🌱 Could Wegovy and Ozempic Help Fight Colon Cancer?
🧾 What happened?
The weight-management drugs Ozempic and Wegovy have become blockbuster treatments for obesity and are having a real impact on patients. Millions of people in the United States now use GLP-1 medications. One study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, a leading health data organization, estimates that 12 percent of people in the US have used them.
These drugs are synthetic versions of the naturally occurring GLP-1 hormone, which regulates a variety of metabolic functions. While the benefits of GLP-1 drugs are well established for diabetes, weight management, and cardiovascular disease, a new study suggests a potential benefit for colon cancer patients as well.
🔬 What was found?
The study analyzed medical records from more than 6,800 people diagnosed with colon cancer. Patients who were taking GLP-1 medications were significantly less likely to die within five years compared with those not using the drugs (15.5 percent versus 37.1 percent).
The benefit appeared strongest among obese patients with colon cancer (BMI over 35). Although this was not a randomized trial, the findings suggest a meaningful survival advantage and point toward a possible new therapeutic value for GLP-1 drugs.
💡 So what?
When GLP-1 drugs were first introduced, beginning with the 2005 approvals for Type 2 diabetes, there were early concerns about risks such as pancreatitis and possible links to pancreatic or thyroid cancers.
However, recent meta analyses from clinical trials and large observational datasets have found no evidence of increased cancer risk. In fact, several studies suggest potential protective effects, including reduced incidence of hepatocellular carcinoma, colorectal cancer, ovarian cancer, and prostate cancer.
The caveat is that cancer often develops over many years, and the existing studies may not cover long enough time periods to detect small differences in risk.
Even so, the current data are promising. This new study is the first to examine the effect of GLP-1 drugs on mortality in colon cancer patients, and the results align with earlier findings of reduced colon cancer incidence in GLP-1 users.
As more people begin taking these medications, researchers should pay closer attention to their effects on other diseases, including cancer. If GLP-1 drugs are truly protective, controlled clinical trials will be needed to prove it. Such a finding could be a genuine game changer, and companies like Pfizer and Novo Nordisk would not hesitate to explore broader therapeutic applications for their leading products.
💉 Merck Clinches Another Approval for Its PD-1 Inhibitor Keytruda in Head and Neck Cancer
🧾 What happened?
Immunotherapy remains one of the most promising advances in cancer therapy over the past decade. Prototypical in this class is Merck’s blockbuster PD-1 inhibitor, Keytruda (pembrolizumab), which acts to “release the brakes” on the immune system.
On Wednesday, Merck announced that the European Commission approved Keytruda for PD-L1–positive head and neck cancer, following the FDA’s approval for the same indication earlier this year in June.
🔬 What was found?
The decision was based on results from the Phase III KEYNOTE 689 trial, a randomized, active-controlled, open-label study evaluating pembrolizumab in locally advanced head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC).
The drug was administered both before and after surgery, in combination with standard of care radiotherapy (with or without cisplatin chemotherapy).
Patients receiving the Keytruda regimen achieved a median event-free survival of 59.7 months compared with 29.6 months in the control group and showed a 30 percent reduction in the risk of recurrence, progression, or death.
💡 Why does it matter?
Merck’s ongoing strategy of expanding combination approvals for Keytruda is clearly paying off.
These results reinforce how PD-1/PD-L1 checkpoint inhibition continues to reshape oncology, improving survival across multiple tumor types — including melanoma, non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), renal cell carcinoma (RCC), HNSCC, and urothelial carcinoma — as well as tissue-agnostic indications such as MSI-H tumors.
Still, immunotherapy is typically effective only in immunologically “hot” tumors (those with high PD-L1 expression), and the development of resistance remains a major challenge.
Time will tell whether Merck and other companies can continue expanding checkpoint inhibitors across additional cancer types.
💉 Could the COVID-19 Vaccine Help Fight Cancer Too?
🧾 What happened?
In addition to halting the pandemic and saving millions of lives, the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines may also have an unexpected benefit in cancer treatment. An exciting new study led by researchers from MD Anderson Cancer Center and the University of Florida found that mRNA vaccination significantly increased survival in lung and skin cancer patients undergoing immunotherapy.
🔬 What was found?
The study, published this month in Nature, discovered that receiving a SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine within 100 days of starting immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy was associated with substantial improvements in overall survival (OS) in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and melanoma. The findings were based on analysis of more than 1,000 patient records from MD Anderson.
While the results are preliminary, the researchers are now designing a randomized clinical trial to confirm these findings.
💡 So what?
