It is the year 2036. A patient struggling with depression and anxiety is referred to her local psychobiotics clinic where the consultant prescribes a course of personalised pills to improve her symptoms. But rather than acting on her own cells, let alone those in her brain, the pills work by administering specific strains of microbes in her gut.

This future vision of doctors tweaking the contents of your digestive tract to improve complex and hard-to-treat psychological disorders might seem far-fetched. But research over the past couple of decades has revealed the far-reaching impact of the ecosystem of bacteria, fungi, viruses and other microbes that lives within us. Perhaps most surprising has been the associations scientists have discovered between the gut microbiome and our mental health. Now they are exploring whether harnessing this intricate ecosystem could help people feel better.

Growing evidence

The notion that your “gut feeling” connects with your psychological experience of the world is well established in popular imagination. But until recently, scientists were deeply sceptical—particularly of the notion that the multitude of microbial cells inside us could have an impact on mental health. “Fifteen years ago, there was sniggering at the back of the seminar room when people presented their research,” says Professor Phil Burnet, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK.

But the field of microbial neuroscience has accelerated rapidly over the past decade, thanks to an explosion of lab studies and trials in humans that involve microbiota. Some explore live beneficial microbes known as probiotics, others formulations of microbe food, or prebiotics, to fertilise specific bacterial strains. Meanwhile, heat-treated microbes, or postbiotics, are also being developed.

Together, these studies paint a picture of deep and important connections between the — from as many as 5000 different species — in your digestive tract and your physical and mental health. “How can we use this to maintain wellbeing or treat brain disorders?” asks Burnet. “Within the gut-brain circuit, the gut microbiome is the most accessible component.”

What happens in vagus

The neurons that operate the gut are sometimes referred to as our “second brain”. Known as the enteric nervous system, in humans it contains an estimated 500 million neurons, more than . It operates autonomously to control digestion but is also in constant bidirectional communication with the brain via the vagus nerve.

This second brain and its connection with the one inside your skull is one way that gut microbes can affect mental health. There are others too:��via metabolites they produce passing into the blood and crossing the blood-brain barrier, by impacting gut hormones and by stimulating the immune system.

“The microbiome is endlessly complicated, and what I suspect is that there is more than one mechanism for the clinical effects that we see,” says Dr Richard Day, V.P. Medical Affairs and Clinical Development within R&D at ADM, a company that researches and markets pre-, pro-, and postbiotics. “We’re still on that journey to unpick the mechanisms of action.”

The fact that the gut microbiome is capable of impacting the brain is, however, clear.

Some of the strongest evidence comes from research into mood disorders, with studies showing associations with gut microbiome composition. Now, scientists are moving beyond these observational studies to experimental interventions to find out more.

A mechanistic study led by the University of Oxford, for example, found that giving participants a probiotic had measurable effects on their cognitive and emotional processing.�� Other studies are exploring the gut-brain axis in clinical populations. In 2023, for example, researchers at King’s College London and ADM published a study in JAMA Psychiatry, exploring the effects of a probiotic in people with major depression. “Together, these studies paint an increasingly compelling picture of the gut-brain connection,” says Dr Malwina Naghibi, Head of Clinical Development at ADM.

A two-way street

This connection works both ways: mental health can affect digestive health and vice versa. Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), for example, has an established relationship with anxiety, and this link is being actively explored. In , ADM’s researchers gave adults with IBS either a live or a heat-treated strain of gut bacteria. Both produced similar results in patients, providing researchers with vital clues on how bacteria—alive or dead—interact with the gut and nervous system (see Box, right).

scientists are relishing the challenge of exploring this new frontier

These studies are typical of a proliferation of mostly small, but rigorous clinical trials testing the impact of the gut microbiome on , (ADHD) and . There is even into whether it plays a role in Alzheimer’s disease.

What’s needed now are larger studies over longer periods that can show how robust any impacts really are. “There is just this explosion of research at the moment,” says Naghibi.

The sniggering at the back of seminar rooms has gone quiet, but there is still a long way to go. Microbial neuroscience is a field in its infancy, psychobiotics even more so. Yet scientists are relishing the challenge of exploring this new frontier. “I think this is the most exciting part,” says Naghibi.

MICROBIAL AFTERLIVES—THE SCIENCE OF POSTBIOTICS

The new kid on the block in microbiome research is postbiotics. Unlike probiotics (live microbes) or prebiotics (microbe nutrients), these are preparations of microbes inactivated by heat or other methods, sometimes also together with the soup of cell fragments and metabolites they produce (see graphic). Even though the microbes are no longer alive, they can still exert biological effects. ADM scientists, for example, have shown that heat-treated bacteria produce to live ones in people who have IBS.

