What Sonia Vallabh and Eric Minikel have been working toward since her diagnosis in 2011 is truly inspiring. The drug candidate was developed by Anastasia Khvorova and her lab at UMass Chan Medical School, in collaboration with Vallabh, Minikel, and their research teams.

What makes this effort even more remarkable is their commitment to sharing the drug development process openly, including an IND filing that would typically remain confidential.

Whatever the eventual outcome( I’m optimistic) about the possibilities, the journey, the data, and the knowledge shared along the way will be valuable.

This is not just about developing a drug; it’s about making science more transparent, collaborative, and accessible for everyone working toward the same goal.

Let's say her name again! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastasia_Khvorova

Yes, I totally agree with you. I had the same experience, the coral cover has decreased significantly over the last 1–2 decade, and the EL Nino is just accelerating it.

Liked the melody, would love to know more about the work you are doing.

Hey, this is a really cool idea! I’ve worked in the carpentry industry and our glass and aluminium shop used to do something similar to what your website is doing. People would come to us and share the work they needed done. Whenever a carpenter or worker came to us looking for work, we would share the available jobs, pricing, and details with them and connect them with the client free of cost. We mainly did this to help both parties find each other and get the work done. Because we were selling Glass and Aluminium and we earned many trusted clients and workers with this approach.

I’d love to suggest one thing: if you could create a text/WhatsApp alert system for temporary jobs, I’m sure you’d get more inflow. Most of these workers do not have an email but phone.

Yes totally agree, not just the carbon dioxide but other by products too.

With gut microbes handling the plastic degradation to proteins? :-D

even if you decompose it, plants uses the same during their growth.

That’s fine. Make it plant food, not human food. I’ll trust the food a plant produces by consuming this than eating it directly myself. There’s a filtering layer in ther

Not exactly these set of microbes(you will need to find the process). These authors used engineered microbes on a plastic derived substrate and not the plastic it self(PET).

To make a fuel or food or other stuff out of it you need to define the microbes set(mixture). Almost every study claiming plastic to X follows hybrid pattern, they break the polymer into smaller molecules by depolymerization either thermally/chemically for polyolefins like PE/PP/PS, since no enzyme is known to break a C-C backbone; enzymatically for ester-linked plastics like PET/PU, via PETase-type enzymes). Then it goes to the fermentation process, resulting small molecules into lipids (most common), PHA, or specific chemicals.

Sometimes a consortium(Mixture of microbes) is used, with different microbes handling different fractions of the breakdown mixture. Any "protein from plastic" claim is the same logic, the depolymerized substrate is just feeding an yeast, and the protein is the yeast biomass itself, harvested and used crude or extracted.

True microbial degradation of intact plastic polymers, no pretreatment, organism doing all the work, is still a challenging task for biologist.

Minor point, but a few years ago there was noise about waxworms being able to break down PE into ethylene glycol somehow, which would mean enzymatically breaking C-C bonds. No idea where that research ended up.

Yes, you are correct. Waxworm saliva in combination with gut microbes can digest PE.

thanks for sharing full text

Yes you are correct, at age 1 screen time is not at all in your hand, it's your parents who has access to it.