Drugging the ‘undruggable’ cancers & conserving the Bayeux Tapestry | Podcast

Introduction and Weekly News

Mariana Kneppers

A ground-breaking new drug has become the first of its kind to win FDA approval for metastatic pancreatic cancer. Could it mark the beginning of a new era for cancers that have long been considered impossible to target? And we’ll also uncover the chemistry behind the investigation and conservation of the Bayeux tapestry. What secrets have scientists already revealed, and what questions about this iconic artifact remain unanswered?

I’m Mariana Kneppers, Chemistry World’s science media producer, and this is the Chemical Breakdown. We’ll be diving deeper into these stories shortly, but first let’s take a look at this week’s news from the Chemistry World website.

A new species of coronavirus discovered in a Brazilian bat provides more support for the theory that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which caused the COVID-19 pandemic, evolved naturally in bats as opposed to the controversial claim that it was engineered in a Chinese lab. In particular, the virus contains a furin cleavage site which had not been seen in other bat-derived SARS-related coronaviruses before.

The UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency, also known as ARIA, which funds high-risk, high-reward science, is spending 66 million pounds on 19 research projects that will aim to make the mitochondrial genome programmable. The ultimate goal is to demonstrate the persistent and reproducible expression of a novel gene from engineered mitochondrial DNA in an in vivo system.

Top performing chemists are increasingly likely to go back to China, according to a new analysis. The number of returnees to China rose between 2004 and 2022, a significant proportion of which came from the US. The returning chemists went on to outperform similarly qualified peers who remained in the US.

And chemistry in Africa is undergoing what some are calling a quiet renaissance. Earlier this year, students in Liberia held the country’s first chemistry symposium, marking a significant step as chemistry organisations on the continent are looking to professionalise and get involved in setting standards in their home countries.

You can find these stories and more online. Just visit chemistryworld.com for more of the latest news in the chemical sciences.

New Drug Targets Previously Undruggable Pancreatic Cancer Protein

Mariana Kneppers

Pancreatic cancer remains one of the most challenging cancers to treat. The most common form of this cancer carries a five-year survival rate of just 8%. Scientists have spent decades trying to target the genetic drivers behind the disease, but many of the key proteins involved were thought to be beyond the reach of modern medicines.

Now a newly approved drug is changing that picture. By targeting one of these previously undruggable proteins, the treatment nearly doubled survival times for patients with advanced pancreatic cancer in clinical trials.

How did chemistry help crack one of cancer’s toughest targets? Here to explain more, we have Chemistry World’s business editor Phillip Broadwith and features editor Neil Withers. Hello to you both.

Phillip Broadwith

Hello.

Mariana Kneppers

Thanks so much for joining today. So Phillip, let’s start with you. I briefly mentioned in the intro this idea of this undruggable protein, which I believe it’s called RAS, R-A-S. So can you give us a bit of a background? Why are we targeting RAS and why has it been considered undruggable for so long?

Phillip Broadwith

RAS is a signalling protein that’s involved in the process of cell division, right? Cell division is a normal way that tissues grow, but what happens in cancer is that process starts happening really, really fast, right? A cancer is just a cell that’s dividing very, very fast and out of control.

And one of the ways that goes out of control is through this RAS signalling pathway. If we block that, we can get the division of the cell back under control.

But the problem with targeting RAS with a drug is it doesn’t really have nice pockets that molecules could fit into in a kind of traditional drug, you know, lock and key kind of mechanism, where you’d have a binding site that a little molecule can slip into and block it.

It just has quite fluffy surfaces and it interacts with other proteins over large surface areas rather than at very specific sites. So playing around with that interaction is very difficult. You either need a really big molecule like an antibody or you need a completely different strategy and that’s what’s happening now.

There’s a whole family of molecules called molecular glues which are designed to slip in between the interactions between proteins and either make them better or disrupt them. In this case, what we’re trying to do is make these proteins stick together more strongly, which breaks the signalling cascade that RAS is involved in and stops the cancer from proliferating.

Mariana Kneppers

Yeah, you’ve got this protein. Something’s gone wrong with it. It’s now proliferating way too fast, much faster than it should. So we’ve now been able to finally find a space on this previously difficult to bind to protein and we’ve been able, using these molecular glues, we’ve been able to actually stop that dividing and kind of halt that process. So how significant has this been then? I mean, what have we seen with this new drug?

