involved in progressive renal decline," said first author Zaipul Md Dom PhD, a research fellow in the Dr. Krolewski's laboratory

The authors go further to look at the current biological knowledge relating to the individual proteins and kidney disease, identifying a number of potential mechanisms that might explain their protective effects. According to Dr. Krolewski these are potential new routes for research that they will follow.

Dr Kevin Duffin, co-author on the publication, and chief operating officer at Eli Lilly, Diabetes and Diabetic Complications said: "Our study identified specific circulating proteins that were depleted in diabetes patients with kidney disease who progressed to ESRD. These results suggest a personalized medicine approach might be possible for treating patients with low levels of the protective proteins. We think that administering protein therapeutic mimetics or treatments that enhance circulating levels of these depleted proteins might be the future." 

Dr. Krolewski added: "We have already started to develop protocols on how to measure concentrations of the protective proteins in clinical settings. We hope that these proteins can then be used to identify patients at risk of progression to ESRD, who can then be treated with new therapies."