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Sponsored Content by BGI Genomics May 4 2023 Reviewed by Olivia Frost insights from industry Dr. Stephen Lye Interim Director Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Sinai Health

In this interview, Dr. Stephen Lye, the Interim Director of the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Sinai Health, talks to NewsMedical about how AI and DNA sequencing can be used for understanding pregnancy complications.  Please introduce yourself and your role at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Sinai Health? What inspired your career – both in science and in maternal health?

My name is Dr. Stephen Lye, and I am the interim director of the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Sinai Health, which is part of the University of Toronto. My interest in maternal child health can be attributed to when I undertook my post-doctoral training in London, Ontario.

I am originally from Bristol, England, but I moved to Canada to do this post-doctoral training in a hospital setting. The experience of being in a hospital and talking to clinicians as a basic scientist gave me a better understanding of how integral maternal health is to long-term health and well-being. This idea was partly borne of the integration of basic science with clinical practice, which I think is very powerful. As a research area, maternal health can be both underfunded and under-recognized. However, more technologies, such as AI and DNA sequencing, are being used in recent years to understand pregnancy complications further. Why is it so important to continue raising awareness of pregnancy complications?

Something that may not be immediately apparent is that a pregnancy carried to term involves two human beings – the pregnant patient and the baby. The health of the father is also relevant. It is now known that how an individual develops in utero and early infancy plays a critical role in establishing their lifelong health and well-being.

Image Credit: ShutterStock/SeventyFour

If optimal, the pregnancy environment will help that individual to be healthy and reduce the risk of illnesses in later life.

Conversely, suppose that an individual is exposed to risks in utero. In that case, a challenge can be posed to their health trajectories, whether that is because of maternal ill health, such as preeclampsia, or whether the individual is born prematurely.

This can result in a greater risk of non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, as well as a risk to full intellectual development and pose difficulties for that individual to form optimal social relationships.

A research framework termed Developmental Origins of Health and Disease examines these connections.

As a result, science and government have become increasingly interested in the links between maternal health and child health and how, in pre-conception, the parents’ health can impact embryo development, fetal development, and child development in areas like cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Despite this increase in medical advancement, there’s been no reduction in the occurrence of pre-term birth. Why is this, and what impact does pre-term birth have on infants and moms?

The reality is that the diseases of aging adults have garnered increased attention in recent years, whether we are talking about cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or dementia. This increased support could be partly political: older people are at the most risk of those disorders, and it is generally older people working in government funding and setting budgets for healthcare.

The idea of the developmental origins of health and disease is gaining traction. Currently, though, where the funding is based is where researchers are. In this vein, there are far more researchers in cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes than in reproductive health and development issues. Stephen Lye at ICG17 – Understanding Pregnancy Complications with AI and DNA Sequencing Play

There are typically fewer researchers in specific fields like mine, and much greater collaboration is needed to make changes happen.

At my own institution, Sinai Health in Toronto, within the larger institute, where researchers are involved in cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and cardiovascular diseases, we also have an infant health research group. This allows us to connect with those individuals and ensure we can identify some of the cutting-edge science and technologies. You are currently a senior investigator at Sinai Hospital in Canada. Can you tell us a bit more about the laboratory you work in and some of the current research in which you are involved?

The laboratory that I lead focuses on pregnancy complications. We are interested in examining the mechanisms responsible for preeclampsia and pre-term birth. Through this understanding, we seek more efficient and earlier diagnoses of which women are more likely to have those conditions to intervene.

We are also focused on developing interventions or therapeutics that can be applied once we have understood more about the disease. It is vital, in my opinion, to focus not only on mechanisms, therapeutics, or diagnostics but to recognize that these elements are all interwoven. Our group looks at each aspect to try and make a difference.

Image Credit: ShutterStock/Chompoo Suriyo

I am interested in these aspects of science closer to the patient because I tend to enjoy the broader picture. Rather than a career focused on one particular gene or protein and understanding everything I possibly can about that element, my research interest has been more broad.

The broad research aspect allows me to focus on how relationships and correlations happen between different sectors. If I were focused on one specific area, I might not see the connections in the background. I hope this broader approach will allow me to continue benefiting patients.

Most of the diseases and disorders we are interested in are very complex. As such, they are not single-gene or even multiple-gene but have genetic and environmental components and complex natures. Broad thinking must be employed to identify pathways that might be amenable to therapeutics. You are involved in the largest Canadian study of its kind to track the health of women and their babies. What are you hoping to learn from this, and what does this study involve?

