Fighting fungi, the music of the moons, and self-healing crystals

Gareth Mitchell:

Hello everyone. I'm Gareth Mitchell. Today, the pathogens that kill a million people a year, how Imperial is working with the WHO to protect us all from fungal pathogens. Meanwhile, there's music and astronaut Helen Sharman is on board.

Helen Sharman:

Thinking about science and music together is not necessarily a brand-new concept. What is new this time is really how we're integrating the science and the music. Music, science, life.

Gareth Mitchell:

Inspiring. Stay tuned for that. We have the crystals that heal themselves.

Gareth Mitchell:

All right, well let's jump in with some news. Our first little news vignettes of the new year, I think you'll find. So, let's start in style with Hayley Dunning. We're going to start with broken bones, aren't we, Hayley? Well, some good news here anyway.

Hayley Dunning:

Yeah, it's broken bones, but it's a good news story. So, engineers from Imperial have developed a fixator, which can be used in settings where resources are limited. So what fixators are are metal structures you get if you break your leg and they want to hold everything in place before they can do an operation. It's a structure of rods and metal pins that will hold your leg in place. Now, because they can be quite sophisticated, people can resort to homemade ones in some places where they're in demand. That can really hamper the healing of those fractures. So the Imperial fixator instead is something they've developed that can be made locally. It's a kit to help people be able to respond to demand in places, for example, like conflict zones.

Gareth Mitchell:

Well, so is this already out in the world or are they trialing it at all?

Hayley Dunning:

Yeah, so original trials they set up with Sri Lanka to test actually mostly on vehicle accidents there, but they're also testing it in Gaza on war trauma, and in Ukraine. So, 500 of these fixators have been made in Poland for use in Ukraine since the outbreak of the conflict there.

Gareth Mitchell:

What do the research team have in mind next and what will the next steps be?

Hayley Dunning:

Well, now they are able to provide these kits and they've got a good design for them, they're hoping to roll it out to more countries where these are needed. So they're needed where there is uncertain demand, where they need them quick and they need them cheap, but they need them to work. So they're actually working with the World Health Organization and the United Nations Development Program to roll out a larger scale.

Gareth Mitchell:

All right, Hayley, thank you very much indeed for that. Now, Michael Mills joins us. He's with the business school and I believe congratulations are in order, aren't they? Tell me more.

Michael Mills:

Yes, this is terrific news. So Imperial College Business School's Sustainability Leadership Program has been awarded an FT teaching award for its teaching cases. This is a program that's delivered by Imperial College Executive Education in collaboration with our Leonardo Centre on Business for Society. It's a 13-week online course launched last year and aimed at executives. So not regular students, but business people, senior leadership consultants, who want to have a bit of a better idea about how they can bring sustainable practices into their business, which I'm sure everyone listening is aware is something that is increasingly of interest in society and in business.

Gareth Mitchell:

Okay, well, tell me a little bit more about the course then. What goes on on the course?

Michael Mills:

Well, participants learn how to run a more sustainable business and promote a corporate culture that prioritizes social responsibility. The idea is that at the end of it, they're ready to pitch back to their executives, their leaders, their business for how their business can be more socially responsible. Part of that is looking at thousands of case studies that the Leonardo Centre has collected over the years, but it's also practical aspects as well. So participants engage in meditation, perhaps somewhat at odds with the popular image of business execs and what we imagine they might be like. But it's been shown that meditation actually changes the value structures of our brain and helps us to think in a more socially responsible and engaged manner.

Gareth Mitchell:

So now emblazoned with this prestigious award, Michael, people might want to know a little bit more about this course, this program. So how can they find out more about it?

Michael Mills:

They can find out more by going to the Imperial College Executive Education website and looking for sustainability leadership online. They'll also be able to find the many other online, hybrid and in-person courses that Imperial College London offers to busy executives.

Gareth Mitchell:

Great. Michael Mills, thank you very much indeed for that.

Well, now there's a fungus on the loose and it's terrifying people all over the world. Well, at least people who are tuning into HBO's hotly anticipated series, The Last of Us, based on the video game of the same name. It's 20 years after the outbreak of a fungus that turns people into hideous zombie-like creatures. But when you've finished hiding behind the sofa, you might want to know that the World Health Organization is behind efforts to avoid a real life scenario. Well, okay, not quite at that level. But nonetheless, 200 million people do live with severe life-threatening fungal disease, and such pathogens kill more than a million people a year around the world. The WHO has recently issued the fungal priority pathogen list. Professor Matthew Fisher of the MRC Center for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial is part of the global scientific community working to uncover more about these fungi. He's been telling Ryan O'Hare about the global impact of the pathogens.

