Patients with type 2 diabetes that were treated with a weekly injection of the breakthrough drug Semaglutide were able to achieve an average weight loss of nearly 10kg, according to a new study published in The Lancet today.
Led by Melanie Davies, Professor of Diabetes Medicine at the University of Leicester and the Co-Director of the Leicester Diabetes Centre, the study showed that two thirds of patients with type 2 diabetes that were treated with weekly injections of a 2.4mg dose of Semaglutide were able to lose at least 5% of their body weight and achieved significant improvement in blood glucose control.
More than a quarter of patients were able to lose more than 15% of their body weight — far above that which has been observed with any other medicine administered to people with diabetes.
Professor Melanie Davies said: “These results are exciting and represent a new era in weight management in people with type 2 diabetes — they mark a real paradigm shift in our ability to treat obesity, the results bring us closer to what we see with more invasive surgery.
“It is also really encouraging that along with the weight loss we saw real improvements in general health, with significant improvement in physical functioning scores, blood pressure and blood glucose control.”
This global multi-centre trial was conducted at 149 sites in 12 countries across North America, Europe, South America, the Middle East, South Africa and Asia, involving 1,210 patients with type 2 diabetes whose current treatment was not achieving sufficient blood sugar control, for instance through diet and exercise, or through the use of metformin and other glucose lowering medicines used to control the disease.
It is one of a portfolio of studies conducted as part of the Semaglutide Treatment Effect for people with obesity Programme (STEP) programme. Professor Davies has been involved in all four of the STEP clinical trials involving Semaglutide for weight management completed so far, where the medication was shown to help patients achieve an average weight of loss of between 10kg and 17kg of body weight.
Being overweight or obese is a significant contributor to type 2 diabetes. Many patients can manage their type 2 diabetes by eating a healthy diet, taking regular exercise, and using medications to help control blood sugar, or achieve glycemic control but for a significant minority of patients who have not seen much improvement in spite of these methods, semiglutide is a promising development.
This study was also supported by the NIHR Leicester Biomedical Research Centre, of which Professor Davies is the Director.

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Materials provided by University of Leicester. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Imagine you’re driving up a hill toward a traffic light. The light is still green so you’re tempted to accelerate to make it through the intersection before the light changes. Then, a device in your car receives a signal from the controller mounted on the intersection alerting you that the light will change in two seconds — clearly not enough time to beat the light. You take your foot off the gas pedal and decelerate, saving on fuel. You feel safer, too, knowing you didn’t run a red light and potentially cause a collision in the intersection.
Connected and automated vehicles, which can interact vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and between vehicles and roadway infrastructure like traffic signals and stop signs (V2I), promise to save energy and improve safety. In a new study published in Transportation Research Part B, engineers from Michigan Technological University propose a modeling framework for V2V and V2I cooperative driving.
Cooperative driving helps cars and their drivers safely and efficiently navigate. The framework uses an eco-driving algorithm that prioritizes saving fuel and reducing emissions. The automated algorithm calculates location-based traffic control devices and roadway constraints using maps and geographic information. The research is led by Kuilin Zhang, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and affiliated associate professor of computer science at Michigan Tech, along with Shuaidong Zhao ’18, now a senior quantitative analyst at National Grid.
For the past three years, Houghton, Michigan, has been home to roadside units installed on five of the city’s traffic signals that make V2I communication possible. Zhang conducted a simulation analysis using real traffic signal phasing and timing messages from the Ann Arbor connected vehicle test environment and plans to expand testing in the Houghton area.
“The whole idea of cooperative driving automation is that the signals in the intersection tell your car what’s happening ahead,” Zhang said. “The sensor at the intersection can benefit all connected vehicles passing through the intersection. The automated eco-driving algorithm improves the driving decisions of the connected and automated vehicles.”
The simulation results show that the cooperative automated eco-driving algorithm saves energy — 7% under light traffic and 23% under heavy traffic along the corridor.
“The stop and go, stop and go, it may use a lot of energy,” Zhang said. “The concept of eco-driving incorporates how the vehicle makes driving decisions using data not only from vehicles in front of it, but also with information given from a traffic signal.”
Zhang’s model pulls in high-definition (HD) maps, which use a connected vehicle’s hardware and software to provide down-to-the-centimeter accuracy in navigation. HD maps incorporate multiple types of environmental sensing: long-range radar, lidar, camera footage, short/medium-range radar and ultrasound.
Zhang said for autonomous driving, it’s important to know landmarks to control the car’s driving, as well as hill grades; using a hill to slow or accelerate a car can also increase energy savings. It’s easy to conserve energy on a straight highway; on busy arterial streets with traffic and stoplights, energy conservation isn’t so simple. On city streets, Zhang and Zhao’s online predictive connected and automated eco-driving model considers traffic control devices and road geometry constraints under light and heavy traffic conditions.