We introduced this study to Mount Sinai Hospital, one of the hospitals in Sinai Health. A general hospital, Mount Sinai also has one of the largest reproductive and pregnancy programs in Canada. Our practice is to enroll women when they attend their first obstetrical visit after asking them if they would like to be involved in this study.

If they wish to be involved, the patient will consent to their health information being made accessible to us. When they have a blood sample or another type of sample collected for their routine clinical care, a small sample of the original is banked for research. This way, the study does not involve additional sampling, but the data is derived from their normal care.

Image Credit: ShutterStock/Africa Studio

The only additional requirement is for the patient to complete some detailed questionnaires about their life: their lifestyle, education, home life, economic activity, and past medical history.

We hope to learn more about what factors support a healthy pregnancy through this initiative. The information generated can be passed back to new patients to help them have better outcomes.

Currently, there are close to 4,000 women enrolled in the study. Over the study, we have obtained thousands of blood samples, urine samples, and different biospecimens, and the study is at the stage where we are now following the children born.

We have followed over a thousand children to about four years of age. We examine a range of various aspects of their early development, which provide us with insights into how we can improve pregnancy outcomes as well as how we can improve outcomes for the children. You are currently at ICG, and your earlier presentation was titled ‘RNA Sequence.’ RNA sequence identifies signatures of maternal blood that can predict imminent pre-term birth. Could you outline some of the key takeaways from this presentation?

As mentioned earlier, one of our core aims is to provide better care for women clinically diagnosed with pre-term labor. The condition known as threatened pre-term labor occurs when women start uterine contractions before ‘normal term,’ or 37 weeks of completed pregnancy.

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When threatened pre-term labor occurs, there is a risk of the baby being born pre-term. Indeed, if the delivery is too early, that baby can die because it is essentially a fetus born into an extrauterine environment. At about 24-25 weeks of pregnancy, which is a little over halfway through, such babies would be about the size of my palm.

Sadly, if born at that gestation period, many of them will die, and others might have significant disabilities that they will experience for the rest of their lives. Related StoriesThe Applications of Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT) – 10 Years of ExperienceBGI cares – 2022 social responsibilities in reviewAsk the Expert: 7 Questions about Colorectal Cancer & Non-invasive Fecal DNA Testing

When a clinical diagnosis of pre-term labor is made, it is very difficult for clinicians to know whether a woman experiencing contractions will continue to experience them and go on to deliver within the next couple of days or if the contractions will cease and pregnancy will be maintained onto term. Only about 20% of women diagnosed with pre-term labor actually deliver pre-term.

Suppose the clinician is of the opinion that there is going to be a pre-term birth. In that case, it is firstly essential that the woman is kept in a hospital, hospitalized, or transferred from a community hospital to a hospital that has a neonatal intensive care unit.

This is important since high standards of care and capability are needed for looking after a premature baby, which is costly to the healthcare system. Often, particularly in countries like Canada, which are sparsely populated, this means that women will be transported long distances away from home.

Image Credit: ShutterStock/ALPA PROD

The next step is that the patient will be either treated with drugs to try and stop the labor or given hormones to mature the baby’s organ systems and hopefully allow that baby to survive. If the patient is in real pre-term labor, these methods are all perfectly suitable, but the reality is that 80% of them are not.

We have tried to develop a new test to better identify women that are in real labor and will deliver within the next 48 hours and those that are in forced labor and could instead be sent home.

Threatened pre-term labor is the second largest cause of being hospitalized during pregnancy other than giving birth. This takes up many healthcare resources and can cause women to have treatments they do not necessarily need. Are you hopeful that RNA sequencing could predict imminent pre-term birth? If so, what impact would this have on women, their children, and healthcare?

We had some pulmonary data of gene expression signatures in the blood of women experiencing threatened pre-term labor. These gene expression signatures were predictive of whether women would deliver or not.

cDNA microarrays were old technology deployed before sequencing came in. Its sensitivity and specificity were good, but it was not good enough to turn into a commercial test. When RNA sequencing came in and became cost-effective enough to do on a large scale, it allowed us to conduct the study we did before again and get much more resolution on the gene expression signatures.

Image Credit: ShutterStock/nobeatsofierce

In our current study, we have performed nearly 1000 RNA sequences – RNA sequencing on 1000 samples. This work has increased the sensitivity and specificity of our signatures.

If all the current signatures in new populations can be validated, these can likely be used to develop a commercial test. This project is one that my own hospital jointly funds, BGI, and Genome Canada, which is through a program called the Genomic Applications Partnership Program, our genomics funding agency in Canada.