These effects can be rapid. A of postbiotics and the gut-brain axis noted physiological changes within an hour of administration. And findings from other trials suggest that the effects of postbiotics wear off when participants stop taking them. This suggests a direct effect rather than a permanent change to the microbiota, though much more research on mechanisms is needed.

Meanwhile, postbiotics are being investigated in a wide range of conditions. The ADM team, for example, has conducted a trial of 72 people exploring whether postbiotics can reduce the symptoms of allergic rhinitis.
The advantage of postbiotics over probiotics is that they don’t need to be kept alive, meaning they can be added to foods or drinks. Why swallow a pill if you could take postbiotics in the milk on your cereal?��

Learn more at:

💬 Artificial intelligence and big data are flooding discovery pipelines with high-potential drug candidates, but this rapid innovation has created a new challenge. Simply put, our capability to design miracle molecules is vastly outstripping our technology to mass-manufacture them safely for the global public. Moving drug making from the scale of lab flasks to commercial bioreactors introduces non-linear biological and engineering shifts that can undermine tasks like purification.

⚡In this �鶹��ý CoLab podcast, experts from global life sciences leader Cytiva explain the hidden, high-stakes science of purification that is required to close the gap between drug discovery and the pharmacy shelf.

Our guests are:

Henrik Ihre, Distinguished Fellow, Cytiva

Paul Belcher, Business Leader, Cytiva

🎧 Stay tuned to learn about:

➡ The process of taking a drug from theoretical to the shop shelf

➡ How the drug purification works

➡ The human cost when purification goes wrong

➡ The challenges of keeping pace in manufacturing as AI supercharges drug discovery

Chapters:

(00:00) Intro – How drugs go from discovery to reality

(03:49) The purification process

(10:05) Why small scale success doesn’t mean industrial scale success

(13:00) The challenge of the expanding drug pipeline

(21:39) Understanding the molecules that are being purified

(23:20) What is a chromatography resin?

(25:24) Why purification gets more difficult later in the process

(27:15) The human impact when purification goes wrong

(32:59) The future of AI drug discovery

(37:52) Is AI helping with purification?

(40:32) How it feels to be advancing drug discovery

About the sponsor:

Cytiva:

About the podcast:

�鶹��ý CoLab explores the boundaries of innovation and the intersection of business, science and technology. Hosted by Justin Mullins.

Don’t miss an episode – subscribe now:

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Connect with �鶹��ý:

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Inside the bodies of a growing number of cancer patients, a remarkable feat of pharmaceutical ingenuity is playing out: an injection of an engineered antibody that targets two different fronts at once — a feat no natural antibody can achieve.

With one of its molecular arms, the engineered antibody seizes a cancer cell and with the other, an immune cell called a killer T cell. By hauling the two together, the antibody allows the T cell to destroy the cancer cell. But without this forced union, the killer T cell would have missed the cancer cell altogether. Such molecules, known as bispecific antibodies, are transforming cancer treatment. Their dual-targeting powers bring enhanced precision, reduced side-effects and the ability to circumvent cancer’s famously inventive resistance mechanisms. They are now being trained on other complex conditions such as autoimmune disease.

Bispecific antibodies are just one of a new generation of protein-based drugs, or biologics, that are shaping the future of precision medicine. Scientists are aiming for ever-more complex therapeutic targets, with a broader range of drug types. For example, trispecific antibodies that can bind to three antigens are in the works, as well as more sophisticated versions of single-target monoclonal antibodies, which have been in clinical use for decades. With AI helping to generate more options, drug candidates are flooding the pipeline.

However, this vast increase in drug candidate diversity has exposed a critical bottleneck: manufacturing technology hasn’t kept up. “Downstream development, manufacturing and some analytical workflows are not scaling at the same rate as what’s happening in discovery,” says Paul Belcher, business leader at global life sciences company Cytiva. “And that is creating bottlenecks.”

In the long and tortuous path from drug candidate to the clinic, a key stumbling block is purification—separating the active ingredient from the environment in which it is made. Unlike “small molecule” drugs, which are wholly or partly synthesised by chemists, biologics are made in living cells, meaning they have to be extracted from a complex mixture of other biomolecules. What’s more, biologics are large and complex molecules, and must retain their intricate three-dimensional structure to work correctly, without unravelling or clumping together. “This requires an expanded toolbox of purification tools,” says Belcher. And companies are finding that purification considerations must be built into their drug discovery process early on.

Increasing complexity

The stakes are high. Fewer than 1 in 10,000 new drug candidates ever make it to the clinic, says Belcher, a statistic that is worsening as researchers train their sights on increasingly complicated targets. These candidates can fail or be delayed for numerous reasons and purification problems are a growing concern. That means biopharma companies risk losing out on a booming sector that is currently showing double-digit annual growth, says Henrik Ihre, distinguished fellow at Cytiva. For patients, it means missing out on potentially transformative new treatments.