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Materials provided by Michigan Technological University. Original written by Kelley Christensen. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

In the 1995 movie “Outbreak,” Dustin Hoffman’s character realizes, with appropriately dramatic horror, that an infectious virus is “airborne” because it’s found to be spreading through hospital vents.
The issue of whether our real-life pandemic virus, SARS-CoV-2, is “airborne” is predictably more complex. The current body of evidence suggests that COVID-19 primarily spreads through respiratory droplets — the small, liquid particles you sneeze or cough, that travel some distance, and fall to the floor. But consensus is mounting that, under the right circumstances, smaller floating particles called aerosols can carry the virus over longer distances and remain suspended in air for longer periods. Scientists are still determining SARS-CoV-2’s favorite way to travel.
That the science was lacking on how COVID-19 spreads seemed apparent a year ago to Tami Bond, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Walter Scott, Jr. Presidential Chair in Energy, Environment and Health. As an engineering researcher, Bond spends time thinking about the movement and dispersion of aerosols, a blanket term for particles light and small enough to float through air – whether cigarette smoke, sea spray, or hair spray.
“It quickly became clear there was some airborne component of transmission,” Bond said. “A virus is an aerosol. Health-wise, they are different than other aerosols like pollution, but physically, they are not. They float in the air, and their movement depends on their size.”
The rush for scientific understanding of the novel coronavirus has focused — understandably — on biological mechanisms: how people get infected, the response of the human body, and the fastest path to a vaccine. As an aerosol scientist, Bond went a different route, convening a team at Colorado State University that would treat the virus like any other aerosol. This team, now published in Environmental Science and Technology, set out to quantify the dynamics of how aerosols like viruses travel from one person to another, under different circumstances.
The cross-section of expertise to answer this question existed in droves at CSU, Bond found. The team she assembled includes epidemiologists, aerosol scientists, and atmospheric chemists, and together they created a new tool for defining how infectious pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, transport in the air.

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Effectively rebreathed air
Their tool is a metric they’re calling Effective Rebreathed Volume, or simply, the amount of exhaled air from one person that, by the time it travels to the next person, contains the same number of particles. Treating virus-carrying particles agnostically like any other aerosol allowed the team to make objective, physics-based comparisons between different modes of transmission, accounting for how sizes of particles would affect the number of particles that traveled from one person to another.
They looked at three size categories of particles that cover a biologically relevant range: 1 micron, 10 microns, and 100 microns — about the width of a human hair. Larger droplets expelled by sneezing would be closer to the 100-micron region. Particles closer to the size of a single virion would be in the 1-micron region. Each have very different air-travel characteristics, and depending on the size of the particles, different mitigation measures would apply, from opening a window, to increasing fresh air delivery with through an HVAC system.
They compiled a set of models to compare different scenarios. For example, the team compared the effective rebreathed volume of someone standing outdoors 6 feet away, to how long it would take someone to rebreathe the same amount of air indoors but standing farther away.
Confinement matters
The team found that distancing indoors, even 6 feet apart, isn’t enough to limit potentially harmful exposures, because confinement indoors allows particle volumes to build up in the air. Such insights aren’t revelatory, in that most people avoid confinement in indoor spaces and generally feel safer outdoors. What the paper shows, though, is that the effect of confinement indoors and subsequent particle transport can be quantified, and it can be compared to other risks that people find acceptable, Bond said.

