Alfonso Valencia

A team led by the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona and the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) has developed and used a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool called CANYA, together with a large volume of data, to predict when and why protein aggregation takes place. The resource could be used to advance research into neurodegenerative diseases and drug production, according to the joint press release. The results are published in the journal Science Advances.

US President Donald Trump has announced that all goods imported into the United States will be subject to a 10 % tariff. In the case of goods from the European Union, this will increase to 20 %, according to the executive order signed by Trump, which will affect the EU's science and health industry. This tariff will be even higher with other trading partners. The measure will not affect pharmaceuticals for the time being.

The budget cuts affecting scientific activity in countries such as the United States and the fragility of centralised systems make decentralised and collaborative models a necessity. Science, intrinsically global, requires structures that can withstand local pressures. In this situation, Europe has the opportunity - and the duty - to lead a new paradigm where data is free, secure and accessible.

Thirty eight scientists from different specialties, including Craig Venter, a pioneer in the creation of artificial synthetic life, have written an article in the journal Science in which they assess the possibilities of synthesizing mirror organisms, but also warn of the risks they pose. This type of microorganisms, which would present a mirror structure to that currently found in nature, would have potential applications due to their resistance to biological degradation. However, they would also pose a danger because they would not be recognized by our defenses and could spread in ecosystems. Scientists call for more research and a broad debate, and warn that until more is known, this type of organism should not be created. 

Two of the Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry 2024 are employees of Google DeepMind, who caused significant unrest among their colleagues in May. Hassabis and Jumper announced in *Nature* the results of their AlphaFold 3 model, with applications in drug design; however, they published it in a closed manner, with reviewers not even having access to the system, which contradicts the basic principles of scientific publication. We risk having the transformative potential of AI controlled by big tech companies.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 on the one hand to David Baker for computational protein design, which makes it possible to construct proteins with functions not present in nature. On the other hand, jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper of Google DeepMind, for the development of AlphaFold2, which allows the structure of the 200 million known proteins to be predicted at high speed. 

After lengthy negotiations, the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the EU - which represents the member states - reached a provisional agreement last night on the content of the 'AI Act', the future law that will regulate the development of artificial intelligence in Europe, the first in the world. The agreement limits the use of biometric identification systems by security forces, includes rules for generative AI models such as ChatGPT and provides for fines of up to 35 million euros for those who violate the rules, among other measures. The text must now be formally adopted by the Parliament and Council before it becomes EU law.

Meta has applied language modelling to predict the structure of a large collection of proteins. The model, called ESMFold, is being presented this week in the journal Science after being published on the bioRxiv preprint article server in December 2022. EMSFold is faster than similar models such as AlphaFold, developed by Google's DeepMind and EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute. The sequences of more than 617 million proteins - of which more than a third are predicted with a high degree of confidence - are published in open access in the ESM Metagenomic Atlas.

A study published in the journal PLOS Digital Health has analysed ChatGPT's performance on the US Medical Licensing Exams (USMLE). The results indicate that it could pass or come close to passing the exam.   

Artificial intelligence algorithms using ChatGPT - the OpenAI company's GPT-3 language model - can identify speech features to predict the early stages of Alzheimer's disease with 80 per cent accuracy. The neurodegenerative disease causes a loss of the ability to express oneself that the algorithms could recognise, according to the journal PLOS Digital Health.