Although purification methods exist for “classic” biologics such as monoclonal antibodies, these may not work well for the new generation of biologics, each of which demands a different approach. “People don’t always know how to make the new molecules,” says Ihre. And this often means there is no obvious way to purify them.

The sheer number of new candidates is an issue too. “There are so many that enter the development pipelines each week that companies have a hard time keeping up with developing purification protocols that purify the molecules well enough to do clinical testing,” says Ihre.

Most biologics are purified using chromatography, where molecules are separated based on properties such as size, charge, hydrophobicity or binding affinity. In many cases, this involves a chromatography resin—a material made up of porous beads functionalised with ligands that selectively bind to impurities or to the target molecule before it is released in a later step.

Shared structures

Over the past 20 years, Cytiva has developed 45 resins for purifying new biologics. The ligands on these resins are usually off-the-shelf molecules because, although each biologic is different, it usually belongs to a class of molecules that have key features in common. These can be targets for resin ligands. Classic monoclonal antibodies, for example, share a structure known as the Fc domain, which is targeted by conventional protein A resins. But monoclonal antibodies are getting more varied and complex — some no longer have an Fc domain — and this has transformed purification. “So we need to come up with new resins,” says Ihre.

Successful purification means knowing your molecule like the back of your hand, says Ihre. This includes its size, form, 3D shape, hydrophobicity, and whether there are any regions that a resin ligand could bind to. “If you don’t understand your target molecule, your likelihood of being able to manufacture it and purify it will be very low,” he adds. Newer approaches can also have more liabilities, such as being aggregation prone, acidic and temperature sensitive.

That’s why planning ahead is so important – because it reveals which molecules are likely to be hard to purify. “We need to identify these liabilities as early as possible,” says Belcher. This allows companies to reduce the risk of failure as early as possible in the drug development process.

Another key consideration is to have purification processes that work at scale. Paradoxically, approaches that work in the lab don’t always translate to large-scale manufacture. For example, size exclusion chromatagraphy is still used in drugdiscovery but rarely in manufacturing because of its low capacity and slow throughput. Some issues are cost and productivity: a new technique could be scalable in theory, but in practice is too expensive or inefficient, says Ihre.

Purification technology

In a field where scientific innovation is accelerating rapidly, success depends not only on discovering new molecules but on understanding how they can be developed, purified and produced at scale. That requires expertise across the full development journey—from early discovery insights through to manufacturing realities.

By anticipating purification challenges earlier and designing molecules with production in mind, researchers and developers can reduce risk, improve scalability and bring therapies to patients faster. For companies working at the intersection of discovery and manufacturing, closing this gap is becoming essential to turning scientific breakthroughs into real-world impact.

For more about Cytiva visit:

How can I tell the difference between normal age-related forgetfulness and something more serious?

Misplacing your keys or struggling to recall a name — these are frustrations most of us encounter as we age. But when does forgetfulness suggest something more serious, such as dementia? Understanding this difference can be reassuring and life-changing.

As we get older, small memory lapses become more common. This is normal and not a cause for alarm. Dementia, on the other hand, is a progressive brain disease that goes far beyond everyday forgetfulness and can affect a person’s independence.

The main difference lies in whether memory difficulties disrupt daily life. Dr Tim Beanland, Head of Knowledge and Learning at Alzheimer’s Society, explains: “With normal ageing, you might forget whether you parked in row C or D. With dementia, you might forget whether you drove or took the bus. It’s that kind of difference.”

Misplacing your phone is a nuisance. Forgetting that you own one or being unable to retrace your steps to find it, may signal something more serious. Normal age-related memory changes tend to be minor and isolated, whereas dementia affects many areas of cognition and worsens over time.

Seeking advice

If you’re worried about your own memory or that of a loved one, don’t ignore the signs, says Dr Beanland. “Dementia is a disease of the brain. It’s much more serious.” Spotting disruptions early and seeking advice can make a real difference to outcomes and quality of life.

What is the difference between Alzheimer’s and dementia?

The terms “Alzheimer’s” and “dementia” are often used interchangeably, but they aren’t the same. Knowing the distinction can help people and their families make sense of a diagnosis and know what to expect.

Multiple diseases

Dementia is not a single disease — it is an umbrella term for a range of conditions that affect memory and other cognitive functions severely enough to interfere with daily life. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia, but it is far from the only one.

