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A significant rice in productivity: China’s output of GMO “seawater rice” doubled over the last 2 years
Although controversial, GMOs definitely have their advantages.
The single most populous country in the world today is China. It has been so for thousands of years. Historically, the incredibly fertile floodplains crossing through the land, such as the Yellow River delta, have given China access to reliable and bountiful crops. This meant that food was abundant, and a very large population base developed.

But in modern times, traditional farming practices simply couldn’t keep up with the immense population boom in China. Even the advent of mechanization and advanced farming techniques in the last few decades have not been enough to allow China to reliably feed all its people.

In a bid to finally ensure that nobody ever needs to go hungry in China again, researchers there have been hard at work developing “seawater rice”. Such a crop would allow farmers to grow a staple food on lands that were previously toxic to rice or too barren to be used — and ensure the country’s food security.

New rice
Output of this hybrid species has more than doubled in the last three years, explain researchers from the Qingdao Saline-Alkali Tolerant Rice Research and Development Center in the eastern province of Shandong. Last year, seawater rice could yield an average crop of 8.8 tons per hectare, which was increased to over 10 tons per hectare in 2022, according to the state-run Science and Technology Daily.

Such figures set a new record for the production of rice in environments where salt concentrations reach 4 grams per kilogram. Average yields for hybrid rice were also higher than those of the conventional crop, says Wan Jili, a manager at the research center in Qingdao.

With roughly one in every six human beings today living inside China’s borders, the country has quite a lot of mouths to feed. As such, every inch of arable land is valuable. But China also has around 100 million hectares of barren land inside its borders; between 6.7 million to 13 million hectares of these lands could be improved for rice cultivation, according to internal estimates.

Efforts to increase the yield of rice have mostly centered around the work of the late Yuan Longping, nicknamed the “father of hybrid rice”. Thanks to his research, China’s rice output has more than tripled since the 1970s.

Research into salt-tolerant rice started with Yuan Longping, and was heavily based on his previous efforts. The development of these strains began in 2012. In 2016, six locations in China, each with different soil properties, were chosen as test sites for the new species of rice. From there, the surface used for planting seawater rice has grown to over 400,000 hectares in China as of last year, spread over more than a dozen provinces.

The team aims to expand this growing area to more than 667,000 hectares this year. In the next 10 years, they plan to have 6.7 million hectares of barren land tilled and seeded with seawater rice.

“If the area planted with seawater rice can be expanded to 100 million mu [6.7 million hectares], it can produce an additional 30 billion kg of rice per year, which is equivalent to the total annual grain production in Hunan province,” Yuan said in 2018. “We could feed 80 million more people.”

They are also promoting this rice overseas. In 2018, Yuan’s team successfully demonstrated the crop in the deserts of Dubai, where they achieved an average yield of 7.5 tons per hectare.

Seawater rice was developed by tweaking the interactions between two genes present in conventional rice. This produces a grain that is much more able to tolerate heat and chemical stressors (such as high salinity). According to previous research, these genes can be spliced into other major crops, such as maize or wheat, with similar effects.

Cancer vaccines by 2030? Covid vaccine pioneers are optimistic
After developing the first effective vaccine against COVID-19, these two researchers have their eyes set on something bigger: cancer.
Not only was this a revolutionary vaccine in our fight against the pandemic, but it was also a breakthrough mRNA vaccine, demonstrating a new technology that could pave the way for a new generation of vaccines.

But the two aren’t resting on their laurels, and are already working on the next big thing. According to them, we have quite a lot to look up to in terms of new mRNA vaccines, especially in an unexpected area: cancer. Asked when mRNA cancer vaccines could be ready to use in patients, Şahin said they could be available “before 2030”.

Cautious optimism
Speaking to the BBC, the two researchers said tangible breakthroughs fuel their optimism and they expect to see working cancer vaccines within a few years.

“Every step, every patient we treat in our cancer trials helps us to find out more about what we are against and how to address that,” Prof Tureci, BioNTech’s chief medical officer, said.

“As scientists, we are always hesitant to say we will have a cure for cancer. We have a number of breakthroughs and we will continue to work on them.”
Unlike previously-developed vaccines, which typically insert a weakened or inactivated germ into our bodies (or a fragment of it), mRNA vaccines use mRNA as a blueprint to get the body to produce a protein or a piece of protein that triggers an immune response.