Immunotherapy remains one of the most exciting advances in cancer treatment in recent years, including checkpoint inhibitors (PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors) and CAR-T therapy. However, a major limitation of checkpoint inhibitors is that the tumor must be immunologically active, often characterized by high PD-L1 expression.
These new results suggest the possibility of a universal cancer vaccine that could prime the immune system against multiple tumor types. If confirmed, this research could open entirely new avenues for immunotherapy development and cancer prevention.
🧬 Patients with Autoimmunity Respond Better to CAR-T Therapy
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR-T) cell therapy is a powerful immunotherapy in which autologous (self-derived) T-cells are reprogrammed to attack a patient’s cancer. Seven CAR-T therapies are currently FDA-approved: three for B-cell lymphomas, one for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL), one for mantle cell lymphoma, and two for multiple myeloma. However, side effects, sometimes potentially life-threatening, continue to pose a challenge.
Interestingly, a retrospective study of cancer patients receiving CAR-T therapy found that pre-existing autoimmune disease ((e.g., lupus, rheumatoid arthritis) was associated with less toxicity and shorter hospital stays. Among patients with myeloma, lymphoma, or leukemia, 68% of those with autoimmune disease experienced significant side effects, compared with 79% of patients without autoimmunity.The mean duration of hospitalization was also reduced by 2.1 days for patients with autoimmunity.
The specific mechanism that confers protection is still unknown, but this study confirms that CAR-T therapy is feasible and safe in patients with autoimmune disease and may even support exploration of new therapeutic avenues for this population.
💭 What do you think explains this protective effect? 🧠 Could immune dysregulation actually offer clues to safer, more effective immunotherapies?
🤖 Thermo Fisher Partners with OpenAI to Advance Scientific Breakthroughs
Thermo Fisher Scientific, the Massachusetts-based global leader in analytical instruments, diagnostics, clinical solutions, and laboratory, pharmaceutical, and biotechnology services, has announced a partnership with OpenAI.
Thermo Fisher stated that the collaboration “will help improve the speed and success of drug development” and will be integrated across the company, including its clinical research and drug discovery divisions, among others.
This partnership is another example of how biomedicine is betting big on the promise of AI. For instance, last year Lilly and Novartis entered AI collaborations with Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs. These initiatives may influence drug discovery, multi-omics analysis, precision medicine, clinical trial design, and more.
Time will tell whether the promise of AI will truly benefit patients, which is ultimately the goal of biopharma, but this new collaboration suggests that Thermo Fisher is betting it will.
💭 What areas of biomedical research do you think AI will impact the most? 🧠 How can biopharma companies leverage AI to improve their businesses?
🔬 Tempus AI Awarded $60.5M Contract to Support ARPA-H Precision Oncology Program
Oct 13, 2025
It’s good to see, even amid a government shutdown and a tough landscape for research in general, that some federal programs are still thriving.
Modeled after DARPA’s approach to technology development, ARPA-H is a high-risk, high-reward research framework designed to tackle some of the biggest and most intractable problems in biomedicine.
The Advanced Analysis for Precision Cancer Therapy (ADAPT) program aims to understand how biomarkers change as cancers mutate and to build a repository of tools and resources to better target therapies to these changes.
ARPA-H is now partnering with Tempus AI to leverage the company’s AI-driven tests as part of this effort. Tempus AI already integrates large-scale clinical, molecular, and imaging data with artificial intelligence to produce precision oncology diagnostics that help physicians tailor treatments and accelerate therapeutic discovery.
💭 What are your thoughts on the ARPA-H model compared to more traditional scientific funding mechanisms? 💡 And what other AI-driven innovations show the most promise for advancing precision oncology?
🧬 Patients with Rare Cancers Experience Delays in Treatment
Oct 16, 2025
I cut my teeth in the oncology space studying dysregulated signaling pathways in adrenocortical carcinoma, a rare cancer with a dismal prognosis. To my chagrin, a new report from the American Cancer Society (ACS) reveals that care for rare cancer patients is still lagging.
Pulling data from the National Cancer Database (NCDB), researchers analyzed records from 1,756,944 patients diagnosed with rare cancers in the U.S. between 2015 and 2022—representing about 23.4% of all cancer diagnoses during that period.
More than one-third of these patients did not initiate treatment within 30 days of diagnosis, highlighting a persistent gap in timely care for this population.
While the factors influencing time to treatment are complex, greater adoption of precision oncology diagnostic tools may help bridge this gap, by accelerating and improving diagnosis, identifying targeted treatment options, and matching patients with specific mutations to cutting-edge clinical trials that might otherwise be inaccessible.