According to Dr Beanland, the relationship between the two is straightforward: “Alzheimer’s is just the most common cause of dementia — it’s about two thirds of cases.” Its hallmark is memory loss, which typically appears as an early symptom.

Planning ahead

Beyond Alzheimer’s, other forms of dementia include vascular dementia, dementia with Lewy bodies, and frontotemporal dementia.

As Dr Beanland explains, “Symptoms with these are not always with memory — they can involve problems with mood or movement, planning ahead and organising language.” This is why an accurate diagnosis matters: the type of dementia shapes a person’s experience and the support they may need.

Is dementia hereditary?

A diagnosis of dementia in a parent or grandparent can raise an unsettling question: could the same thing happen to me? It’s a common concern — and the answer is more reassuring than many expect.

Dementia is not inherited in the simple way some other conditions are. While genetics can play a role, the link between family history and dementia risk is nuanced and largely within your control.

Most dementia cases have no direct genetic cause. Fewer than 1 per cent are passed down directly from parent to child. Some people have “risk genes” — variants that can increase your likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease, but there is no certainty.

Dr Beanland, explains: “Risk genes, if you’ve got them, increase your chance of getting something like Alzheimer’s — but it’s not a guarantee.”

Lifestyle and environment play a big role in shaping your risk. Regular activity, healthy diet, not smoking and staying socially engaged can all reduce the likelihood of developing dementia.

Family history

“There’s a lot you can do to reduce your risk of dementia, even if you’ve got those risk genes,” says Dr Beanland.

While family history is worth being aware of, having a parent with dementia doesn’t mean that you’ll get it. How we live matters more than our genes alone.

Are memory problems always a symptom of dementia?

Memory loss is widely seen as the defining sign of dementia — but the reality is more nuanced. While problems with memory are often the first and most prominent symptom, they don’t tell the whole story.

Dementia is not a single condition. It is an umbrella term for different diseases, each affecting the brain in distinct ways. Understanding those differences matters, because the symptoms and experience can vary greatly.

Early signs

In Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form, short-term memory loss is typically the earliest sign. “You might be told something and not remember it three minutes later,” explains Dr Beanland. Even in Alzheimer’s, memory is not the only issue — difficulties with planning, organising, language and concentration are also common.

Other forms of dementia may not even centre on memory problems. Vascular dementia often affects executive function first — the ability to plan and think ahead. Dementia with Lewy bodies can present with visual hallucinations, disrupted sleep or problems with balance. Frontotemporal dementia, which tends to affect younger people, often shows up as changes in behaviour or difficulty regulating emotions, with memory relatively intact early on.

This is why recognising the full spectrum of dementia symptoms is important. A change in personality, unexplained falls or difficulties following a conversation can all be early warning signs — even when memory seems fine.

Are blood tests available to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease?

An early ��and accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease typically relies on brain scans and other tests that can be expensive and time-consuming. But a simpler, faster alternative may be on the horizon, potentially enabling earlier intervention and better outcomes.

Finger-prick test

Blood-based biomarkers – measurable substances in the blood linked to Alzheimer’s – have emerged as a promising tool for diagnosing the disease. A simple blood sample, or even a finger-prick test, could one day replace costly imaging, making diagnosis more accessible for patients and healthcare systems alike.

So where do things stand? Blood tests for Alzheimer’s are currently available – but only within for research. Dr Beanland, explains: “In research studies, we can take a blood sample and use that to help diagnose Alzheimer’s disease.”

Ongoing research

But the test is not yet available through the NHS. Bringing blood-based diagnostics into routine clinical use is a key research goal. Alzheimer’s Society is co-funding studies to determine whether these tests can be introduced into standard NHS care.

Dr Beanland is cautiously optimistic: “Watch out for this – it might be coming in the next few years.”

What new treatments are on the horizon?

For the first time in two decades, there is genuine cause for optimism about new treatments for dementia. A wave of scientific progress is transforming what’s possible — and for people living with Alzheimer’s, the outlook is more hopeful than it has been in a generation.

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia, caused in part by a build-up of a protein called amyloid in the brain. Until recently, no drug had been shown to meaningfully slow this process. That has now changed.

Amyloid stripping

Two new drugs — lecanemab and donanemab — work by stripping amyloid from the brain. In clinical trials, both have been shown to have a modest clinical benefit by delaying the progression of symptoms by around four to six months. Dr Beanland, describes it as a landmark moment: “It’s a really exciting time for dementia treatments, particularly for Alzheimer’s.”

Neither drug is yet available on the NHS. The medicines watchdog NICE is currently reviewing them, but Dr Beanland is cautiously optimistic: “They may be available, or something like them, in the next three or four years — fingers crossed.”