Phillip Broadwith

Okay, so it’s definitely not a cure. There is some indication that cells eventually can kind of develop a resistance, get around this interaction because they’re dividing very quickly, they can mutate very quickly as well.

So it’s important to say that it’s not a cure. There are indications that the cancer cell can develop resistance to this treatment, but it looks like at the moment patients who are treated with this drug live on average a few months more than patients treated with the standard treatment for this cancer at the moment.

So it’s buying a few months of hopefully reasonably good life for these patients.

Mariana Kneppers

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it doesn’t sound like much to us, right? I mean, a couple months versus, but that could be quite a big difference for people who are struggling with this form of cancer, the families involved. I mean, those couple of months mean quite a lot.

Phillip Broadwith

Yeah, and that’s an average. Some people live significantly longer, some people perhaps a little bit less.

Mariana Kneppers

Yeah, of course. And now how exactly is this drug delivered? I think the treatment before this was chemotherapy?

Phillip Broadwith

So a lot of chemotherapies are intravenous infusions. They are quite difficult to do. They involve a lot of procedures. One of the really good things about this is because it’s a relatively small molecule, you can have it as a tablet.

So it’s much more convenient for patients. They can take it at home. They don’t have to come into hospital for an intravenous infusion.

Mariana Kneppers

That in itself is such a difference for people, as you say, like buying more time. Like the quality of life for those extra months probably is completely different because you’re not having to come into the hospital, as you say, to have this treatment. You can just bring it home and take these tablets. Quite revolutionary.

Phillip Broadwith

Yeah, absolutely.

Neil Withers

Can I just point out, I think this is one of the first of the sort of RAS targeting drugs and that there were more in the pipeline? Is that right, Phillip?

Phillip Broadwith

So there are a couple of other drugs that target RAS signalling, but the only ones so far that have been reasonably successful target very specific mutants of RAS.

Whereas the advantage with this one is that it seems to be able to block lots of different RAS mutations. That does mean that it’s blocking RAS signalling elsewhere in the body that isn’t cancer. But because elsewhere in the body those cell division processes are happening much, much more slowly than they do in cancer, those side effects tend to be less of a problem.

So the idea of this is that it’s much more broadly targeting RAS. It’s not targeting just a specific mutation. So there’s a possibility that it could be successful in lots of other different types of cancer.

And if there’s other drugs that follow this strategy, then you start to build up a whole array of drugs. If one doesn’t work, you can try some different ones. Different ones will be effective for different people in different cancers, because cancer is a very individual disease.

Everyone has their own set of mutations within the systems. So you need lots of different drugs, ideally, to be able to treat everybody’s cancer.

Mariana Kneppers

Yeah, I know people often describe it as a cocktail of different kinds of drugs sometimes. Now that brings up a good point. This is such a big milestone. It’s kind of got me wondering, what does this mean for other kinds of cancers that maybe were thought to be undruggable before? Has this got scientists thinking about the next kind of cancer, the next kind of undruggable protein further down the line that they could maybe use a similar strategy with?

Phillip Broadwith

Yeah, well, I mean, people have been working on this kind of molecular glues strategy for a long time, and it’s related to some other new types of drugs as well.

So there’s a type of drug called Protacs, which are protein degraders that again, take two proteins and kind of attach them together, usually so that the protein can be degraded, bringing together the machinery that will degrade a protein, will mark it for degradation within the cell and the target protein.

So it’s a similar kind of idea, this kind of bringing proteins together in ways that you couldn’t do with a standard kind of drug molecule.

The first of those kind of drugs has been also approved relatively recently as well. Degastrant, which was approved in May. And there’s lots of companies working on this kind of thing.

So I think it’s something that’s going to become much, much more prevalent in the next couple of years. We’re going to see lots of drugs using this kind of strategy, mostly in cancer, but there’s other directions as well that they’re going in.

Neil Withers

Can I just ask, Phillip, with a lot of these new drugs, obviously the cost is always a huge issue when they’re first released. Do we have any idea at the moment how much this new one will cost?

Phillip Broadwith

These are not going to be cheap drugs, but because they are relatively small molecules, seven, eight years down the line when they become generic, they will become much, much cheaper.

It’s not like some of the antibodies and biological drugs where you still have a really complicated manufacturing process and even when you get biosimilars, they’re still going to be relatively expensive.