💭 How do you think patients with rare cancers can be better served? 🧠 Do you agree that precision oncology tests play a key role in improving care?
Since I wrote my last article, the indiscriminate gutting of USAID and the Federal government writ large has continued unabated and with reckless abandon for costs and consequences. I know many friends and former colleagues that have lost their jobs— people that are kind, intelligent, hard-working, and dedicated to the public good, not “corrupt” or “lazy” as Elon Musk would have you believe. But then again Mr. Musk doesn’t care about the fate of government workers or any of the good that USAID did because he believes “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” as he said in an interview with Joe Rogan on Feb 28, 2025. Makes sense, because destroying USAID will literally kill people, and only someone devoid of empathy could possibly be ok with that.
The real cost to the death of USAID and American goodness abroad will be measured in bodies. This is not exaggeration or metaphor, I am being as literal as I can possibly be. Cutting USAID will kill people–IS killing people—and the most likely culprit is HIV/AIDS.
There are a million examples of foreign aid programs doing good things: nutrition and food programs to fight famines, disaster recovery after a tsunami or earthquake, supporting refugee camps for those fleeing war, water and sanitation programs, programs combating gender-based violence, programs improving schools and hospitals, and so many more. I am going to focus on the biggest and probably the most successful foreign aid program in history – the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief or PEPFAR.
PEPFAR is a massive program that has saved 25 million lives from HIV over the last 20 years. While the program encompasses several agencies including the Department of State, the Centers for Disease Control and others, USAID is the primary implementer of the program. As one global health expert said, the loss of funding for program “will be a bloodbath.”
The number of HIV deaths have fallen since the start of PEPFAR in 2003.
PEPFAR was created in 2003 under the George W. Bush Administration. In the 90s and early 2000s, HIV was a true pandemic that rampaged across the globe. New antiviral treatments and public health campaigns combating the virus had huge benefits to fighting the disease in the U.S., but for lower income countries, the virus was left virtually unchecked, for example, killing tens of millions in Africa. As American lives and treasure were wasted in the middle-East wars fueled by post-9-11 hysteria, the Bush Administration at least recognized the benefits of foreign aid in promoting American values (this is a perfect example of the contradictions of U.S. foreign policy I alluded to in the last article). Bush signed the United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act of 2003 on May 27, 2003, created PEPFAR (as well as programs for countering tuberculosis and malaria).
An Infographic from PEPFAR’s website summarizing its achievements.
The USAID stop work order and dismantling of the agency have already caused disruptions and threaten to undo the decade of progress in fighting the forgotten pandemic. In 2024, more than 20 million people were receiving HIV treatment through PEPFAR and nearly 84 million tested for HIV. Many countries, especially in Africa, lack the funding to cover HIV treatments and testing, hence why the generosity of the US and other nations is so important. The sudden cessation of funding has had an immediate impact as HIV testing and treatment centers are already closing and patients are no longer receiving their life-saving medications. One estimate says as many as 1,650,000 people could die within a year without American foreign aid for H.I.V. prevention and treatment.
Peter Donde was a 10-year-old infected with H.I.V. from his mother during childbirth. But American aid kept Peter strong even as his parents died from AIDS. A program started by President George W. Bush called PEPFAR saved 26 million lives from AIDS, and one was Peter’s.
Under PEPFAR, an outreach health worker ensured that Peter and other AIDS orphans got their medicines. Then in January, Trump and Musk effectively shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development, perhaps illegally, and that PEPFAR outreach program ended. Orphans were on their own.
Without the help of the community health worker, Peter was unable to get his medicines, so he became sick and died in late February, according to Moses Okeny Labani, a health outreach worker who helped manage care for Peter and 144 other vulnerable children.
The immediate cause of death was an opportunistic pneumonia infection as Peter’s viral load increased and his immunity diminished, said Labani.
“If U.S.A.I.D. would be here, Peter Donde would not have died,” Labani said.
This is just one life tragically and unnecessarily lost because of Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump’s actions. The true impact on human life may not be known for many years but there will be many, many more stories like Peter’s. Ironically, the loss of funding will hit Musk’s home country of South Africa particularly hard. One HIV expert said “I predict a huge disaster” in regards to the rise of infections and deaths there. Global Health used to be an issue of bi-partisan support. What congressman doesn’t love to brag about saving lives? But now Mr. Trump’s stronghold has forced his party to abandon their values, if they had any to begin with.
Mr. Musk, you killed Peter Donde. How many more will die because of your actions?