It is essential to work closely with companies interested in pregnancy. Most companies are afraid of what might happen if a problem occurs, so they steer clear of pregnancy. BGI has had some experience in pregnancy and newborn health due to their newborn screening tests. If we successfully generate a screening test through the research program, this could be introduced into their line of products. Are you hopeful that the field of maternal health will soon see better outcomes with continued research, funding, and innovation? Could increased and improved testing generate better outcomes for pre-term birth? What more needs to be done before this can become a reality?

As an optimist, I would say we strive for and achieve positive outcomes for women. We are also trying to develop a similar type of test that will predict in early pregnancy whether a woman is likely to have a pre-term birth in addition to this screening test in development. In addition, other colleagues are developing the same approach to other pregnancy complications like preeclampsia.

Image Credit: ShutterStock/Petrovich Nataliya

There is a great deal of activity within the pregnancy research field that can improve outcomes, particularly in diagnostics. It is more complicated to introduce a new therapeutic to women during pregnancy than to give a cancer drug where someone is at imminent risk.

Most pregnancies are uneventful and ultimately lead to the birth of a remarkable new human being. For most parents, pregnancy and childbirth are low-risk, high-reward events. For a small number – approximately 10-15% – pregnancy can be more of a rocky road and potentially have a disastrous outcome. Having a baby die in utero or during the newborn period is devastating, and this motivates us toward our goals. As a recognized leader in the field of infant health and maternal reproductive health, what has been your proudest achievement?

When I reflect, the work that springs to mind is how the maternal immune system plays a role throughout pregnancy, which has been very exciting. From this, we have discovered that the interactions between the mothers’ immune cells and the developing placenta are critically important in forming the placenta.

In other words, as is well known, the placenta is the lifeline between the mother and the baby. The birth process also requires maternal immune cells, underlining this form of mutual communication between the mother and the baby throughout the pregnancy, which has been hugely exciting to find out.

Image Credit: ShutterStock/crystal light

The other aspect that has given me the most satisfaction in my career is building groups of scientists, conditions, and investigators that can work well together. Building teams is essential, as I firmly believe that a team will have greater expertise across disciplines. Such multidisciplinary expertise is vital in understanding complex medical issues like pregnancy complications.

The third thing I am proud of is training young scientists who come into my lab as students, several of whom now hold senior positions in their own labs around the world. Those three things – the groundbreaking research we have done, the teams we have built, and the trainees who have furthered their careers in the field – have brought me great fulfillment. What are the next steps for you and your career?

We aim to expand the research and innovation in the pre-term birth area. One element of this is the screening tests that we hope to develop further and lead to commercial products. Thanks to some early-stage therapeutics, there is also the potential to reduce pre-term birth in high-risk women. We are working to move those closer to human clinical studies.

Finally, we also have a large study in four different countries: India, China, South Africa, and Canada. I am mainly involved in the South African study, in which we are looking at interventions that start pre-conception.

Image Credit: ShutterStock/George Rudy

In this study, to see whether we can improve pregnancy health, women are enrolled before they have a baby so that we can follow them through pregnancy and their child’s infancy.

The study also aims to improve women’s health before they get pregnant, allow them to have healthier pregnancies, and enable their children to have better starts in life. Currently, about 24,000 women are being enrolled, which is going to be exciting over the next few years. Omix is VGI’s vision for their company. What does Omix mean to you as a scientist?

My priority is utilizing Omix to improve the lives of individuals, which in our case refers to women during pregnancy and their children during infancy.

The core of the vision is to make these expensive and large-scale technologies more affordable and accessible to more people. Our partnership with BGI takes us some way along that route. Simply having the technical capability without understanding the biology or having access to the patients is not viable, sustainable, or valuable; instead, partnerships are essential, as are collaborations. What are you looking forward to most at the conference, or what have you enjoyed most so far?

I have enjoyed hearing about the science that I am not necessarily familiar with. For instance, we have heard much about metabolomics and meta-genomics and how the microbiome is vital for mental and physical health. It has also been intriguing to learn more about population genomic studies research in the Baltics. This data can also help inform the rest of our work, which is invaluable. About BGI

BGI Genomics is the world's leading integrated solutions provider of precision medicine, now serving customers in more than 100 countries.

They provide academic institutions, pharmaceutical companies, health care providers, and other organizations with integrated genomic sequencing and proteomic services and solutions across a broad range of applications spanning:

They have almost 20 years of genomics experience helping customers achieve their research goals by delivering rapid, high-quality results using a broad array of cost-effective, cutting-edge technologies, including their own innovative DNBSEQ™ sequencing technology.