Whereas this being a small molecule has the potential to become quite cheap once it’s generic.

Mariana Kneppers

So it’s received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration. Does that mean that it’s on the market now and it’s actively being prescribed, or are there still steps remaining before that becomes a reality?

Phillip Broadwith

I believe that this is a full approval in the US, which means, yes, doctors and healthcare systems can begin prescribing it straight away.

I can’t remember exactly how the US system works, but I think for some of the state-run healthcare systems, there still needs to be cost effectiveness calculation, whether different insurers will support it or not. Those negotiations need to happen.

How much is it going to cost? How much of a discount are the companies going to give to the various insurers? All of those things will need to be settled out. But from the regulatory point of view, the FDA has said, yes, use it.

Mariana Kneppers

Gosh, well, it’s exciting. I mean, it’s not often that we get to discuss these things that are approved and on the market already.

So definitely an exciting time. We’ll see how this progresses and see what it inspires in the future. But thank you so much.

The Chemistry Helping to Unravel the Bayeux Tapestry’s Secrets

Mariana Kneppers

Earlier this month, the Bayeux tapestry went on display at the British Museum on loan from France’s Bayeux Museum, while its permanent home undergoes renovation. Nearly 1000 years old, the wool embroidery on the 70 metre long linen tapestry depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England. Yet many questions remain about how it was made, where its materials originated, and how it has changed over centuries of preservation and repair.

Chemists have begun uncovering new clues hidden within its fibres and dyes, using advanced analytical techniques to reveal details that have remained elusive for generations. So what can modern chemistry tell us about the history and origins of one of Europe’s most iconic artefacts?

Neil, you obviously edited this feature written by Rachel Brazil. Very interesting one. It’s lovely when we can blend chemistry and history together. What are some of the challenges of maintaining and studying such a delicate artefact? And how is chemistry helping to solve these challenges?

Neil Withers

I mean, the main thing to mention, as you say, is that it is very, very old. Or, as you say, almost 1000 years old. And I think it might be one of the very few fabric embroideries tapestries from the 11th century that’s still around today.

And so the fact that it has survived and the fact that it survived in Normandy, which has been, you know, ravaged by war many, many times is pretty incredible.

And yeah, and so the people who look after it, they’re studying it to find out how its sort of physicality is changing over time. And because it’s made of linen, then it needs to be kept in quite a controlled environment because linen’s hygroscopic, which means it can absorb moisture.

The cellulose that it’s made of has got lots of hydroxyl groups on it. And so that means that water can hydrogen bond to that. And then as the moisture and the temperature changes, those hydrogen bonds kind of are broken and remade in different places, which is why you get the sort of the wrinkling or the shrinking or the potential cracks and small tears and that sort of thing.

They did a very long term experiment where they took a one minute exposure photograph every six minutes over months and months and months to see how it changed over time related to the seasonal changes in the museum, the temperature, the humidity and all that.

And they found that actually it deals pretty well with relatively small changes in humidity, say between, I think it was between about 50 and 60%, but it doesn’t deal so well with big ones.

And that’s pretty important for a new museum because it means, you know, they don’t have to keep it at an absolutely constant temperature and humidity. It means they can slowly cycle it over seasons because it can cope with those kind of changes, which means they don’t have to spend as much on the heating and the moisture control to keep it absolutely bang on.

They can let it go up by a few degrees or a few percent humidity and come back down again, which is pretty important when you’re building a huge new museum.

Mariana Kneppers

Yeah, of course. I think that distinguishing between, you know, these big sudden changes are what caused more of the damage, was the gradual shifts are quite, it’s a bit more durable to that.

The first thing that came to mind as you were describing that is, you have linen that’s quite, I think, what was the term you used? Hygroscopic.

Neil Withers

Hygroscopic.

Mariana Kneppers

Hygroscopic. And England can be quite a humid environment. Are there any concerns in terms of, you know, I’m actually not sure if Normandy is much more humid than England, to be fair.

Neil Withers

I think, well, I think Bayeux is pretty close to the coast, so it’s probably a very similar climate to ours. So I don’t think it’d be too different. And of course, the British Museum is climate controlled and all of that.

And I think they took it in a very secure transport in a big truck with a sort of climate controlled crate inside that also could dampen the vibrations that it might have on our famously potholey roads at the moment.