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Co-authors Jeff Pierce in atmospheric science and Jay Ham in soil and crop sciences helped the team understand atmospheric turbulence in ways that could be compared in indoor and outdoor environments.
Pierce said he sought to constrain how the virus-containing particles disperse as a function of distance from the emitting person. When the pandemic hit last year, the public had many questions about whether it was safe to run or bike on trails, Pierce said. The researchers found that longer-duration interactions outdoors at greater than 6-foot distances appeared safer than similar-duration indoor interactions, even if people were further apart indoors, due to particles filling the room rather than being carried away by wind.
“We started fairly early on in the pandemic, and we were all filled with questions about: ‘Which situations are safer than others?’ Our pooled expertise allowed us to find answers to this question, and I learned a lot about air filtration and air exchange in my home and in my CSU classroom,” Pierce said.
More to learn
What remains unclear is which size particles are most likely to cause COVID-19 infection.
Viruses can be carried on droplets large and small, but there is likely a “sweet spot” between droplet size; ability to disperse and remain airborne; and desiccation time, all of which factor into infective potential, explained Angela Bosco-Lauth, paper co-author and assistant professor in biomedical sciences.
The paper includes an analysis of the relative infection risk of different indoor and outdoor scenarios and mitigation measures, depending on the numbers of particles being inhaled.
“The problem we face is that we still don’t know what the infectious dose is for people,” Bosco-Lauth said. “Certainly, the more virus present, the higher the risk of infection, but we don’t have a good model to determine the dose for people. And quantifying infectious virus in the air is tremendously difficult.”
Follow-up pursuits
The team is now pursuing follow-up questions, like comparing different mitigation measures for reducing exposures to viruses indoors. Some of these inquiries fall into the category of “stuff you already know, but with numbers,” Bond said. “People are now thinking, OK, more ventilation is better, or remaining outside is better, but there is not a lot of quantification and numbers behind those recommendations,” Bond said.
Bond hopes the team’s work can lay a foundation for more up-front quantification of transmission dynamics in the unfortunate event of another pandemic. “This time, there was a lot of guessing at the beginning, because the science of transmission wasn’t fully developed,” she said. “There shouldn’t be a next time.”

Amyloid plaques are pathological hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) — clumps of misfolded proteins that accumulate in the brain, disrupting and killing neurons and resulting in the progressive cognitive impairment that is characteristic of the widespread neurological disorder.
In a new study, published March 2, 2021 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM), researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital and elsewhere have identified a new drug that could prevent AD by modulating, rather than inhibiting, a key enzyme involved in forming amyloid plaques.
In studies using rodents and monkeys, the researchers report the drug was found to be safe and effective, paving the way for possible clinical trials in humans.
“Alzheimer’s disease is an extraordinarily complex and multi-faceted condition that has, so far, defied effective treatment, let alone prevention,” said senior author Steven L. Wagner, PhD, professor in the Department of Neurosciences at UC San Diego School of Medicine. “Our findings suggest a potential therapy that might prevent one of the key elements of AD.”
Amyloid plaques are composed of small protein fragments called amyloid beta (Aβ) peptides. These peptides are generated by enzymes called β-secretase and γ-secretase, which sequentially cleave a protein called amyloid precursor protein on the surfaces of neurons to release Aβ fragments of varying lengths. Some of these fragments, such as Aβ42, are particularly prone to forming plaques, and their production is elevated in patients with mutations predisposing them to early-onset AD.
Several attempts have been made to treat or prevent AD using drugs that inhibit either β-secretase or γ-secretase, but many of these drugs have proved to be highly toxic or unsafe in humans, likely because β-secretase and γ-secretase are required to cleave additional proteins in the brain and other organs.