Matthew Fisher:

Fungal infections are a hugely neglected problem and they cause significant mortality and morbidity globally. Now we're all familiar with those annoying fungal infections. We've all had them, athletes foot, thrush, dandruff. But what we're talking about here is these very severe fungal infections and the numbers are very large. Over 200 million people globally. Now, the burden of mortality is well over one million people per year. Now, this puts fungal diseases in the same bracket as those death caused by breast cancer, malaria or tuberculosis. So, they're a really significant problem. But these diseases are often treatable, but they're not treated, first of all because clinicians don't know their patients have got a fungal infection or the correct diagnostics not available or hasn't been invented, or the drugs just aren't there to treat a patient's infection. We've also got to remember that there are no vaccines that have been developed against these severe fungal infections. So there are a huge-neglected problem.

Ryan O'Hare:

What is the priority pathogen list and how could it change things?

Matthew Fisher:

Essentially, the WHO Fungal priority pathogens list is a flag planted in the ground that says there is a problem here, it's a neglected problem and it's something that we need to and can actually address. What the WHO did is they used expert consultation and meta-analysis of existing known data to assess out of the well over 300 fungi that can cause severe human disease, which ones we should focus on and where impact could be made. So after this big assessment exercise, they came up with 19 organisms and that's the priority pathogen list. Now, the list could be a game changer because what it does is it not only identifies these organisms as being serious disease causing agents, but also what we can do to strengthen our response to them, how we can improve patient survival, how we can improve awareness.

So, essentially for each of these pathogens, the list then goes on to say what we can do to improve surveillance where new diagnostics are needed and could be invented. Also, what research and innovation we can do to actually bring these sorts of diagnostic products to market, including the desperately needed new drugs. There are also big gains to be made just in basic public health interventions, raising awareness amongst clinicians where there could be a fungal disease and where they could actually use an antifungal. For instance, if you're thinking about a shadow on the lung on a radiogram, that could either be cancer or it could be tuberculosis or it could be a respiratory fungal infection. Now, if misdiagnosis occurs and the clinician treats for cancer or for TB and not with an antifungal, then that patient's survival is going to be greatly decreased. So, it's that awareness and then actually having the drug available. So, obviously many of these infections are highly prevalent in the global south where these drugs that are required just are not present. So the list is really going to help that to change.

Ryan O'Hare:

How does your work contribute to this?

Matthew Fisher:

I've been working on fungal infections for the last 20 years, and my lab currently focuses on two pathogens that are in that core critical list. So the first of those is aspergillus fumigatus. This is a very common mold, but what is happening to it is it's developing resistance to clinical antifungal drugs. We really need to understand the scale of this problem and what can be done to mitigate against the exposure to these antifungal resistant mold bio aerosols, which are very, very common.

The other organism is cryptococcus. This causes a devastating fungal meningitis in patients with HIV/AIDS, and we're attempting to understand the ecology of this organism where hotspots are for exposure. Again, bringing this research together, we're able to at least develop new methods for lessening patient exposure, especially in those critical groups such as those with cystic fibrosis or HIV/AIDS. From our point of view, the WHO priority pathogens list is a huge boon because it just enables us to advocate the research we do and improve our chances of being able to attract those sorts of research funds that are necessary to spur us onwards.

Gareth Mitchell:

Matthew Fisher talking there to Ryan O'Hare. Well, now one and all, please take your seats.

Helen Sharman:

Good morning. Welcome to LUNAR at Imperial College London. I'm Helen Sharman, the first British astronaut, and I'm a member of Imperial College London's outreach team who've collaborated with The Moons Symphony to create this unique event that combines two of my great loves, science and music.

Gareth Mitchell:

Yes, astronaut Helen Sharman is introducing a musical work. You might not necessarily associate a space farer with music, but here the cosmos and composition are brought together. It's just before Christmas and Imperial scientists and student musicians are bringing school students an outreach event like no other. Our reporter, Keerthi Raj was there and he's here to tell us a bit more. So, what do we need to know then Keerthi?

