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Leveraging big data & artificial intelligence to solve unmet medical needs — andrea de souza — eli lilly & co.


Andrea De Souza, is Associate Vice President, Research Data Sciences and Engineering, at Eli Lilly & Company (https://www.lilly.com/) where over the past three years her work has focused around empowering the Lilly Research Laboratories (LRL) organization with greater computational, analytics-intense experimentation to raise the innovation of their scientists.

A former neuroscience researcher, Andrea’s portfolio career has included leadership assignments at the intersection of science, technology and business development. She has built and led informatics and scientific teams across the entire pharmaceutical value chain.

Italian company Energy Dome has announced the successful launch of its first CO2 Battery facility in Sardinia, Italy. The milestone marks the final de-risking of the CO2 Battery technology as Energy Dome enters the commercial scaling phase, becoming the first commercial long-duration energy storage technology on the market offering a reliable alternative to fossil fuels for dispatchable baseload power globally.

The Energy Dome CO2 battery uses carbon dioxide to store renewable energy, such as solar and wind energy, over a long period and release it quickly. Energy Dome says the technology can be quickly deployed anywhere in the world at less than half the cost of similar-sized lithium battery storage facilities.

Energy Dome began its operations in February 2020 and has progressed from a concept to full testing at a multi-megawatt scale in just over two years. This successful launch is also in part due to the unique nature of Energy Dome’s process, which integrates known components in a novel industrial process based on a thermodynamic transformation of CO2.

Researchers at the University of Liverpool have captured a clear view of the generation process of “protein machinery” that plays a key role in the colonization of pathogenic Salmonella bacteria.

The findings, published in Nature Communications, answer an important question about how various proteins self-assemble to create a higher-ordered functional organelle in Salmonella to boost metabolism.

Many , such as Salmonella, use specialized nano-sized organelles, or bacterial microcompartments (BMC). The BMC has a virus-like polyhedral shell made of proteins to encase multiple metabolic cargo enzymes. The protein shell provides a selectively permeable barrier which controls the passage of metabolites and sequesters the reactions in its interior. This ensures higher efficiency of the encapsulated reactions and prevents toxic products from being released into the rest of the cell, providing the pathogens a competitive advantage in human gut.

Having multiple conditions that affect the heart are linked to a greater risk of dementia than having high genetic risk, according to a largescale new study.

Led by Oxford University and the University of Exeter, the study is among the largest ever to examine the link between several heart-related conditions and dementia, and one of the few to look at the complex issue of multiple health conditions.

Published in The Lancet Healthy Longevity, the paper looked at data from more than 200,000 people, aged 60 or above, and of European ancestry in UK Biobank. The international research team identified those who had been diagnosed with the cardiometabolic conditions diabetes, stroke, or a heart attack, or any combination of the three, and those who went on to develop dementia.

Devices made of readily available oxide and carbon-based materials can produce clean hydrogen from water over weeks — according to new research (Nature Materials, “Long-term solar water and CO 2 splitting with photoelectrochemical BiOI–BiVO 4 tandems”).

The findings, co-led by Dr Virgil Andrei, a Research Fellow at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, with academics at Imperial College London, could help overcome one of the key issues in solar fuel production, where current earth-abundant light-absorbing materials are limited through either their performance or stability.

Multiple BiOI and BiOI-BiVO 4 pixels on a device. (Image: Dr Virgil Andrei)

Ethereum, the world’s most used cryptocurrency blockchain network, passed a milestone test ahead of a highly anticipated technical upgrade without any major glitches.

Developers ran the latest software for the upgrade known as the Merge on Ropsten, which is one of the oldest so-called testnets of the network. The testnets are used by developers to find potential bugs and glitches before moving their applications to the blockchain. While the Merge has been carried out on other testnets earlier this year, Ropsten was seen as providing the most realistic technical environment and the best estimate for the outcome of the final process.