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Instead, Wagner and colleagues investigated the therapeutic potential of drugs known as γ-secretase modulators or GSMs, which instead of inhibiting the γ-secretase enzyme, slightly alter its activity so that it produces fewer Aβ peptides that are prone to form plaques while continuing to duties cleaving other protein targets.
“GSMs offer the ability to mitigate mechanism-based toxicities associated with γ-secretase inhibitors,” said Wagner.
In the new JEM study, researchers created a novel GSM and tested it on mice, rats and macaques. They found that repeated, low doses of the GSM eliminated Aβ42 production in mice and rats, without causing any toxic side effects. The drug was also safe and effective in macaques, reducing Aβ42 levels by up to 70 percent.
The novel GSM was then tested in a mouse model of early-onset AD, treating the animals either before or shortly after they began to form amyloid plaques. In both cases, the novel GSM decreased plaque formation and reduced plaque-associated inflammation, which is thought to contribute to the development of disease.
The findings suggest that the novel GSM could be used prophylactically to prevent AD, write the authors, either in patients with genetic mutations that increase susceptibility to AD or in cases where amyloid plaques have been detected by brain scans.
“In this study, we have pharmacologically characterized a potent GSM that, based on its preclinical attributes, appears to equal or exceed the potency of any previously tested GSMs,” said co-author Rudolph Tanzi, PhD, professor neurology at Harvard Medical School and director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital.
“Future clinical trials will determine whether this promising GSM is safe in humans and could be used to effectively treat or prevent Alzheimer’s disease.”
An estimated 5 million Americans are living with AD. The number of people with AD doubles every five years beyond age 65, according to the Centers for Disease Control, with the total number of Americans with the disease projected to nearly triple to 14 million by 2060. Currently, there is no known cure, only symptomatic therapies.

The coronavirus pandemic has drawn new attention to the digital divide, as the need for online schooling and working from home has disproportionately hurt those without computer equipment and skills.
Research by Paul A. Pavlou, dean of the C. T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston, found that people with basic Information Technology (IT) skills — including the ability to use email, copy and paste files and work with an Excel spreadsheet — are more likely to be employed, even in jobs that aren’t explicitly tied to those skills.
People with more advanced IT skills generally earned higher salaries, the researchers found. The work is described in Information Systems Research.
“Unemployment and low wages remain pressing societal challenges in the wake of increased automation, more so for traditionally-disadvantaged groups in the labor market, such as women, minorities, and the elderly,” the researchers wrote. “However, workers who possess relevant IT skills might have an edge in an increasingly digital economy.”
The findings, Pavlou said, reinforce the need for robust public policy to ensure people, especially women, older workers and others who are more likely to face employment discrimination, have the basic IT skills needed for the modern working world, since few companies provide on-the-job training in those skills.
“Very few people can get these skills from their employer. Workers are expected to obtain these IT skills themselves, in order to get a job in the first place” he said. “And the less-privileged population they are, the harder time they have obtaining these skills that require computer equipment and internet access.”
That leaves many workers, especially from under-represented populations in the labor market, unable to even apply for work, as more job applications — and now, interviews — are handled online.
In addition to Pavlou, co-authors on the paper include Hilal Atasoy of Rutgers University and Rajiv Banker from Temple University.
The analysis was conducted using two datasets from the Turkish Statistical Institute, and Pavlou said the findings are especially relevant for the developing world, where people are less likely to have IT skills and access to computer equipment than they are in the United States.
But the pandemic has laid bare unequal access to technology in the United States, too, as schools and universities struggle to provide students with computers, internet hotspots and other equipment to continue their educations online.
The work thus has implications for marginalized workers in the United States and other developed countries, Pavlou said. That includes women and older workers, who are more likely to opt out of the labor force if they cannot work from home — jobs that are more likely to require at least basic tech savvy.
“The digital divide is a major societal problem,” Pavlou said. “I think the pandemic will make it even more pronounced. People with basic IT skills will have access to more opportunities, and it is imperative for educational institutions to provide these IT skills, especially in traditionally-disadvantaged populations.”

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Materials provided by University of Houston. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.