Nine Innovators to Watch in 2018

For a while now, researchers have struggled to develop a cancer vaccine, with little success. They’ve been unable to create a treatment that makes a person’s immune system aggressively zero in on tumor cells.

But a study published in Nature this past summer suggests that quest may have turned a corner. Catherine Wu, a researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and Harvard Medical School, led a team that produced an effective vaccine personalized for individual patients.

It was a small study—only six melanoma patients. All had their tumors removed through surgery, but were considered high risk for recurrence. They were given a vaccine, and after two years, four of them showed no indication of cancer. The other two had some recurrence, but after treatment with a drug used in cancer immunotherapy, their tumors disappeared.

What made the difference is that the scientists were able to create a vaccine using neoantigens—molecules produced by DNA mutations in cancer cells—and that enabled the patients’ immune systems to recognize and destroy cancer cells displaying them.  

Wu says, in the study, the results provided “proof of principle” that a vaccine can be targeted to a person’s specific tumor. She and the other researchers plan to do more vaccine trials involving patients with advanced cancer with the goal of refining the tailor-made treatments.

“If successful in subsequent trials,” Wu adds, “a personal vaccine has the potential to be applied to any cancer that harbors a sufficient number of antigens for vaccination.”

When he launched Newsela four years ago, Matthew Gross had a pretty straightforward mission—promote literacy and get students more engaged in reading by providing curated news articles to teachers. That’s still its primary goal, but the company, which now has more than 12 million registered users throughout the country, has more recently sharpened its focus on one of the more vexing issues in media today—so-called “fake news.”

It became a “red-hot topic” among teachers during the 2016 presidential campaign, many of whom were confused by just what the term meant, according to Gross. They also knew that the vast majority of their students got their news online, often from sites which didn’t follow the vetting process of more traditional media outlets.

So Newsela entered into a partnership with the American Press Institute and began to incorporate questions related to a story’s credibility, such as: What are the sources of the information and are they reliable? Is there a bias? Is the main point backed up by the evidence? and What’s missing? In addition, Newsela launched a section on its website featuring articles about “fake news.”

Earlier this year, the service also rolled out an initiative called “A Mile in Our Shoes,” which tries to promote students’ empathy for people different from themselves by presenting collections of news stories about various groups--from American Muslims to people with disabilities to families in rural communities.

It’s in line with Gross’ vision to offer content that resonates with today’s students. “We want,” he says in a press release, “to go beyond the textbook and help create an instructional content experience for the digital classroom era.” 

For all their success in urban areas, ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft haven’t made many inroads in rural communities. The model isn’t a good fit—demand is too limited and distances too great. Plus, many of those regions still have sketchy broadband and cell phone connections, making the mobile app at the heart of those services unreliable.

That’s unfortunate, because mobility has become a critical need in many rural communities where public transportation is limited, if not nonexistent, and aging residents—whose families have moved away—often have to scramble to find rides, not only to doctor’s appointments and food shopping, but particularly when emergencies arise.  

Valerie Lefler, as someone who grew up on a Nebraska dairy farm, understands how challenging this can be. So, a few years ago, she founded Liberty Mobility Now, with the goal of using digital technology and private-public partnerships to create systems that make it easier to stay mobile in rural America. For instance, it could involve coordinating an existing bus service with networks of Liberty’s own paid drivers and volunteer ones working for non-profit agencies.

Liberty also focuses on compiling data that enables a community to adapt more efficiently and effectively to its residents’ mobility needs and habits. “We have this amazing technology in the private sector, where everything can be managed down to the second,” Lefler says. “But with public transit in low density communities, they tend to schedule it, and then see what happens.”

The company began rolling out the service last spring and is now operating in seven states—Nebraska, Virginia, Ohio, Missouri, Texas, South Dakota and Colorado. Lefler says she expects to add at least nine more states in 2018. She adds that she wants Liberty to also start playing a role in addressing other rural problems, such as social isolation, opioid abuse and stress on caregivers.

“What is exciting is that due to our footprint in seven states, we can take those solutions and knowledge and propagate them in other communities facing the same issues,” she says. “It takes a lot of momentum and resources to break down issues that have existed for decades in a matter of months. But that is what we are doing, and we look forward to more of it in 2018.” 

There’s little question that artificial intelligence is now at the heart of most technological innovations—whether it’s through the growing use of robots or the expanding ability of machines to learn and make decisions.

But, as is often the case, the technology is outpacing any serious research of its ethical, legal and social implications. For instance, one study has found that data used to develop AI can contain implicit biases against women and minorities.

Now, however, two women who work for tech giants—Kate Crawford, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, and Meredith Whittaker, founder of Open Research at Google—are leading an effort to tackle those thorny issues. In November, they announced the launch of the AI Now Institute, a research organization at New York University that will focus on AI's impact on many layers of society.

“The amount of money and industrial energy that has been put into accelerating AI code has meant there hasn’t been as much energy put into thinking about social, economic and ethical frameworks for these systems,” Crawford said during a recent interview. “We think there’s a very urgent need for this to happen faster.”    

Among the themes AI Now researchers are expected to focus on are biases in data, how AI affects hiring and healthcare decisions, and how it can impact individual rights and liberties.