What six words best define America today? Years ago, Freakonomics held a contest to answer this, and while the winner—”Our Worst Critics Prefer to Stay”—was clever, my favorite remains: “The Most Gentle Empire So Far.” This phrase perfectly captures the contradictions at the heart of American foreign policy since the end of WWII. Our influence is vast, simultaneously dominating and self-serving yet aspirational towards an alleged greater good for all. The American Empire promotes democracy and free-market values—principles that have enriched the world. Yet, at their core, these ideals primarily serve America’s own wealth and power—a form of “friendly hegemony.”
The rising American tide has lifted many ships worldwide and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) served an important role in buoying these efforts. USAID historically acted as a core lever of American “soft power” and aptly served the somewhat conflicting aims of greater good and direct U.S. benefit. The loss of the Agency (or near-loss) under Trump represents the most shocking shift in American Foreign Policy in decades and something far darker about how this President thinks about America’s status on the world stage. Trump cares only about American domination and wants to kill the myth of American goodness abroad.
The official USAID logo.
This shift in foreign policy felt personal to me because of my own journey into the world of international development. After I earned my Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Biology, I became a bit burned out during my postdoctoral research so I sought a path to have greater benefit to more people’s lives. I pursued the AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship and found myself quite unexpectedly at USAID. Before interviewing there, I knew almost nothing about the quietest giant in the world, or the work it did, the influence it had, and the good it spread. Throughout my fellowship, I became enamored with the noble mission of helping some of the poorest people in the world. I ended up staying for over 6 years through various contracting mechanisms and living in two different countries. I came to learn of the passion and intelligence of the people that worked there, the impact it had on people’s lives, and the economic value and security it brought to the U.S.
An excerpt from an actual policy brief from Trump 1.0 and how the Administration formally viewed USAID as a tool to counter China.
My time in Cambodia revealed how U.S. foreign aid serves both humanitarian goals and strategic interests—particularly in countering China’s influence. I worked directly with our incredible local Khmer staff and traveled all over the country to learn how the U.S. could partner with Cambodian businesses and alleviate the biggest challenges in the country. The not-so-secret goal of our work was to counter the influence of China in the country and throughout the region. In addition to its many humanitarian and economic benefits, U.S. foreign aid is ultimately a powerful tool for competing with and countering our adversaries WITHOUT the need for military force.
Over time, I became jaded. Like U.S. foreign policy itself, USAID operates in shades of gray—its noble mission often tangled in inefficiencies and contradictions. For all the good USAID did, it moved slowly, suffered from overly complex funding requirements, and had a heavy bias towards the “beltway bandits”—large contractors near Washington, D.C., that dominate federal spending. These inefficiencies reduced the potential impact of the billions of dollars it spent. There certainly is a lot of room to improve how money is spent and where. For example, I am an advocate of direct cash transfers, an area of work historically looked down upon in the foreign aid community. But despite these problems, the core thesis was always at the heart of the Agency’s work, something I experienced first hand: America can and should help other countries because it is good for them and it is good for us.
The purpose of improving efficiency and reducing waste is to make the work of something BETTER. In the case of USAID, a keen mind for reform could help the Agency to help MORE people and bring MORE value to the U.S. But that’s not what Elon Musk and his followers—more focused on spectacle than substance—care about. Attacking USAID has NOTHING to do with efficiency or cost savings and everything to do with making a statement: America doesn’t care about you anymore. If you want our help, you need to do something for us. It’s hard to keep friends if you view them solely as transactions. Ironically, this is exactly China’s model for aid. Indeed, no one is probably more thrilled at the death of USAID than China, which has been building its own vast foreign aid influence machine (which operates in a much more insidious manner than the U.S.’s version).
An example of a USAID program supporting a HIV treatment clinic in Cameroon.
Even though USAID is and always has been intended as a foreign policy tool designed to advance U.S. interests, I believe it represents a much deeper value, a belief that American influence can make the world a better place. Whether or not U.S. influence actually has done real good in the world is a complicated issue with many facets. In some areas like global health, I argue this is an unambiguous “YES” (and I plan to explore the real benefits and evidence behind USAID in future articles).
Contradictory as it may be, there is power in the myth of American goodness in foreign policy. The world cannot be controlled through sheer force alone and America no longer has the strength or will to exert that type of control. American values of democracy and freedom ARE a strength inherent to themselves. The MYTH of what America represents is as important as what we actually are in reality. The death of this myth—of American goodness abroad—is what frightens me most. When America stops believing in its power to do good, the world loses more than a superpower; it loses hope. So what does the sacking of USAID say about us as a nation?