Sponsored Content Policy: News-Medical.net publishes articles and related content that may be derived from sources where we have existing commercial relationships, provided such content adds value to the core editorial ethos of News-Medical.Net which is to educate and inform site visitors interested in medical research, science, medical devices and treatments.

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The 1975 star Matty Healy warns of musical ‘silence’ without small stages as he backs new UK-wide festival

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The 1975 star Matty Healy warns of musical 'silence' without small stages as he backs new UK-wide festival

The 1975 frontman Matty Healy has warned of a musical “silence” that would come without the pubs and bars that give UK artists their first chance to perform.

Fresh from headlining Glastonbury in June, Healy is backing a new UK-wide festival which will see more than 2,000 gigs taking place across more than 1,000 “seed” venues in September.

The Seed Sounds Weekender aims to celebrate the hospitality sector hosting bands and singers just as they are starting out – and for some, before they go on to become global superstars.

Healy, who is an ambassador for the event, said in a statement to Sky News: “Local venues aren’t just where bands cut their teeth, they’re the foundation of any real culture.

“Without them, you don’t get The Smiths, Amy Winehouse, or The 1975. You get silence.”

Oasis, currently making headlines thanks to their sold-out reunion tour, first played at Manchester’s Boardwalk club, which closed in 1999, and famously went on to play stadiums and their huge Knebworth gigs within the space of a few years.

Liam and Noel Gallagher on stage for the first Wembley night of the Oasis reunion tour. Pic: Lewis Evans
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Oasis stars Liam and Noel Gallagher, pictured on stage at Wembley for their reunion tour, started out playing Manchester’s Boardwalk club. Pic: Lewis Evans

GigPig, the live music marketplace behind Seed Sounds, says the seed sector collectively hosts more than three million gigs annually, supports more than 43,000 active musicians, and contributes an estimated £2.4bn to the UK economy.

“The erosion of funding for seed and grassroots spaces is part of a wider liberal tendency to strip away the socially democratic infrastructure that actually makes art possible,” said Healy.

“What’s left is a cultural economy where only the privileged can afford to create, and where only immediately profitable art survives.”

He described the Seed Sounds Weekender as “a vital reminder that music doesn’t start in boardrooms or big arenas – it starts in back rooms, pubs, basements, and independent spaces run on love, grit, and belief in something bigger.”

Read more from Sky News:
Oasis photographers recall the early days
Heavy metal to reality TV: The wild life of Ozzy Osbourne

The importance of funding for grassroots venues has been highlighted in the past few years, with more than 200 closing or stopping live music in 2023 and 2024, according to the Music Venue Trust. Sheffield’s well-known Leadmill venue saw its last gig in its current form in June, after losing a long-running eviction battle.

In May, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy announced the £85m Creative Foundations Fund to support arts venues across England.

And last year, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee called for a levy on tickets to large concerts at stadiums and arenas to help fund grassroots venues, which artists including Coldplay and Katy Perry, and venues including the Royal Albert Hall, have backed.

But most seed venues – the smaller spaces in the hospitality sector that provide a platform before artists get to ticketed grassroots gigs or bigger stages – won’t qualify for the levy. GigPig is working to change this by formalising the seed music venue space as a recognised category.

“The UK’s seed venues are where music careers are born,” said GigPig co-founder Kit Muir-Rogers. “Collectively, this space promotes more music than any other in the live music business, yet it has gone overlooked and under-appreciated.”

The Seed Sounds Weekender takes place from 26-28 September and will partner with Uber to give attendees discounted rides to and from venues.

Tickets for most of the gigs will be free, with events taking place across 20 UK towns and cities including London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Leicester, Newcastle and Southampton

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Samsung backs South Korean AI chip startup Rebellions ahead of IPO

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Samsung backs South Korean AI chip startup Rebellions ahead of IPO

The Rebel-Quad is the second-generation product from Rebellions and is made up of four Rebel AI chips. Rebellions, a South Korean firm, is looking to rival companies like Nvidia in AI chips.

Rebellions

South Korean artificial intelligence chip startup Rebellions has raised money from tech giant Samsung and is targeting a funding round of up to $200 million ahead of a public listing, the company’s management told CNBC on Tuesday.

Last year, Rebellions merged with another startup in South Korea called Sapeon, creating a firm that is being positioned as one of the country’s promising rivals to Nvidia.

Rebellions is currently raising money and is targeting funding of between $150 million and $200 million, Sungkyue Shin, chief financial officer of the startup, told CNBC on Tuesday.