Keerthi:

Yes, Gareth. This was The Moon Symphony. It's an ambitious orchestra work performed to school students in the Great Hall. As well as hearing the music, the students also heard from Imperial researchers about the science behind the moons. It's part of a big experimental outreach project called LUNAR.

Gareth Mitchell:

As for the symphony, you've been speaking to the composer, haven't you?

Keerthi:

Yes. The composer is Amanda Lee Falkenberg. She's always been inspired by the moons of our neighboring planets.

Amanda Lee Falkenberg:

When I saw these moons, it was really these moons need music and these moons need emotion. Then, when I did discover they had all sorts of science attached to their worlds, that's when it started to get really interesting and that actually what has ended up taking over the 100% creative forces and inspiration behind the storytelling.

Gareth Mitchell:

That's Amanda Lee Falkenberg. So Keerthi, we're hearing about seven moons in this piece. So, which moons?

Keerthi:

Yes, Gareth. The moons are Io, Europa, Titan, Enceladus, Miranda, Ganymede, and the Earth's moon.

Gareth Mitchell:

Well, I think we should definitely hear a little bit of the symphony.

Keerthi:

The music on Io, Jupiter's third largest moon, and roughly the size of our own moon, begins with very rhythmic violin notes. As the notes progress, they effectively create a sense of fear or danger, representing the threat of volcanic activity on this moon.

Gareth Mitchell:

It's dramatic stuff, isn't it? There's some interesting musicianship involved.

Keerthi:

Yes, Gareth, it's a challenging one for the musicians. Lavinia Kadar was the lead violinist at the Imperial College event. She has been telling me about an unusual string technique.

Lavinia Kadar:

Instead of playing with the side of the hair on the bow on the strings that makes the sound, you actually rotate the bow and play with the wooden part and it just makes very different sound. So, you basically hit the strings with that wooden part of the bow. She incorporated that to represent ice cracking on one of the moons.

Gareth Mitchell:

That's violinist Lavinia Kadar. Now in the introduction, we heard astronaut Helen Sharman launching the event. So, what has been her involvement?

Keerthi:

So the wider LUNAR outreach project goes far beyond The Moons Symphony. It's all about bringing scientists and musicians together, that's why some top Imperial researchers are involved. But when you want input from a space expert, you could hardly do better than someone who has actually been to space. When I caught up with Helen, I was interested in what makes this project unique.

Helen Sharman:

Thinking about science and music together is not necessarily a brand-new concept. What is new this time is really how we're integrating the science and the music. So yes, the music has been inspired by the science, but how might that make us approach the science in a different way? How might that make us open to the science? Does it give us that accessibility to what's going on in the moons? Then back to the music. How does knowing about the moons make us appreciate the music better? So I think it's the fact that everything is much more integrated and seamless. Music, science, life. That's what I love about this project.

Gareth Mitchell:

A very enthusiastic Helen Sharman there. So Keerthi, what happens next?

Keerthi:

Well, it's going to go far beyond the event that I went to before Christmas. It was originally performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Marin Alsop and recorded at Abbey Road. But now the outreach continues at venues and in schools. The composer, Amanda, certainly has some big plans.

Amanda Lee Falkenberg:

We have a big vision. We would like to go on a global tour with astronauts and scientists and have concerts, and in the day have matinées where we present in the science that everyone will experience in the evening concert and present that to the students. So, we are thinking quite big and global.

Gareth Mitchell:

The Moons Symphony is available now from Signum Classics.

Well finally, let's talk about a chemical process, which is all around us and can even be very beautiful, the formation of crystals. We put them on our food salt and sugar for instance, and they're a big deal in industry too. But having known about crystals for millennia, there's still a lot to learn about them. What better reason then to check out a recent edition of the excellent Never Lick the Spoon podcast from the Institute for Molecular Science and Engineering. It's one of the many podcasts now available in Imperial's ever-growing podcast directory. Find it via the Be Inspired pages on our website. Well, let's hear an excerpt then from Never Lick the Spoon. Here, presenter Isabella von Holstein investigates a crystal that heals itself in a previously undiscovered phenomenon. Second-year chemical engineering PhD student, Isha Bade has seen the effect in paracetamol and now she's looking elsewhere. As she explained to Isabella, she's captured the healing crystal on video.