The researchers explain: “mRNA acts as a blueprint and allows you to tell the body to produce the drug or the vaccine… and when you use mRNA as a vaccine, the mRNA is a blueprint for the ‘wanted poster’ of the enemy – in this case, cancer antigens which distinguish cancer cells from normal cells,” the researchers told BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg.

There’s no doubt that mRNA has been wildly successful in the pandemic (not just for BioNTech, but also for Moderna, another company that developed a pioneering vaccine), but having them work for cancer is a whole new different ballgame.

However, this isn’t as crazy of a plan as it sounds, and it’s not exactly a new idea. Earlier this year, a UK trial administered its first cancer vaccine, and one year earlier, another personalized cancer vaccine trial was launched. In fact, BioNTech was founded primarily to use mRNA as individualized cancer immunotherapies — the pandemic was only a detour (although the company now explicitly also addresses infectious diseases).

The company has developed an mRNA-based human therapeutic for intravenous administration and aims to bring individualized mRNA-based cancer immunotherapy to clinical trials. Already, BioNTech has several trials in progress, including one Phase 2 trial of a cancer vaccine for advanced melanoma — a vaccine that they hope will help patients fight off advanced tumors and prevent recurrences. In another of the company’s trials, patients are given a personalized vaccine that would prime their immune system to seek and destroy cancer cells. The company is looking to address bowel cancer, melanoma, and several other forms.

Of course, many cancer projects that seemed promising had to be abandoned, and while the researchers are optimistic, there’s no guarantee of success.

The idea with the cancer vaccines is to offer genetic instructions for the body’s defense systems, teaching it to recognize cancer cells and attack them. But the major challenge is that cancer is not one unitary disease, and cancer cells that make up tumors can have a number of different peculiarities, making it extremely difficult to make a vaccine for all types of cancer cells.

Livers can stay alive and functional for over 100 years across multiple donors and recipients
Such findings pave the way towards older people being eligible to donate their livers and saving more lives.
A research team composed of members from the University of Texas (UT) and TransMedics, Massachusetts reports that a human liver can stay functional for over 100 years. The results are based on a (still small, but growing) subset of livers that have been transplanted once or several times for a cumulative age of over 100 years across their patients.

The team studied these particular livers to determine why they are so resilient, and explain that their results potentially open the way to allow older individuals to act as liver donors.

Long liver lives
“We looked at pre-transplant survival–essentially, the donor’s age–as well as how long the liver went on to survive in the recipient,” said lead study author Yash Kadakia, a medical student at UT Southwestern Medical School. “We stratified out these remarkable livers with over 100-year survival and identified donor factors, recipient factors, and transplant factors involved in creating this unique combination where the liver was able to live to 100 years.”

For the study, the team used the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) STAR file to identify livers that had accumulated at least 100 years of age (as measured by adding up their initial age at transplant to the post-transplant survival period).

Of the 253,406 livers transplanted between 1990 and 2022, 25 met this age criterion.

These long-lived livers came from older donors. The average donor age of this subset of organs was much higher than that of donors for livers that did not pass 100 years of age: 84.7 years vs. 38.5 years of age, respectively. Another notable difference between the two groups that the team observed was that donors from the centenarian liver group had lower incidences of diabetes and fewer donor infections. Their donors also had lower levels of transaminases, functional enzymes that are produced by the liver. High levels of transaminases are known to cause issues with liver transplantation.

“We previously tended to shy away from using livers from older donors,” said study coauthor Christine S. Hwang, MD, FACS, associate professor of surgery, UT Southwestern Medical Center. “If we can sort out what is special amongst these donors, we could potentially get more available livers to be transplanted and have good outcomes.”

According to Dr Hwang, there are over 11,000 patients awaiting a transplant as of September 2022. For now, demand far outstrips supply. Should older livers be deemed fit for transplant following findings such as these, a lot of new organs would become available and a lot of the lives on that list could be saved.

The current data is very encouraging towards that end. No grafts of the livers in the over 100 years group were lost to primary nonfunction, vascular, or biliary complications (i.e. none of them ‘stopped functioning’). No significant differences were found in the rejection rates at 12 months between the two groups of transplanted livers. Furthermore, the outcomes for the over-100 group had significantly better patient survival outcomes and allografts (the successful harvesting of these organs from deceased individuals).