Treatment pipelines

And the pipeline behind them is substantial. There are currently over 100 trials of new dementia drugs at various stages of development. Researchers are confident that better versions of these treatments will follow. What’s clear is that science is starting to catching up with the scale of the challenge.

What kind of cutting-edge research does Alzheimer’s Society support?

When it comes to dementia, progress depends on research and development — and Alzheimer’s Society is one of the leading forces driving that science forward. The charity invests in a broad and ambitious portfolio of work that spans the full spectrum of the disease.

Dementia remains one of the most complex conditions facing medicine today, with no cure and limited treatments available. Research is therefore not a luxury — it is a necessity.

Alzheimer’s Society funds scientists at every stage of their career, from early-career researchers to established centres of excellence. Its research portfolio covers four broad areas: the underlying biological causes of dementia; new drug treatments; advances in diagnosis, including promising blood biomarker tests that could detect the disease earlier; and care research focused on helping people live better with dementia.

That last category is especially wide-ranging. Care research includes exploring how technology can help people maintain their independence, as well as developing new non-drug interventions to improve quality of life and support memory.

Huge commitment

Dr Beanland says the breadth of this commitment is huge.��From laboratory discoveries to practical care solutions, Alzheimer’s Society’s research funding is helping to build a future where dementia can be better understood, detected, treated — and ultimately, prevented.

How can you reduce your risk of getting dementia?

A diagnosis of dementia can feel over-whelming, but many cases may never need to happen. The science of dementia prevention has advanced rapidly and simple lifestyle changes could make all the difference.

Dementia affects nearly one million people in the UK. Yet many cases are not inevitable. A growing body of evidence suggests the choices we make every day can reduce our risk, from how much we exercise to whether we get our hearing checked.

Lifestyle changes

Dr Beanland, says: “45 per cent of dementia globally could be prevented.”��What does that look like in practice? Dr Beanland points to two broad areas: looking after your heart and looking after your brain. On the cardiovascular side, keeping blood pressure under control, maintaining a healthy weight and staying physically active all play an important role. These factors influence blood flow to the brain, which is critical to its long-term health.

Brain exercises

Brain health matters just as much. Dr Beanland highlights hearing loss as an often-overlooked risk factor — getting your hearing checked and treating any problems early, can make a difference. Avoiding head injuries is also important. “And keep yourself stimulated through puzzles, languages, hobbies, things like that,” he says.

The message is clear: small, consistent steps could significantly reduce your risk.

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Listen to the Change your Mind podcast

Self-driving cars struggle when the weather turns bad. That’s because they are trained largely on data gathered when driving conditions are good and because similar data for hazardous driving conditions is difficult to collect on real roads.

In this video, we visit the German test track where researchers are collecting real-world vehicle data to help solve this problem. We then travel to London to find out how UK scientists are using this data to simulate the effect of fog, snow and rain. The film focuses on the unique contributions each partner makes and shows how together the teams generate�� results that are greater than the sum of the parts.

The research is part of a €10 million project funded by the EU’s flagship Horizon Europe innovation programme.

This is a �鶹��ý CoLab production, .

Read more about the UK-German partnership solving the toughest challenges for driverless cars

At first glance, things look bad: attention spans are shrinking, loneliness is on the rise, trusting news reports is harder than ever and far too much of our life’s infrastructure is in the hands of just a few multi-billion dollar companies.

This overwhelming onslaught raises a crucial question: is this techno-enslavement society’s destiny or can humanity fight back with clever, creative, socially-aware innovation? The signs are that it can and the green shoots of a brighter future are beginning to emerge. “I am optimistic that we will course-correct,” says psychologist Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine.

These green shoots take the form of people shifting news consumption towards audio and influencer-led content over traditional text. A federated internet or “fediverse” is emerging in the form of�� a decentralised network of servers designed to reduce reliance on tech behemoths and enhance data rights. And there is a growing sense that technology can be designed from the bottom up to benefit broad swathes of society rather than a narrow set of wealthy individuals and investors.

Transmission stamps

One of the major shifts of recent years has been the growing proportion of people who are listening to, rather than reading, news and other factual content, for instance. This significantly influences their impressions because listeners engage more strongly with negative aspects of a story than readers. “People tend to walk away with an understanding of news that is less nuanced and more negatively biased after listening to it versus reading it,” says Shiri Melumad of the University of Pennsylvania.

Melumad’s research also shows that when news gets passed between peers by verbal report rather than by forwarding a piece of text, the transmitter puts their own stamp on the story. “Retellings contain increasingly fewer original details from the story but more personal opinions and negativity,” she says.

But Dominic Guitard, an applied psychologist at Cardiff University, thinks humans can find alternative ways to check their sources. “People may adapt by developing new strategies for evaluating information, particularly if audio content is paired with searchable transcripts, summaries or visual records,” he says.

