Arvind's Newsletter

1.India weighs five-year tax cuts on EV imports to woo Tesla

India is considering a request from Tesla to lower tariffs for imported electric vehicles, according to Indian government officials, as Elon Musk’s company explores setting up a plant in the country. Tesla has asked New Delhi for an initial tariff concession that would allow it to offset India’s steep customs duty of 70 per cent for cars worth less than $40,000, and 100 per cent for cars worth $40,000 or more, according to two officials with knowledge of the matter, according to Financial Times.

Tesla had requested the concession as a precondition to building a plant in India. The lowered tariffs would apply to all EV makers. The officials said the reduced rate under consideration would be 15 per cent for EVs of all prices, but added that the policy had not been agreed within India’s government yet. 

2.The case for export of Indian workers to Taiwan and Israel
As India’s workforce increases and the working age population of the developed world comes down, export of Indian labour will be a win-win situation for both India and the host nations, opine Subir Roy in Moneycontrol.

India and Taiwan are reportedly close to finalising a deal for the far eastern country to host as many as one lakh Indian workers. This comes close on the heels of another reported move that Israel is considering bringing in a large number of Indian workers, possibly to replace Palestinians whose services the country wishes to forego as the two are now at war.

On the face of it this is good news for India, which has a large number of people who are either unemployed or surviving below or just above the poverty line. Taiwan has reportedly offered to pay migrant Indian workers who will stay for a period of up to three years at the same rate as it does its own workers, plus local insurance.

The earnings that these workers will send back will significantly enhance the consumption levels of their families back home, thereby reducing national deprivation levels. These inward remittances will add to India’s services exports earnings and enhance the health of its balance of payments.

3.Schengen visa application will soon be a paperless process

EU foreign ministers recently approved a digitalisation shift for Schengen visa applications. The online platform will streamline the process, removing the necessity for consulate appointments or visits to service providers' offices.

This also means, no more physical stickers in your passports. 

The change, unveiled after a months-long legislative process, will take effect three weeks after it is published in the EU's administrative gazette, expected soon.

4.Nord Stream Saboteur was Ukrainian

A high-ranking Ukrainian military officer was responsible for the September 2022 Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, according to new media reports. Several nations have opened investigations into the attack, which reduced Europe's oil supply ahead of last winter.

Roman Chervinsky, a 48-year-old colonel with ties to the intelligence community, reportedly coordinated the six-person operation, though sources claim senior generals initiated the plot. The team reportedly rented a sailboat and used deep-sea diving equipment to lay bombs on the steel and concrete pipelines in the Baltic Sea. Chervinsky is currently jailed in Ukraine, awaiting trial for alleged abuse of power in a separate case. He denied involvement in the pipeline sabotage and claimed the allegations are Kyiv's retribution for his past criticism of the administration.

Sources also claim Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has consistently denied Ukraine's involvement, was intentionally kept out of the loop of the mission.

5.Microbiome treatments are taking off, reports The Economist. Faecal transplants are just the start of a new sort of medicine. In a small laboratory at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital in London, Désirée Prossomariti is processing donations. Each is weighed, tested for pathogens, filtered, centrifuged and then freeze-dried, before being turned into a powder to be encapsulated and given to patients. The process takes a strong stomach, for the donations are of fresh faecal matter. “I don’t smell it any more,” says Dr Prossomariti.

The lab workers are not interested in the faeces themselves, but the tiny organisms they carry. Scientists have long known that the guts of animals, including humans, are full of bacteria, viruses and other micro-organisms. But it is only recently that they have come to understand just how important they are. Far from a collection of mere passengers, the microbiome is a vital part of a healthy body. Its members help break down food, produce chemicals that regulate the body within which they live, and repress the growth of other, harmful species of bacteria.

It is one of those harmful bacterial species that Dr Prossomariti’s pills are designed to repress, through a process known as a “faecal microbiota transplantation” (FMT). Five pills (or “crapsules”, as the lab workers like to call them) can overcome a recurrent infection of Clostridium difficile, a bacterium which has evolved resistance to many antibiotics. As its name suggests, the idea is to copy a healthy person’s gut ecosystem and reproduce it in someone whose microbiome is out-of-kilter.

