Maths Homework Club, solar panels and asthma attacks: News from Imperial

Here’s a batch of fresh news and announcements from across Imperial.

From our Maths Homework club nominated for an award, to improving solar panel efficiency and a curious discovery reducing asthma attacks, here is some quick-read news from across Imperial.

Maths Homework Club nominated

An Imperial-run Maths Homework Club for young people in White City has been nominated for a Helping students make informed decisions (HELOA) Award for Best Small or Low Budget Initiative.

The Homework Club launched in 2018 in response to the Societal Engagement Strategy and is spearheaded by Professor Maggie Dallman, Associate Provost (Societal Engagement). The Homework Club is led led by Outreach in collaboration with Phil Ramsden from the Department of Mathematics and the Invention Rooms at Imperial’s White City Deep Tech Campus. It aims to support 13–16-year-olds with their maths homework, particularly those facing social and educational disadvantages in the local area.

Imperial provides a safe space, laptops, and a hot meal for 40 local young people, with student ambassadors providing maths tutoring. The club helps build the young people’s confidence and sense of belonging, as well as improving their maths skills.

Solar panels improved

Researchers have made an advancement in addressing how quickly perovskite solar cells degrade, meaning the latest solar panels can maintain their performance in producing clean energy for longer.

The formation of iodine compounds degrade the perovskite material over time, and is accelerated by environmental stressors such as light, heat and moisture. The study showed that iodine reductants help to manage iodine formation.

PhD student Thomas Webb, said: “Gaining mechanistic insights into the underlying chemistry regarding stability is essential in the development of new solar technologies.”

Research author, Professor Saif Haque from the Department of Chemistry, said: “The new fundamental insights from our work will enable the design of perovskite solar cells with improved stability.”

The research team incorporated an iodine reductant into the lead-tin perovskite solar cells, significantly improving both efficiency and stability. The solar cells achieved a power conversion efficiency of 23.2%, one of the highest reported for lead-tin perovskite solar cells, and an increased lifetime of 66%.

Drug resistance mechanisms

A new stochastic (‘random’) model shows how two mechanical phenomena can help pathogens resist treatment. Over time, repeated therapies, like antibiotics for urinary tract infections or chemotherapies for cancers, become less effective. This process is called fractional killing, because only a fraction of pathogenic cells die. The surviving cells then produce drug-resistant lineages.

Few studies have investigated how noise in cell population dynamics influences the emergence of fractional killings. Now, researchers from the Department of Mathematics have simulated the progression of fractional killing in a cell population during consistent versus periodic drug delivery.

During periodic delivery, intracellular noise from stochastic variables forced a transformation from complete to fractional killing in accordance with cells’ division rates and death times. With varying drug exposure, this appeared as a pattern characterised by periodic bursts in cells' survival rates during reoccurring treatment.

Overall, this could help inform efforts to anticipate risks posed by overprescribing and repeated treatments, and design more effective treatment schedules.

Read the full paper in Physical Review Letters.

Asthma attacks, slimmed

A study by researchers at the National Heart and Lung Institute has found that currently available diabetes treatments may successfully reduce asthma attacks.

Looking at GP records from over 2 million asthma patients who also had diabetes, the researchers found that one of the cheap, first line treatments for diabetes, Metformin, reduced asthma attacks by a third.

And when patients who were taking both Metformin and a GLP1 drug, such as Ozempic, for their diabetes were examined, researchers found the GLP1 drug reduced them by another 40%.

The combined effect of the treatments therefore reduced asthma attacks by 70% - which is far more effective than current expensive asthma biologic treatments.

Dr Chloe Bloom, who led the study, said; “It helped all asthma patients, regardless of how bad their diabetes was. The effect was not because of changes of weight but seems to occur through another mechanism, which we hope to explore in future work.”

For more, see the paper in Jama Internal Medicine and journal podcast with Dr Bloom.