So they’ve gone to quite a lot of extent to make sure it’s going to be in good condition.

Dyes, Colours and Restoration

Mariana Kneppers

Yeah, gosh, it’s amazing how much thought goes into it. Now what about the colours on the tapestry? I think, you know, with time, obviously the colour on the tapestry has of course faded. Can you give us a bit of an idea of what’s caused the colour changes over the years and do some of the colours fade faster than others maybe?

Neil Withers

Yeah, so what I found quite interesting is that because it went through a period of restoration in the mid 19th century around the 1860s and 70s.

And so they replaced some of the, whether it was decayed or very faded threads, the wool threads with new ones in those times. But the synthetic dyes that they used have actually faded more quickly than the original thousand-year-old dyes because the synthetic dyes in the early chemical industry just weren’t very good and maybe hadn’t been around long enough for the manufacturers to realise how much they did degrade.

So they can almost tell the more faded bits are actually the more recent restoration, which is pretty incredible to think.

Mariana Kneppers

That’s so interesting. I mean, to think that we have all this modern technology on our hands and all these modern kind of dyes and whatnot, and they still didn’t withstand the test of time as well as the older, more traditional dyes. What were those dyes? I mean, do we know what specifically they used?

Neil Withers

Yeah, so we’ve got a pretty good understanding of a lot of the different dyes that they used. The red ones were a family of madder dyes, which are mainly anthroquinones. The yellows are what they called welds, which are flavonoids. And the blues are woads and indigo type dyes, which are sort of indole rings and stuff, which, you know, when you think of the blue painted Celts, it’s the same stuff, which is quite cool.

Phillip Broadwith

And those are all plant-based dyes, right? They’d have been coming from roots and plants. 1000 years ago, that’s where all the colours came from.

Neil Withers

Yeah, and actually when they did some of the 19th century restoration work, they did use some of the original type of dyes, simply because that was what they still had available.

So there are some, I’m not sure which ones, perhaps the blue ones were still used those dyes. So presumably those have stood up better.

And actually if you go and read the feature you’ll see we’ve got an image where they’ve taken a photo of the back of the tapestry and you can see that those original colours are still perfectly bright and vivid because the back hasn’t been exposed to the light damage that the front has.

So they can do a very accurate recreation of all the colours simply by taking a photo of the back of it and going well we know this thread must correspond to this thread on the front because it’s literally the same thread.

And so we know the colour and they can also do the spectroscopic analysis to know, okay, so we can see what colour, what dye is present in the back. And we know that must be the one on the front. And so they can then recreate what colour it was originally.

Mariana Kneppers

Wow. And so when they’re doing this analysis, are they taking any samples? Are they destructively sampling at all?

Neil Withers

Or is this all just based on, as you say, destructive analysis. But I don’t think they’ve needed to do too much. I think simply because spectroscopic analysis is so good now, is so advanced, that a lot of it they can just do through analysing it photographically and through spectra and stuff, which is quite cool.

But another interesting thing, just going back to that 19th century restoration, is that because it wasn’t on display for much before around that time, around the mid 19th century, the paintings of the whole tapestry, I think the Society of Antiquaries or someone like that, sent out an artist to do a very exact copy.

And the colours in that painted recreation exactly match what we think they would look like based on, as we can see from the back.

And so you can see that when it first went on display 150 or so years ago, the colours were much more vibrant than they are now.

And so we know that actually this age, it’s lasted 1000 years, but most of the ageing has actually happened since it’s been on display just in the last 150 years.

Whereas before that, they think it was maybe only on display once a year in Bayeux Cathedral, which wouldn’t have been as bright and would have had stained glass as well, so less light would get through.

So again, it’s lasted very well and it’s only this sort of accelerated more recent ageing that has been the problem.

Mariana Kneppers

Gosh, that’s amazing, isn’t it? You want to be able to spread this history, but in the act of displaying it, you’re exposing it to more of these stressors, right? That’s incredible that we have that evidence and we can see that.

Neil Withers

And I guess going forward, now we know that, they’ll be able to do it in a much more controlled environment. I mean, presumably the lights nowadays, you don’t have to have incandescent bulbs, I guess, gave off a very harsh light. Now with LEDs, they can use the right sort of light, which won’t hopefully degrade it any further.