Trump and MAGA signal something deeper and far more sinister: that America no longer cares. Not about the world, not about the good we could do, and not about the responsibility that comes with our power. The tragic reality is that this President has abandoned even the pretense of striving for good. But America’s greatness has never been measured by power alone; it lies in the belief that we can lead through compassion and principle. In abandoning this belief, we forfeit not only our credibility but the very essence of American exceptionalism. Without the will to stand as a ‘city on the hill,’ we lose more than influence—we lose the soul of the nation.
While the country enjoyed its annual celebration of the Super Bowl, the U.S. biomedical research sector was stabbed in the back.
Late last week, Trump slashed billions in funding overnight with no planning or consultations with researchers, doctors, or hospitals. The impact will be catastrophic for biomedical research: labs will shut down, clinical trials could get cancelled, and hospital staff fired.
What did they actually do?
The Trump Administration announced they would cap the amount of overhead that the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, is allowed to issue in research grants at 15%. Historically, the NIH has paid up to the ~50% range. If it goes through, this change would amount to a near immediate loss of billions of dollars to hospitals and universities, many in red states that voted for Trump.
NIH funding also supports about 412,000 jobs, from research assistants to grant managers to people who dispose of toxic chemicals.
All of this is labeled by Musk and his goons as unnecessary waste as they continue their ill conceived rampage against the federal government and a strong American future.
The message is clear and destabilizing to the scientific ecosystem: Your work is not valued. Your job is expendable. Patients don’t need new treatments.
Now is the time toinform and act — because the average person will not feel the near-term impact. But when the pipeline for new discoveries and new life-saving medications dries up, and America loses its position as the leader in biomedical innovation — we’ll ask “How did we let this happen??”
The NIH is the engine that powers US medical innovation: long-term research with decades long horizons that companies and investors will never fund. Our economy gets a solid payback on this research — measurable in dollars, and immeasurable in lives.
For every $1 spent on NIH research, $2.46 flows back into our economy (Link1, Link2). Not to mention the taxes paid by a $1 Trillion biopharma and medical research industry.
The discoveries made in these labs become tomorrow’s life-saving treatments. With healthcare costs spiraling, it is pennywise, pound foolish to slash research.
Examples originating from the NIH:
Cardiovascular disease: Advances in hypertension and cholesterol management reduced heart attack and stroke rates, saving $100s of billions.
Cancer: research in precision medicine and immunotherapy has led to higher survival rates. Without foundational NIH funding, cancer immunotherapies wouldn’t exist.
So many more!
Musk dares to call long-term investments in the fight against cancer a WASTE?
NIH’s indirect costs average (28%) and are in-line with private biotechs (25%-50%) and defense contractor overhead (10-100%) — spending on facilities, equipment, infrastructure, benefits, project management, administration, etc.
Should we have oversight to ensure appropriate spending? Of course. But Musk’s surprise nuclear bomb is the WRONG way to approach this!
US long-term innovation is fueled by grants, and is the basis for our future economy (e.g. Internet, human genome, etc). The US has been the world’s beacon for medical research, attracting top talent and driving innovation. We’re about to dim that light. China just surpassed the US in annual research publications — in the race for global dominance in medical research, these NIH cuts are like shooting researchers in the leg.
What do you value? For me, health research that saves lives ranks near the top. Do you agree? Speak. Up. Now. Lives depend on it.
Honey bee (Apis mellifera), Cumnor Hill, Oxford. Source: Wikimedia.
What’s the Buzz all About?
In case you missed this fascinating news, the world’s first vaccine for honeybees has been approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)! Developed by the Georgia-based biotech company Dalan Animal Health, the vaccine targets the destructive American foulbrood bacteria and is administered to the queen as a food (royal jelly). The immunity in the queen is then passed on to all the offspring she produces.
So What?
There is global decline in pollinators. Since 2006, scientists have noticed collapse of honeybee colonies, a problem that still persists now. The USDA estimates that over 100 U.S. grown crops rely on pollinators, such as honeybees . This innovative new technology is a powerful new tool to help protect bee colonies and other pollinators. The technology has implications for fighting other pathogens in bees, or might even be adaptable to other insect species.
The world population is predicted to reach 9.8 billion people by 2050. Try to visualize all those people…and all those mouths. Can we make enough food to feed everyone, especially when we can’t even feed everyone right now (it’s estimated 828 million went hungry in 2021)?