It works, too. FMT is a standard remedy for C. difficile infections in Britain, and is being investigated for diseases from irritable bowel syndrome to multiple sclerosis. But FMT is only the beginning of the microbial-medicine revolution. Researchers believe that, rather than the relatively blunt approach of copying over a microbiome in toto, the future lies in tweaking microbiomes to meet a specific patient’s needs. FMT is a stopgap, says Eric Pamer, a microbiologist at the University of Chicago.

Besides the “yuck” factor—which, say researchers, tends to evaporate when patients are presented with the evidence—FMT suffers from several problems. Those who donate the stool find the process off-putting. The stool itself is impossible to standardise, varying across donors and even across donations.

That makes it hard to regulate consistently. America and Canada regard fmt pills as investigational drugs. In Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium, fmt is viewed as a tissue transplant. Britain, meanwhile, considers it a medicinal product, which allows for more flexible regulation.

All this strongly limits supply. Simon Goldenberg, who runs the laboratory where Dr Prossomariti works, reckons that of a thousand patients with recurrent C. difficile infections in Britain each year, only a few hundred get the treatment. There is also an open question as to whether chronic conditions could ever be reliably treated with FMT. Even if the entire microbiome is replaced, says Bernd Schnabl, a gastroenterologist at the University of California, San Diego, the benefits will be temporary if the root cause is untreated.

Hence the push for finer-tuned treatments. Rather than tweaking the populations of individual species of bacteria in a patient’s microbiome, for instance, Dr Schnabl is focused on the metabolites that they produce. Take ammonia, which is linked to cirrhosis of the liver.  One approach to limiting its presence in the gut (and, subsequently, the bloodstream) is to genetically engineer neighbouring bacteria to be better ammonia-eaters. Another is to grow bacteria-killing viruses, known as phages, which can reduce the number of ammonia-producing microbes. Dr Schnabl hopes to begin a trial of such phages for alcohol-related hepatitis next year.

Industry is interested, too. Seres Therapeutics is a biotech firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its philosophy involves designing communities of bacteria that, when parachuted into the hostile environment of a malfunctioning gut, can restore order. Matthew Henn, the firm’s chief scientific officer, says the idea is to use the bacteria themselves as a drug; one that has an evolved ability to get to where it needs to go, and whose diversity of constituent species endows it with many possible simultaneous effects.

In April, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), an American regulator, approved a product called ser-109—the first oral microbiome therapeutic—for use against recurrent C. difficile infections. The company is now testing a cluster of 16 bacteria they call ser-155 in patients who have undergone an allogeneic haematopoietic stem-cell transplant, a treatment for diseases such as leukaemia in which bone-marrow stem cells are transplanted in order to strengthen the patient’s immune system. This process, which often includes high antibiotic doses, can severely damage the microbiome, making a dangerous infection harder to fight off.

Early results released in May showed that the treatment was well-tolerated and that, over 30 days, only one new infection occurred in nine patients given ser-155, compared with six that might have been expected without treatment. Additional results from a placebo-controlled trial are expected in late 2024.

The team at Seres have identified other types of immunocompromised patients that are susceptible to bacterial infections, and hope to begin other trials soon. And they have competition, too.  Vedanta Biosciences is another biotech company also based in Cambridge. Earlier this year ve303, a product it produces that contains a mixture of eight strains of harmless C. difficile relatives, did well in clinical trials on 79 individuals with recurrent infections of the hostile version of the bacterium. After eight weeks, subjects who had taken high doses of the treatment were less likely to get a recurrent C. difficile infection than those on the placebo. The company has “fast track” designation from the fda, and hopes to begin a larger trial soon.

It is early days, in other words, but the prospects for a new era of microbiome medicine, more sophisticated than crude-but-effective FMTs, look promising. “Our drugs are just that,” says Dr Henn, at Seres. “They are the next generation.

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