Origins and Remaining Mysteries

Mariana Kneppers

Gosh, that’s so interesting. What have we learned about perhaps the people who made this tapestry from analysing these materials or maybe where it was made or what other kind of clues from history have we got from analysing the tapestry?

Phillip Broadwith

So when I read the feature, one of the things that struck me at the end is there’s a possibility to look at the actual materials themselves where like the wool of the threads and the flax and try and work out perhaps where the sheep that gave the wool came from to give a bit more evidence about where the embroidery was actually done.

I mean, we’re reasonably sure it was done in England, near Canterbury, but any additional evidence we can get to get towards that is quite cool. So that sounds like a really interesting development.

Neil Withers

It does sound incredible to think that they can DNA test the wool in the thread in the embroidery.

And I don’t know what they’ve got to compare that to, I guess, to other samples of medieval wool from England or from France and to see which one is the closer match.

One of the things that I didn’t quite realise but I’ve learned from this feature is not necessarily about the making of it but the fact that some of our interpretations of history have changed over time.

So the famous image that we’ve all got of Harold with the arrow in his eye. There’s evidence from, I think, the late 18th century that arrow wasn’t there at that point.

There were holes in the fabric showing that there was something there, but they think it could have been him holding a spear and not going into the eye.

But because there was this sort of, I don’t know, it’s probably not an urban myth, but this sort of story that he died with an arrow in his eye, a later restoration has actually added that.

And they can again see because they know the difference between the threads, between the ancient threads and the more recent threads, they can tell that, yeah, it is an addition.

So this most famous part of it with Harold with the arrow in his eye wasn’t there originally. It’s a more recent addition.

And I’d always known that it was probably a story that there was a lot of ambiguity about it. But the fact that it’s a much more recent addition is just incredible to think.

Mariana Kneppers

It’s amazing, isn’t it? Because you think of restoration as quite a modern thing, something that, you know, has happened within our lifetime.

But this tapestry has been around for so long. What you said just made me realise that restoration happens in steps and the idea that there was historical restoration already restoring something that we’re re-restoring now, that makes me wonder how many different iterations of this tapestry have existed over time.

Is that something that we can gain from analysing the material?

Neil Withers

I think, yeah, I think that’s one of the best ways that we can do it is by, you know, you can do these tests on the types of materials that are in it. You can date them in certain ways. Obviously carbon dating is the big one.

So there are ways to do it.

Yeah, and a lot of restoration often involves undoing what previous restorations have tried to do, whether that’s removing varnish, for instance, that they went through a phase of just slapping varnish on paintings and that sort of thing.

So yeah, all restorers have to be aware of not just what they’re doing for the future, but what has happened in the past as well.

Mariana Kneppers

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and it brings into question what is restoration? Is previous restoration a part of the history of the original work or are we trying to restore it back to the original version of it?

Neil Withers

There’s a big debate about it and I think the restoration and conservation because I think that’s the deal. Are you conserving or are you restoring?

Do you want it to tell its story of how it’s got to now over hundreds of years or do you want to show how it would have looked then? But then you remove all that historical record.

And I think it’s a debate that I think will always be going on.

Mariana Kneppers

Yeah, absolutely. Now, after all this work, what are the biggest mysteries of the tapestry that still remain? Do we have questions that have remained unsolved?

Neil Withers

We still don’t know exactly where it was made, as we’ve discussed, which I think as Phillip says, we could get a few steps closer to that with DNA testing the wool.

And also, we don’t know absolutely who it was made for. There’s a pretty good idea that it was made for Bishop Odo because he was the brother-in-law of William the Conqueror and he built Bayeux Cathedral so there’s those connections.

And I think there’s some of his sort of friends and allies are shown on the tapestry which adds more clues.

I don’t know how we’d get closer to knowing who it was made for and that sort of thing but again if you can find out more about where it was made that will presumably tell you who it was made for because you assume it would be local to their sphere of influence, if you like.

Phillip Broadwith

I think we can all be fairly glad that it actually was made at all, though. I mean, it was a massive piece of work. It must have been thousands of hours of presumably predominantly women working for a very long time, very hard, master craftswomen.

You know, this is a masterpiece of embroidery and it’s a really important historical record. So absolutely needs to be conserved for the future of everyone.

I remember going to see it on a school French trip very early on in my secondary school and it’s something that a lot of French and English school children are taught about in their school and a chance to see it back in England. Fantastic.