Human-caused climate change is also predicted to cause sea level rise of a foot by 2050. While this doesn’t sound like much, the costs are predicted to be in the billions, not to mention the cost to human lives. And sea level rise is only one of a host of potential causes from climate change, including an even more dire food security situation. And the impacts of climate change impacts will only get worse unless we do something about it NOW.
This could be the world’s coastlines in a few decades. Photo credit: Kelly Sikkema Unsplash.
2050 is not that far off and things can only get worse for the future if we don’t do something about it now. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to help solve both problems at once…?
Surprise, there very well might be 🙂 Insects are an underutilized food source (for both humans and animals) with a ton of potential benefits: environmental, nutritional, economic, and social.
“Insects as food”, or entomophagy, which literally means “the eating of insects” (ento = insect, phagy = to eat), is certainly novel to Europe and the U.S. But if you live in countries in Africa, South East Asia or many other places entomophagy is nothing new. If you’re from Thailand or Cambodia, you may be used to chomping on some fried crickets, or if you’re Mexican, chapulines (grasshoppers) may be something that’s familiar (and delicious) to you. It’s estimated that currently some 2 billion people eat insects for food every year, and over 1,900 species have been documented as edible.
Chapulines for sale in Mexico. Photo credit: Wikimedia.
So what’s all the buzz about (don’t worry, plenty more bad bug puns to come lol)? And if eating insects for food is so widespread, why are people just talking about this now? Why do I think insects as food can help save the world?
Insects may be a climate-friendly, healthy, and safe alternative livestock (yup, as in alternative to cows, pigs, chickens, and fish). In 2013, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), entitled “Edible insects: Future prospects for food and feed security.” In my opinion, this report can be considered one of the most significant efforts to introduce the very real concept of “insects as food and feed” to a global audience. The report is comprehensive of all the research and knowledge on insects as food and for use as animal feed and covers almost all angles from nutritional, economic, environmental, regulatory, and more (there has been a surge of new research in this area since first publication of the report but a lot of the conclusions are still valid).
The cover of the FAO report.
Just a few highlights taken directly from the report and other studies (I’ll spend future posts doing a deeper dive into the evidence behind these issues. This is just an intro after all):
Environmental Benefits
Lower environmental impact of raising insects compared to traditional livestock.
Lower feed to protein conversion ratio – more weight gain/amount of feed.
Insects are cold-blooded and this means that insects are extremely efficient at converting feed to body mass. For example, on average, insects can convert 2 kg of feed into 1 kg of insect mass, whereas cattle require 8 kg of feed to produce 1 kg of body weight gain.
Lower green-house gas (GHG) emissions than traditional livestock.
For example, pigs produce 10–100 times more GHGs per kg of weight than mealworms.
Lower water requirements than traditional livestock.
Insect farming is less land-dependent – insects can be raised vertically, thus maximizing land use.
An important component of a circular economic model.
Globally, >1/3 of the food is lost or wasted, resulting in an economic loss of $1 trillion USD, and contributing to 10% of GHG emissions. Food waste ends in landfill rotting and emitting the potent harmful GHG methane. Insects can be raised on plant and food waste and unsafe food/the inedible portion of the food, thus simultaneously reducing the environmental impact of food waste and producing a useful commodity.
For example, black soldier fly (BSF) larvae (BSFL) raised on food and other organic waste can then be used as animal feed or processed as food. In 2019, a company in Ecuador produced the largest plant in Latin America to use BSFL larvae to produce animal feed and fertilizer.
Opportunities to strengthen small holder farmers and local supply chains.
Insects can be produced locally as animal feed (both for livestock and aquaculture) thus reducing dependence on costly, international supply chains and markets for animal feed. This also creates economic opportunities for smallholder farmers.
Nutritional and Health Benefits
Insect protein can be a healthy, cheap alternative to meat.
Insects are higher in edible protein by mass than traditional livestock, and they are rich in nutrients and vitamins.
For example, cricket protein has higher levels of iron, calcium, zinc, manganese, and B vitamins than most other meat-based protein sources and these are especially essential for women of reproductive age and young children.
Insect protein powder can be produced as a nutritional supplement or added to other low-protein or processed foods.
Insects may be particularly important as a food supplement for undernourished children because most insect species are high in fatty acids, fiber, and micronutrients (copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, selenium and zinc).
Insects pose a low risk of transmitting diseases spread from animals to humans.
Social and Livelihoods Benefits
Improved livelihoods.
Insect farming can provide entrepreneurship opportunities in developed and developing economies. The technical requirements and capacity for starting an insect farm are relatively minimal and can be done in locally, which makes it accessible to many people, including those in agriculture-poor areas.