And technology itself is playing a part here, by making our news sources more personal and accessible. According to Pew Research, 21 per cent of adults in the US and 37 per cent of under-30s regularly get news content from creators and influencers, rather than traditional outlets. For some, that means the news becomes less trustworthy.

But that doesn’t have to be the case. According to research published in Nature Scientific Reports last year, adopting the right technologies can significantly increase the credibility and authenticity of collected data. Incorporating Global Navigation Satellite Systems data and Android location flags, for instance, allows users to verify that the news source is where it claims to be. Additionally, blockchains can protect information from manipulation or modification.

Enter the fediverse

The evolving infrastructure behind our online lives also has the potential to make it easier to trust content. Take the growth of the “federated internet”, which is more resistant to interruption, disruption and censorship.

It also gives users greater flexibility in terms of data rights and the ability to connect with like-minded people without being tied to one platform. The microblogging social media service, Bluesky, for instance, is built on an open source protocol with a standardised format for identity and data. The aim is that social apps are able to
interact – although this is happening to highly varying degrees.

Not that the “fediverse” is a utopia. As numerous researchers have pointed out, bots populate the federated internet too. What’s more, as Samantha Lai and Yoel Roth of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote in 2024, “federated platforms remain ill-equipped to meet the threats of abuse, harassment, coordinated manipulation, and spam that have plagued social media for years.” Ironically, they suggest that the answer might lie in some form of centralised moderation that builds safety and trust in decentralised social media platforms.

Such ideas are slowly being implemented, but the sluggish pace is due to technical and commercial challenges rather than reluctance. Indeed, many of the new companies building and evolving the internet and its deployment actively want to do things better. They campaign on a number of fronts: for more human-centred development, stronger regulation and legislation that limits the power and reach of algorithms, for instance.

Technology for good

One example is the DAIR Institute in California, whose founder, Timnit Gebru, will be speaking at SXSW London 2026. DAIR seeks to make sure AI develops in ways that benefit humanity. It uses measures such as assisting technology developers to remain within existing communities rather than working from Silicon Valley’s silos.

Other organisations are building on our new power to connect with each other. The charity Chapter One, for instance, uses AI and other tech to source one-to-one support for children learning to read. Over 200 global corporations now partner with Chapter One to enable their employees to be online reading buddies.

Even though in-person reading buddies would probably be better, this is the shape of 21st century society: we just aren’t as physically close to each other in the way we used to be. Mark reckons people are finding ways to adapt to this new normal. “One clear adaptation to loneliness is seen in the rise of synthetic companions: people turn to AI for friendship and relationships,” she says. According to her research, the top six AI companies have around 52 million users of synthetic companions.

Mark will be discussing her research findings at SXSW London 2026 in the Society Rewired Track. She remains optimistic that we can make sure emerging technologies serve humanity, not the other way around. “I’m not a Luddite: I’m not about throwing away technology,” she says. “I think instead we have to figure out how we can integrate technology into our lives – but on our terms.”

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In this episode, we explore how some of the UK and Europe’s premier research institutes and pharmaceutical companies have joined forces to pioneer “greener” production methods. This work is funded by Horizon Europe, the European Union’s flagship €96 billion research and innovation funding programme.

We visit Barcelona to talk to Dr Laura Rodriguez and Dr Andrés Cruz from IRIS Technology Solutions. They share how their collaboration with UK research teams has yielded impressive results—and why the partnership itself has been a key factor in the success.

This is a �鶹��ý CoLab production, sponsored by the��UK Government.

For more information and to find a UK partner for your next Horizon Europe bid, .

Your host is James Randerson.

Read more about the UK-Spanish partnerships solving pharma’s toughest challenges

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit��

“We consider the UK as a leader in excellent science and innovation so of course having them on board for proposals and projects for us is crucial.” Dr Laura Rodríguez should know. As one of the scientific leaders at the heart of an ambitious Europe-funded research effort, Rodriguez has been at the centre of the Europe-wide partnership between her company, IRIS Technology Solutions in Barcelona, and several research partners.

This sharing of expertise has made the research effort more than the sum of its parts, she says. “The multicultural and multidisciplinary environment is crucial to the results.” All this is made possible by Horizon Europe, the European Union’s flagship €96 billion research and innovation funding program.

The goal of Rodriguez’ collaboration is to minimise the environmental footprint of the pharmaceutical industry by rethinking the entire life cycle of medicines—from the moment a molecule is designed to how a patient disposes of the leftover pills. The science is so complex that it requires the expertise of world class researchers, innovative small-to-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and leading pharmaceutical companies from across Europe. That’s how IRIS Technology Solutions has come to partner with UK companies such as Quotient Sciences,��headquartered in Nottingham,��as well as the pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca.

