What Have You Done For Us Lately, Israel? (#324 in a series)

Perhaps you are like me, and can hardly tell the difference among such numbers as π, and Avogadro’s number, and Euler’s constant, and the exponential constant, and Amazon Prime’s numbers, that Jeff Bezos is trying to patent. Quite possibly you have no idea — I certainly don’t — what Markov chains are, and string theory, and the unified field theory, and Mandelbrot’s sets, and De Sitter Space, and non-Riemannian geometries, and Hilbert Space, and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and Markushevich’s paper on completeness that I remember reading back when I was just a college kid at Moscow State. So much to learn, so little time.

And the plucky little engine that could, Israel, fights on, against its genocidal enemies, from the air, from the sea, and on land, and even deep underground, in what sometimes requires combat at close quarters, fighting Hamas in Gaza to the west and exchanging fire with Hezbollah in Lebanon to the north, while keeping a close eye on the Houthis in Yemen and the Iranians in Iran, who are behind it all. It’s Israel’s professional army and the 360,000 reservists who have been called up to serve in this fourth war for Israel’s survival — the other three being in 1948, 1967, and 1973 — who will save the only Jewish state, and defeat those who want it to be replaced “from the river to the sea” by a twenty-third Arab state.

Meanwhile, Israel’s deep bench of scientists is hard at work, contributing to advances in several dozen fields, that will make all our lives better. One new development came to my attention just today, about researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science who have discovered ways to more quickly adapt animal antibodies to make them safe for human use. You can find the full description of this remarkable advance here: “Researchers find new way to make animal antibodies safe for humans,” by Judy Siegel-Itzkovich, Jerusalem Post, February 6, 2024:

Weizmann Institute of Science researchers present a new algorithm to greatly speed up the process of engineering therapeutic proteins to protect against diseases.

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot have developed an algorithm that offers a much faster and cheaper way of adapting animal antibodies to make them safe for humans – instead of basing them on blood serum extracted from immunized horses and guinea pigs that was used to protect people against diphtheria.

Replacing an antibody’s animal segments with human ones is laborious, time-consuming, and costly; not only that, it can make an antibody less effective or even entirely useless. Now, in a study published in the prestigious journal Nature Biomedical Engineering under the title “Computational optimization of antibody humanness and stability by systematic energy-based ranking,” the researchers have taken a different approach….

CUMAb is a powerful new tool that could significantly speed up the design of new antibody-based drugs, as well as lower development costs. Fleishman and his team have turned the algorithm into a web server that any academic can use.

Together with collaborators, he then applied CUMAb to explore every possible way to humanize a mouse antibody. The algorithm computed a whopping 20,000 humanized variants of a single antibody and predicted the structural stability of each, selecting the best ones for testing. “This is the first time that a method has shown such broad success in this critical biomedical engineering problem. It is quite likely to become a key element in accelerating the transition from therapeutic candidate molecules to real-world drugs,” he added.

The results were extraordinary. Without any additional adjustments to the proposed designs, the humanized antibodies functioned just as effectively as the mouse’s original.” Tests of four other antibodies, all designed with CUMAb, were just as impressive and sometimes even surpassed the original animal antibody’s activity or stability.

“This is the first time that a method has shown such broad success in this critical biomedical engineering problem. It is quite likely to become a key element in accelerating the transition from therapeutic candidate molecules to real-world drugs,” said Fleishman….

Okay, Israel, that’s what you’ve done for us lately. Aside, I mean, from defending the West against the jihadis who would, if they could, destroy both your state and all other non-Muslim states.

And one more thing. I notice that among the four principal researchers in the photograph accompanying the article in the Jerusalem Post, one is named Razi Khalaila. Judging by his name, he must be an Israeli Arab. What do you make of that, all you malevolent protesters screaming about “the apartheid state of Israel”?