Mariana Kneppers

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to have it back in England is quite a special thing, isn’t it? So if you’re around in London and you fancy a trip to the British Museum, it’ll be on display. I think it’s until 2027. Is that right, Neil?

Neil Withers

I think so. I think all the tickets are currently sold out to the exhibition at the moment, but I think there are more coming out in October. So you’ve just got to get in the online queue early, I think.

Mariana Kneppers

Well, keep your eyes out if you want to get those tickets. And yeah, really, really interesting to hear about the chemistry behind all of it. So thank you so much, both. Really good discussion.

This Week in Chemistry History: The Montreal Protocol

Mariana Kneppers

And finally, this week in chemistry history, the Montreal Protocol was signed on September 16th, 1987. The Montreal Protocol phased out production of ozone depleting substances and marked one of the most successful examples of leadership by all the world’s governments in tackling an environmental issue.

The story begins in the late 1970s. Man-made chemicals known as chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, were all the rage. They were originally developed in the 1920s as non-toxic, non-flammable and remarkably stable alternatives to the toxic compounds used in refrigeration and air conditioning.

Their popularity soon grew beyond cooling, serving as propellants in aerosol spray and blowing agents for expanding foam. Soon enough, CFCs were everywhere, reaching an estimated worldwide production of nearly 1,000,000 tons per year.

With CFCs being used around the globe, a crucial question remained unanswered. What happened to all these chemicals once they were released into the atmosphere?

It was this question that professor of chemistry Frank Sherwood Rowland began to ask himself. In 1972, Rowland attended a presentation by British scientist James Lovelock, in which he suggested that practically all of the trichlorofluoromethane, or CFC11, ever manufactured was still present in the atmosphere to this day.

The notion stunned Rowland. If this truly was the case, what effect could this be having on the planet’s atmosphere?

Rowland joined forces with a postdoc in his lab named Mario Molina to find out. Their research revealed that while CFCs were inert in the lower portions of the atmosphere, once they had reached the stratosphere, they could be broken down by ultraviolet radiation into highly reactive chlorine atoms.

Each atom would immediately react with an ozone molecule, breaking it down into oxygen. And because the free chlorine radical was not used up in the reaction, it was free to continue breaking down ozone molecules in an unstoppable chain reaction.

In fact, the scientists estimated that one chlorine atom could destroy over 100,000 ozone molecules before it was removed from the atmosphere.

The groundbreaking study was published in Nature in 1974, warning that if CFC production continued to grow, the ozone layer could degrade by 30 to 50% in the next few decades. This loss could lead to increased rates of skin cancer, crop failures, and ecosystem disruption.

The response to the study was divided. While the chemical industry dismissed the study as science fiction, the public was deeply concerned and began boycotting aerosol products, eventually leading to restrictions on the use of CFCs in the US, Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

More than a decade later, decisive observational evidence emerged. In 1985, a team from the British Antarctic Survey discovered the existence of a hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica. Soon after, scientists at NASA were able to image the hole.

The finding shocked the world.

With this unavoidable evidence, 20 nations gathered in Vienna to sign the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer in 1985, establishing an international framework for cooperation and taking the first step to acknowledge ozone depletion as a shared global problem.

Two years later, on September 16th, world leaders gathered to sign the Montreal Protocol, creating a formal treaty to limit and phase out the production of ozone-depleting substances.

The treaty was the first in the history of the United Nations to achieve universal ratification.

And the results have been extraordinary. More than 98% of controlled ozone depleting substances have been phased out globally, and the ozone layer is showing clear signs of recovery.

In 2023, the United Nations reported that if current policies remained in place, the ozone layer is expected to return to pre-1980 levels over most of the world within the coming decades.

Nearly 40 years after it was signed, the Montreal Protocol remains a powerful reminder that when nations listen to science and act together, they can successfully address even the most daunting global environmental challenges.

Outro

Mariana Kneppers

That’s all for this edition of the podcast. If you’re interested and want to hear more about any of the items we’ve covered, check out chemistryworld.com for more of the latest stories in the chemical sciences.

You can also sign up for our weekly newsletters like Reaction, giving you a hand-picked selection of stories from Chemistry World and beyond, from newsletter and research editor Jennifer Newton, or our industry brief containing essential analysis and insight on the industrial side of chemistry from business editor Phillip Broadwith.

I’m Mariana Kneppers. We’ll see you next time.

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