Cleaner Chemistry

“The manufacture of pharmaceuticals generates more waste and by-products compared to all other chemical sectors [per quantity of end product],” says Dr Sara Sànchez, also at IRIS. For every kilogram of medicine, the industry produces more than ten kilograms of waste and by products, far more than industries that are generally thought of as “dirtier” such as petrochemicals. While fuels are produced in massive, continuous flows, medicines are typically manufactured in discrete batches. This requires frequent, intensive cleaning between products, which generates significant chemical runoff and waste.

“The nature of these wastes and products have a huge impact on the environment,” says Rodríguez, “so it is not only about the amount of waste and sub-products, but also the complexity of the chemicals and the dangers they pose.”

To tackle these issues, the Horizon Europe innovation programme has funded a €5.9 million project called ETERNAL which brings together 16 partners from across the continent in a 4-year partnership. The project is exploring green chemistry techniques to help reduce the use of solvents and help minimise residues in wastewater; it is studying mechanochemistry—how mechanical forces like grinding and compressions can trigger chemical reactions and reduce the reliance on solvents and energy-hungry heat; and developing digital twins to create virtual replicas of manufacturing processes that predict how changes will affect the environmental impact before a single chemical is poured.

A “clean” supply chain doesn’t end at the factory gate; it includes the patient. So ETERNAL is launching campaigns to influence behaviour by nudging consumers to dispose of medicines responsibly, for example by returning unused pills to a pharmacy rather than flushing them down sinks and lavatories.

Positive reactions

The challenge begins with the way drugs are designed to start with. In the early stages of drug development, pharmaceutical companies are generally focused on bringing effective and safe medicines to market quickly. So, factors such as the amount of by-product produced can become a secondary concern. The result is that inefficient chemical pathways can become locked into the manufacturing processes.

One way to change this is to better understand reactions as they are in progress. To this end, IRIS and Quotient are using a technique called Raman spectroscopy, a kind of chemical fingerprinting technique that monitors chemical reactions while they are in progress, allowing more control and therefore less waste.

The technology involves firing a laser into the reaction vessel and analysing the light that comes back. That light is frequency-shifted based on the vibrations of chemical bonds in substances within the mixture, allowing the researchers to infer how quickly a reaction is progressing. If adjustments to reaction conditions such as temperature or pressure are needed, they can be done in real-time without the chemicals needing to be sampled.

But neither partner could have done this on their own. IRIS has expertise in building the optical hardware and creating the software to analyse the results, while Quotient has the detailed understanding of the complex chemical reactions at work.

Dr Rowena Howie at Quotient’s Alnwick site says the company could not have pursued the Raman approach on its own. “One of the best things about our collaboration with IRIS is the access it gives us to technology and expertise that we wouldn’t otherwise have,” she says.

Once the technique has been fully validated, it should open up a new pathway to understanding and monitoring the chemical processes at the heart of drug manufacture more precisely. “The real-time interface is what’s really going to help,” she says.

And the hope is that the partnership will continue beyond ETERNAL, allowing the technique to be applied to other chemical processes.

IRIS also collaborated with AstraZeneca to develop membranes that filter active ingredients or impurities from solvents, a technique that uses significantly less energy than traditional separation techniques like distillation. A key task is to find the best pore size for the filter, which would conventionally be done with multiple experiments that are time consuming and wasteful.

Digital twins

IRIS has built a digital twin of the process — a computer simulation that models the fluid dynamics around the pores, incorporating the properties of the solvent, the solutes and the membrane. “A digital simulation, of course, is much cheaper and faster,” says IRIS’s Dr David Nettleton. It allows researchers to run dozens of ‘what-if’ scenarios—virtually testing different experimental parameters—to identify the most efficient process before a single drop of real chemical is used.

Again, this is a problem that neither side could have cracked on its own. Nettleton describes the partnership as an iterative process, where AstraZeneca defined the problem and IRIS built prototypes of the simulation model. “We get the feedback … and we make updates,” he says, until the simulation is a close approximation to its real-life twin.

This free flow of ideas between participants in the collaboration has been crucial to this success, says Dr Rory MacDonald at Quotient Sciences. “All partners, I think, have just been completely open.” That openness will outlive the formal end of the ETERNAL project in August because much of the data will be put in the public domain. “It will be delivering benefits in terms of reduced environmental impact with all the various partner companies that have worked here,” he says.

Rodríguez agrees that on the scientific level, working together has been “fluid and collaborative” while personal connections have thrived. But there is one realm where national rivalries have proved impossible to eliminate.