Isha Bade:

The video essentially captures this regeneration self-healing. When you cut a crystal in half and you hang it in a vial in the solution that it's meant to grow in, the camera captures its regrowth process. So if you put it in solution and you just let it sit for a few weeks, then that broken crystal regrows back into its original shape. So, just think of it as a kite shape and you break that kite shape in half, so you end up with two triangles. Now, you let one of the triangles grow and then that triangle regrows back into the kite. It's just mad. We have observed this phenomenon in paracetamol, but my PhD also involves looking at other systems. So I have started growing crystals of organic pharmaceuticals, so ibuprofen and aspirin. Especially when you are trying to look into a phenomenon that's not been reported before, you at least want to be comfortable with the molecule because then at least there's a lot of knowledge on the fundamentals of that molecule. So that that's not something you have to worry about, you can just worry about the new phenomenon that you have.

Isabella von Holstein:

Next, I spoke to Alison Arber who completed the IMSE MRes course in molecular engineering this year, and whose six month research project was on this crystal regeneration phenomenon. I asked her, so what aspect of this phenomenon did you investigate in your master's project?

Alison Arber:

They first discovered this self-healing phenomenon in ethanol. So, I took that a bit further and said I want to investigate the effect of solvent and different breakage claims because we wanted to see if you make a random cut in the crystal, will it still self-heal, or will we see some other behavior?

Isabella von Holstein:

So how long does one of these experiments take?

Alison Arber:

It depends on the size of the crystal. We were working with two size classes. Typically, regrowth for a five-millimeter crystal would take about a week. With the larger crystals, it could be 10 days to 14 days. These experiments take a while, so I would do a few hours every day and then do computational work for the rest of the time. So, it was probably 50/50.

Isabella von Holstein:

Finally, I went to talk to Jerry Heng, professor of particle technology at Imperial, for his perspective on the discovery.

Jerry Heng:

If we think about pharmaceuticals, almost all purified or isolated using a crystallization step. I mean you can imagine not only paracetamol, ibuprofen, aspirin, carbamazepine. You can think also of other sectors, for example, the computer you are using has silicon wafers and that's also a crystallization process. You can think about jewelry, so people think about sapphire or nice gemstones, that's also crystallization process. Food, sugar, salt. Even to energy storage, batteries, a lot of those electrodes are made of crystalline materials too. So, I can imagine that the applications are wide ranging beyond pharmaceuticals.

Isabella von Holstein:

So, this is all pretty fundamental research. How's it useful to understand how some crystals under some conditions can regenerate?

Jerry Heng:

I can maybe describe two potential applications which are very relevant to industry, one of which is what is known as seeding. So in a batch or continuous crystallization process, what we normally do is we do seeding. Seeding means we add some of the particles so that the particles are going to grow. The particles we add in are often described by size and amount. They may have been fractured along different planes. Whether it grows directly or whether it has to regenerate first, then grows, I think will mean that we've got a better degree of control over our experiments. That could lead to better particle attributes, size distributions, or even potentially overcoming outcomes in polymorphic forms. Last one, the second is in the design of the crystallizer for us to understand the impact of our mechanical agitation as an example. So the reason why we agitated is to suspend the particle so that they continue to grow quickly enough. But if we were to break them, then we may change the modes of growth, regeneration or continued growth.

Isabella von Holstein:

So Alison said she's been doing a mixture of experimental work and she was also doing some modeling. That's very modern, isn't it? 50 years ago we wouldn't have done the modeling.

Jerry Heng:

Yeah, I wouldn't have gone that far back. When I first started, I did not do much modeling at all. I'm an experimentalist, and experiments are true and real. I think we're at a point now that modeling is also more accessible. I'm not a modeler like Nick Harrison or others who will be developing the solutions, the models for it. I'm a user. But I do believe that we need to use both because experiments do guide and inform modeling. At the same time, modeling does guide and inform experiments. So it's a win-win situation if we combine some degree of experiments and modeling.

Gareth Mitchell:

Professor Jerry Heng. That was an excerpt from Never Lick the Spoon. Do check it out on all good pod catchers and our very own podcast directory. There are episodes on substitutes for soil, 3D printing living cells, and coconut palm processing. That'll do for this particular podcast for the Imperial Podcast for today. Thank you so much for listening. We of course are on all your favorite pod catchers as well. If there's one that we are not on, let us know and we'll try and sort it out. On behalf of me, Gareth Mitchell, and all of the team, it's goodbye for now.