Samsung’s investment in Rebellions last week was part of that, Shin said, though he declined to say how much the tech giant poured in.

Since its founding in 2020, Rebellions has raised $220 million, Shin added.

The current funding round is ongoing and Shin said Rebellions is talking to its current investors as well as investors in Korea and globally to participate in the capital raise. Rebellions has some big investors, including South Korean chip giant SK Hynix, telecommunication firms SK Telecom and Korea Telecom, and Saudi Arabian oil giant Aramco.

AI chip startup Rebellions looks to raise up to $200 million ahead of IPO

Rebellions was last valued at $1 billion. Shin said the current round of funding would push the valuation over $1 billion but declined to give specific figure.

Rebellions is aiming for an initial public offering once this funding round has closed.

“Our master plan is going public,” Shin said.

Rebellions designs chips that are focused on AI inferencing rather than training. Inferencing is when a pre-trained AI model interprets live data to come up with a result, much like the answers that are produced by popular chatbots.

With the backing of major South Korean firms and investors, Rebellions is hoping to make a global play where it will look to challenge Nvidia and AMD as well as a slew of other startups in the inferencing space.

Samsung collaboration

Rebellions has been working with Samsung to bring its second-generation chip, Rebel, to market. Samsung owns a chip manufacturing business, also known as foundry. Four Rebel chips are put together to make the Rebel-Quad, the product that Rebellions will eventually sell. A Rebellions spokesperson said the chip will be launched later this year.

The funding will partly go toward Rebellions’ product development. Rebellions is currently testing its chip which will eventually be produced on a larger scale by Samsung.

“Initial results have been very promising,” Sunghyun Park, CEO of Rebellions, told CNBC on Tuesday.

South Korean AI startup Rebellions says tariffs could delay IPO by 'a little bit'

Park said Samsung invested in Rebellions partly because of the the good results that the chip has so far produced.

Samsung is manufacturing Rebellions’ semiconductor using its 4 nanometer process, which is among the leading-edge chipmaking nodes. For comparison, Nvidia’s current Blackwell chips use the 4 nanometer process from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Rebellions will also use Samsung’s high bandwidth memory, known as HBM3e. This type of memory is stacked and is required to handle large data processing loads.

That could turn out to be a strategic win for Samsung, which is a very distant second to TSMC in terms of market share in the foundry business. Samsung has been looking to boost its chipmaking division. Samsung Electronics recently entered into a $16.5 billion contract for supplying semiconductors to Tesla.

If Rebellions manages to find a large customer base, this could give Samsung a major customer for its foundry business.

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Science

NISAR Launches July 30: A NASA-ISRO Satellite to Track Earth’s Changes

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NISAR Launches July 30: A NASA-ISRO Satellite to Track Earth’s Changes

The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) satellite, a joint Earth science mission, is now set for launch from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre. The pickup-truck-sized spacecraft was encapsulated in the nose cone of an Indian Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle and is scheduled to lift off on Wednesday, July 30 at 8:10 a.m. EDT (5:40 p.m. IST). Once in orbit, its dual-frequency radars will circle Earth 14 times a day, scanning nearly all of the planet’s land and ice surfaces every 12 days. It will provide data to help scientists monitor soil moisture and vegetation, and better assess hazards like landslides and floods.

International Collaboration and Launch Readiness

According to the official website, NISAR reflects a significant NASA–ISRO partnership. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) built the long-wavelength L-band radar, and India’s Space Applications Centre built the shorter-wavelength S-band radar. This dual-frequency design makes NISAR the first Earth satellite to carry two radar systems, underscoring the mission’s unique collaboration.

The spacecraft is now integrated into its launch vehicle at India’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre. On July 28 NASA announced NISAR had been encapsulated in the payload fairing of an ISRO Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle on the pad. The GSLV is scheduled to lift off at 8:10 a.m. EDT (5:40 p.m. IST) on Wednesday, July 30.

Advanced Dual-Frequency Radar

NISAR carries a novel dual-frequency radar system. The satellite’s instruments operate at L-band (25 cm) and S-band (10 cm) wavelengths. The longer L-band waves can penetrate forests and soil to sense moisture and land motion, while the shorter S-band waves pick up fine surface details like vegetation moisture and roughness. This combination lets NISAR detect both large-scale and fine-scale changes.

From orbit, NISAR will circle Earth 14 times per day, scanning nearly all land and ice surfaces twice every 12 days. Its data will track changes like the advance or retreat of polar ice sheets and slow ground shifts from earthquakes, and will also aid agriculture and disaster planning by helping monitor crops and prepare for floods and hurricanes.

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