Insect gathering and rearing can offer an important livelihood diversification strategy. For example, insects can be directly and easily collected in the wild and sold to buyers.
Creates economic opportunities, both as entrepreneurs and employees, for women, youth, individuals with disabilities and other marginalized groups.
Insect agricultural work is less time and labor-intensive than traditional agriculture which means practically anyone can start an insect startup. This presents opportunities to engage with women and other groups marginalized from formal economic sectors.
Clearly there’s a lot of good to raising insects for food and feed, even in addition to fighting nutrition and climate change! So what do you think about edible insects now? Been bitten by the bug yet? Have I whet your appetite for creepy crawlies enough to want to learn more?
Just to ground-truth things a bit as well. While the pro-insect arguments are compelling, there are a number of outstanding questions that need to be considered. For example, how do we get past the “Yuck!” factor? How do we efficiently and effectively produce edible insects so that they can have the maximal amount of environmental, health, and economic benefits? Can (or should) we raise insects on an industrial scale and if we do, have we learned from our mistakes with traditional livestock? These (and many others) are important questions that I don’t think we have the answers to yet.
Also the reality is I don’t ever anticipate edible insects completely replacing meat. I personally love meat and fish and wouldn’t want to be deprived of them forever. You can imagine a future dinner in a week being a mix of different protein sources. For example, eating chicken, pork, or beef 2 nights, fish 1 night, lab-based meat substitute 1 night, insect-based protein 1 night, and vegetable or plant-based protein 2 nights. We can still enjoy meat but we need to drastically reduce consumption of it and introduce other more sustainable alternatives, like edible insects. This type of diverse diet is not very common right now but I still think it’s a good idea for a better world!
But back to the title of this post: can insects really help save the world? Maybe, but not definitely not by themselves. When it comes to combating climate change, hunger, poverty, inequality and all the rest of the world’s ills, a silver bullet simply doesn’t exist. What we need is a silver bullet machine gun! Insects as food and feed may just be one of the many silver bullets we use. My next few posts will take a look at why and how in greater detail. Until then, the ants go marching 2 by 2, hurrah, hurrah…
There’s a lot of darkness in the world right now. There seems to be an endless supply of conspiracy theories, fringe ideas become centered, urgent issues being ignored, and evidence and reason that is denounced and derided. What is the response to this? Cynicism? “The world is doomed so who cares anyways.” Blind optimism and the hope that things will just work out? Ostriching? That is, sticking your head in the sand and pretending the problem will go away? No to all of these.
The answer is the same as for any challenge: hard work and steady, incremental change. When you’re stuck in a hole do you bury yourself? No, you climb out! And the only way to counter bad ideas is with good ideas. Good ideas is our way out of the hole we’re in.
Good ideas tend to create more! Photo credit: Pexel
That’s what I want to do here. Share a couple of my favorite “good ideas.” Or least what I see as good idea. Maybe you’ll agree, maybe you won’t, but that’s the fun of free thought. In the end, I want try to make the world a better place for more people, even if it’s just a tiny bit.
Ok, first some background.
My name is Dr. Derek Simon. The “Dr.” is from my Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Biology, which I earned from the University of Michigan in 2013. I have always loved science and nature, and I always knew I wanted to be a scientist one day. Hence the title of this blog, “Dr. Simon Says Science (And More).” Get the bad joke? Simon Says… read my blog 🙂
This is me 🙂
I was the type of kid that would spend his summers turning over rocks looking for creepy crawlies underneath, or catching fireflies and frogs and putting them in jars so he could watch and study them. My parents had a video of me when I was seven years old asking me, “Derek, what do you want for Christmas?” I responded with, “A bug kit. And That’s all.” Even back then, we all knew…
As a youngster I dabbled in nearly all the sciences: geology (trips to rock quarries and an accumulation of 3 huge boxes of rocks that to this day are still in the basement of my parent’s house), chemistry (I started a fire on my kitchen table by mixing two random chemicals together1), entomology (the aforementioned backyard expeditions for bugs), microbiology (culturing bacteria from doorknobs and my dog’s saliva on homemade agar petri dishes), physics (I made a homemade tennis ball launcher in physics club that used lighter fluid as fuel), and more.
I eventually refined my passion to “curing disease” and discovered cellular and molecular biology, or how life works at the molecular level. I was amazed by the incredible complexity of the cell, and how the vast diversity of biological life, behaviors and structures are all ultimately derived from the same collection of molecules, participating in an insanely complicated molecular dance that has evolved over hundreds of millions of years.
