The Washington, D.C., area has been home to some incredible scientific advancements this year.
Breakthroughs in treatments of life-altering issues; a dinosaur discovery of the century in Maryland and a teen's cancer-fighting invention are some of our most-read and favorite science and health stories of the year.
Here’s a look at some of NBC Washington’s health and science stories about innovations that are changing lives for the better.
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‘You've had enough': What weight-loss drugs may teach us about addiction
The medications Ozempic and Wegovy have been all over the news for helping people lose weight — and researchers are now studying the potential impact they could have on alcoholism and other addictive behaviors.
“We're seeing a decrease in impulsive behaviors from patients,” said Dr. Rocio Salas-Whalen, an endocrinologist. “Initially it was for food, but we're seeing it for other types of impulses like alcohol, tobacco.”
The medications work by suppressing a person's appetite and essentially rewiring the reward system in our brain for food and other cravings, such as for alcohol, Salas-Whalen explained.
Alexandria, Virginia, mom Lisa Robillard first took weight-loss medication as part of a clinical trial. She was responding to chronic obesity, which she dealt with starting in childhood. On the medication, she lost 60 pounds, began to leave food on her plate and noticed her drinking habits change too.
“I just don't have that desire. I will have a glass of wine, and where I may have had two or three, one is [now] fine or a half of a glass is fine. Something in my head says, ‘That's good. You've had enough,’” she said.
Scientists at the UNC School of Medicine are taking a deeper dive with humans, studying this class of drugs and their potential effectiveness as a treatment for alcohol addiction as part of an ongoing clinical trial.
‘Most important dig site east of the Mississippi': Ancient river ‘bone bed' reveals dinosaur fossils in Maryland
In an undeveloped chunk of land in the middle of a heavily industrialized section of Prince George's County, less than an hour from Washington, D.C., paleontologists have found a gold mine for the fossil record.
Paleontologists in Dinosaur Park, a public park and active dig site in Laurel, Maryland, announced in July that the park is home to what paleontologists call a bone bed. It's the term used when one or more species are concentrated near each other, in the same geologic layer of the Earth.
"It is certainly the most significant collection of dinosaur bones discovered along the eastern seaboard in the last hundred years,” Matthew Carrano, a paleontologist with the Smithsonian, said.
One of the most exciting discoveries came on Earth Day: the three-foot-long leg bone of a large, meat-eating dinosaur. It belongs to a theropod, which is a branch of the dino family that includes carnivores like the T. Rex. But this dinosaur lived about 50 million years earlier than that.
JP Hodnett, a paleontologist with Prince George's County Parks and Recreation, believes it belongs to an Acrocanthosaurus, a 12,000-pound, apex predator that called Laurel home about 115 million years ago.
"Finding a bonebed like this is a dream for many paleontologists," said Hodnett in the release.
Dinosaur Park – and its many fossils – lie waiting to be discovered. If you want to try your hand at fossil hunting, visitors can take part in public programs for free on the first and third Saturdays of each month.
Virginia 14-year-old named top young scientist for cancer-fighting soap invention
Heman Bekele, a freshman at Woodson High School in Northern Virginia, spent his summer break working to cure cancer.
He was named “America’s Top Young Scientist” for creating a bar of soap designed to fight low-grade skin cancer. Out of nine students, he won the top prize of $25,000 and was named America’s Top Young Scientist.
“I wanted to try to find a way for the entire world to be able to have an equitable and accessible form of skin cancer treatment,” Bekele said.
The 14-year-old calls it skin cancer-treating soap, or SCTS for short. The soap replenishes the skin with dendritic cells, which help protect the skin and fight cancer.
Before making the soap, he reached out to University of Virginia professors to help with research.
He said he hopes to take the soap to market in the next five years and start a nonprofit so it can be available to people in need.
Diagnosed and treated for cancer all in one day, thanks to new medical tech
It can take several weeks to diagnose, and then treat someone with surgery, for lung cancer. But for some patients, INOVA Health System can do both procedures on the same day, thanks to new cutting-edge robotic technology.
"This is a game changer in the way we treat early stage lung cancer," said Dr. Michael Weyant, the chief of thoracic surgery at INOVA. "So in one day, from start to finish, it is all taken care of."
Weyant says the approach leads to better outcomes and reduces the mental toll that comes after a cancer diagnosis.
Sheryl Bitsch's successful biopsy and surgery took about eight hours, and she was back in her Northern Virginia home the next day. In January, she told us she’s back to her routine, taking her new puppy out for long walks and looking forward to more travel adventures, thanks to innovative technology.
"It was a process that was, despite the diagnosis, really painless," she said. "I'm not sure if I had to go home and think about this for weeks on end, I would have been nearly as okay with everything as I was as a result of it."
Doctors say to be eligible for the same-day diagnosis and surgery, patients need to have an identified lung nodule that has not spread anywhere else.
‘It's unreal': AI helping paralysis patients regain movement and communicate
Two cutting-edge clinical trials are using artificial intelligence to help patients with paralysis regain movement in their body and reclaim their voice.
For years, Keith Thomas has been unable to move his arms and hands after a diving accident left him paralyzed from the chest down.
Now, a simple gesture like shaking someone's hand gives him tremendous hope.
"When I feel the sense of touch, it's like, it's unreal because I haven't felt that in three years now," Keith Thomas said.
Through a new procedure called a double neural bypass, doctors at Northwell Health's Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in New York implanted five tiny computer chips in Thomas' brain that can literally read his mind.
"This is the first time the brain has been linked directly to spinal cord stimulation and to the body to restore movement and the sense of touch where the user's thoughts are actually driving that therapy," said Professor Chad Bouton, the vice president of Advanced Engineering and director of the Neural Bypass and Brain-Computer Interface Laboratory at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research.
AI isn’t just helping patients regain movement.
In a separate study published in the journal Nature, researchers from UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley are using artificial intelligence to help a paralyzed mother reclaim her voice.
Edited by Sophia Barnes