“We try not to talk about soccer,” she admits. In Barcelona, a proud footballing city, European collaboration it seems has its limits.

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All we had to do was to construct a set of molecular models and begin to play.” When James Watson and Francis Crick set out to solve DNA’s structure, they drew inspiration from chemist Linus Pauling, who had recently cracked one aspect of protein structure by tinkering with toy-like physical models. The pair spent hours fiddling with wire and cardboard representations of DNA’s components. By trial and error, following their curiosity and investigating different possibilities, they deduced the structure of the double helix.

Emergent breakthrough

It’s an example of how scientific breakthroughs can emerge from something that looks remarkably like play, a word that conjures up images of something easy or trivial. “It has a definite overtone of frivolous or unserious or not important,” says Paul Ramchandani, LEGO Professor of Play in Education, Development and Learning at the University of Cambridge. But nothing could be further from the truth. A growing body of evidence is showing that play is a vital activity, associated with the development of a raft of cognitive and emotional skills, such as critical thinking, problem-solving and resilience, as well as the ability to form strong relationships and navigate social situations.

For all its importance, it’s hard to define exactly what we mean by “play”. Researchers tend to adapt their definitions of play to the particular contexts they are investigating, such as adventurous or risky play, says Ramchandani. But one key feature unites them all: “It’s an activity that is joyful and enjoyable to children,” he says. Children devote a vast amount of time and energy to play. “It’s the majority of their world, particularly when they’re very young.”

Play is not unique to humans; some young animals, such as rats, spend a lot of time playing. But why such a behaviour evolved that distracts young animals from important tasks such as seeking food is still debated. One idea is that it helps animals practise important physical skills, another that it helps develop social bonds, says Ramchandani.

Human play is much richer and changes as a child develops. “Children are thrown into a world of uncertainty and the unknown when they’re born,” says Bo Stjerne Thomsen, Head of Educational Impact at . “And the main mechanism to deal with that uncertainty is to play, to sense, and try and experiment with things around you. This is how children learn through play”

It begins in infants with parent-child bonding that builds relationships and early learning, later incorporating social elements with peers and siblings, and goes on to include pretend play, physical play and risky play. But young humans also seem to have a distinctive form of play that involves deliberately creating problems for themselves. One theory is that this is how humans practice curiosity-driven thinking, by inventing problems that force us to come up with creative solutions.

Testing ideas

Ethically, we can’t deprive children of play to test all these ideas, says Ramchandani. But you can study what happens when you expand opportunities for play. “Increasing play of various kinds is correlated with positive outcomes across almost every aspect of development,” he says.

Evidence is also emerging from experimental studies that certain kinds of play can help children learn as well as, or in some cases better than, formal instruction. In 2022, Ramchandani and his team at the Play in Education, Development and Learning (PEDAL) Centre at the University of Cambridge analysed 39 studies of “guided” play in children aged three to eight. Unlike “free” play, where children decide what to do, guided play involves a playful educational task where children have some freedom of choice, but are gently steered towards a learning goal by an adult.

The study found that guided play was as effective as conventional teaching for developing key skills such as literacy, numeracy, social skills and thinking skills. For developing some maths skills, namely understanding shapes, guided play was superior. This may be because guided play lets children explore shape in a range of different ways. The joyful aspect is also key. “If children are enjoying themselves, they’re going to engage for longer,” says Ramchandani.

Hands-on play with objects such as blocks and puzzles may also help children develop scientific reasoning skills. In 2023, Ramchandani, Thomsen and their colleagues analysed 102 studies of the use of objects in learning, mainly of early primary-aged children and found that there were benefits to children’s spatial, literacy and science skills, with the strongest evidence for benefits in developing mathematical skills.

Creative links

There are links, too, between play and creativity, a central pillar of the scientific endeavour. “You’re creating, you are experimenting, you are buzzing ideas together,” says Ramchandani. “There is an obvious parallel with playing imaginatively or playing with friends.” So what looked like child’s play with wire and cardboard turns out to be anything but trivial—it won Watson and Crick a Nobel Prize and unlocked one of biology’s greatest mysteries.

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Thankfully, recent advances in science mean we understand the diseases that cause dementia better than ever. There has never been a more exciting time in dementia research, and supporting some of the most pioneering work in this field is UK charity Alzheimer’s Society.

In this episode of the �鶹��ý CoLab podcast, Justin Mullins is joined by Richard Oakley, Associate Director of Research and Innovation at Alzheimer’s Society.

Richard explores the latest breakthroughs in dementia treatment and promising areas of research. He discusses the latest technologies and trials that are bringing us closer to a better future for people living with dementia. And he discusses his belief that research, with time, can beat dementia.

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