A few years ago I hit the wall in academia. As a kid, I thought “curing disease” was just finding that one magic pill through mixing stuff together at random until…“Eureka!” Oh, how wrong I was. As a real scientist, I learned how much work (just to be clear, oftentimes incredibly repetitive and tedious work) it takes to even figure out something tiny. As a grad student, I would make the joke that “if A is the discovery of something new, like a novel molecule or gene, and M was the drug given to a patient to treat their disease, your entire thesis project might take you from C to D, maybe to E if you were lucky…”
As you can imagine, after over 10 years “at the bench” as we say, I got burned out by doing the type of research I was doing and no longer felt the passion for the work. To me, moving from C to D didn’t feel like accomplishing anything or helping anyone. Though I still believe strongly in basic research in general. There are so many dedicated, hard-working scientists that make unseen contributions to our world everyday, but for me, I didn’t want that life anymore.
Five years later I am still working as a contractor for USAID (honestly, I’m ready for another change) but through my diversity of experiences on this new path, my passions have spanned in so many different and unexpected directions. I am thankful I made that unplanned transition because I have been exposed now to a whole constellation of amazing ideas that never would have occurred to me on a more traditional scientific path.
Some of those ideas could very well help save the world one day.
That’s what this blog is about: ideas on cool and interesting things that I think may help to make the world a better place.2 My goal for this blog is to simply share a few of my favorite ideas that are not necessarily in the mainstream right now but I think could have a real potential to help the world in the future. And most importantly, I want to discuss the data and research behind them: why do I think these are good ideas and what is the evidence for that?
I have so many interests in so many areas but I will mostly stay within my past and present fields: the biomedical sciences and international development. I will try to be focused on topics within these very deep buckets while at the same time remaining flexible to write about anything cool I happen to stumble across (tech, psychology, philosophy, so much knowledge out there…). I also don’t plan to claim these ideas as my own, but when it comes to good ideas, the more people talking about them the better!
But before I share a few of the things I may write about, I think I should share some of my values and assumptions. After all, if I’m writing a blog about good ideas to make a better world, how exactly do I define that “better world”?
At the core of my beliefs is that I think all people are equally important and have equal value, regardless of who they are or identify as, where they live, and under what circumstances they were born. I believe all people should have the same right to pursue a life of their choosing and be given the same opportunities and chances for happiness and fulfillment as everyone else. I will make no attempt to prove these values scientifically but this is simply the foundation for the topics I will pursue in this blog. Sadly, I do not think many people in the world explicitly share these values and even worse, some people actively believe in the opposite or promote a world-view that either intentionally or not, is moving us farther from these values. But I don’t care about those people. I’m not going to try to convince anyone about my values. They are are simply my working assumptions for the things I want to talk about: how can we make the world better for everyone? How can we make life on earth (not just for humans either, mind you) more equitable, safe, healthy, peaceful, prosperous, and sustainable?
Ok, so now that’s out of the way: what are some of my ideas?
One of my favorites that I’ll focus on for the first few posts is related to climate change and food security: entomophagyor the eating of insects as food. (ento = insects, phagy = to eat). My passion for bugs continues 30 years later since that Christmas “bug kit” video and my summer bug catching adventures…
Now, I’m not the first to argue that eating insects is a great idea. Actually, Medium itself has already curated a bunch of edible insects articles published here. And eating insects itself is hardly a new idea. It’s been practiced by cultures all over the world and throughout human history. What’s “new” about it is making it mainstream. I’ll argue that we should rotate in more insects into our diet, and cut back on environmentally-destructive cattle and pigs.
But that’s just a taste (pun definitely intended) of things to come. I also want to talk about a whole range of issues, many that I’ve worked on directly or indirectly in my career. These include: drug addiction and why it should be treated as a medical ailment and not a criminal disorder (the focus of my old blog posts and some of post-doctoral research), the virtue of the social business model over the standard profit-driven model, the strengths and flaws of international development and how to make it better, and plenty more.
Thanks very much for reaching the end of this and I hope to keep you engaged and learning! After all, anyone who’s alive is still learning; we’re all just figuring it out as we go. I hope you join me on this learning journey as Dr. Simon Says Science (and so much more).
And now, let’s start digging out of that hole we’re in 🙂
I know now that the reaction was potassium permanganate and glycerine, a very intense redox reaction. Actually, I found this video on youtube of it. Isn’t the internet great?
Truth be told, I actually started blogging way back in 2015 or so but gave it up a few years ago. A lot of my old posts were on neuroscience, drug addiction, and other topics. You can still find them in my “archive” (i.e. the drop down on the right).
Dr. Simon Says Science (And More) 
