Last week, the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq witnessed the inauguration of the “Kurdistan Biodiversity Project” at the Pastora Dam, which the Erbil government says is an essential step within the region’s efforts to document and protect its flora and fauna, especially the threatened ones.
In an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat, Hendrin Ghazi, Program Director at the Kurdistan Foundation, said: “The website (www.biodiversity.krd) represents the basic foundation of the project. It is considered a new national database that includes scientifically documented information about plant and animal life in the Kurdistan Region,” adding that “researchers at the Kurdistan Foundation collected this data through field work, and it is now available in one platform for students, scientists, policy makers, and everyone interested in the natural wealth of Kurdistan.”
Ghazi explained, “By the day the project was launched, 2,252 species had been officially registered and documented on the website, including 1,408 plant species and 844 animal species. In addition, 19 major biodiversity areas were identified, distributed across the four governorates of the Kurdistan region.
He continued, “The Kurdistan Region is characterized by the diversity of its terrain, which includes mountains, river valleys, wetlands, and plains. However, for a long time, reliable information about the creatures that live in these areas was either fragmented or not available at all. This project’s database was created to fill this gap and provide a solid scientific basis for environmental conservation and environmental planning.”
It should be noted that the Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Region, Masrour Barzani, said during his speech at the project inauguration ceremony: “This project is a very important step towards preserving the climate and wildlife in Kurdistan. The dimensions of this project go beyond the administrative borders of the Iraqi Kurdistan region,” calling for “the documentation of biological species in any part of the historical geography of Kurdistan, including neighboring countries.” In order to enrich the common scientific stock,” stressing that “protecting and preserving this natural wealth represents a solidarity responsibility shared by every lover of the environment,” as he put it.
According to Hendren Ghazi, the “Kurdistan Biodiversity Project” is part of the work of the “Climate.KRD” initiative - affiliated with the “Kurdistan Foundation” - which focuses on climate and environmental initiatives, in partnership with the Climate Change Unit in the Office of the Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government, noting that the Kurdistan Foundation plans, in the coming months, to expand the database, implement awareness programs, and cooperate with universities and partners to expand the scope of the project, he said.
Ghazi stressed that this project is open to visitors through the website, which received nearly 9,000 visitors within the first 24 hours of its launch.
He concluded that the project depends on 3 stages, the first is collecting the available data and integrating it into the website, which has already been done, the second is completing all available discoveries, including their location, description, scientific names, and their status with the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the last is opening a center for biodiversity in Kurdistan and developing a center for rehabilitation and species protection in coordination with researchers and academic professors.
The Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Region launched the project in the presence of a number of ministers and senior government officials in Kurdistan, and Arin Barzani, President of the Kurdistan Foundation, the institution supervising the project. Climate activists, researchers, and members of the forest and environment police also participated in the launch ceremony.
Boosting the body's immunity against cancer may one day become possible through a vaccine that is taken orally instead of by injection. An early exploratory clinical study has shown that genetically modified bacteria can be used to transfer a cancer antigen to the immune system, with preliminary results indicating the possibility of enhancing the anti-tumor immune response in some patients.
In a first-stage clinical trial, the experimental vaccine “B440” was generally well tolerated, and showed immunological and clinical indicators that deserve further research. The results also revealed the possibility of a biomarker that could help in the future to identify patients most likely to benefit from this approach.
• “Intestinal” bacteria. The immune system has a natural ability to attack cancer cells, but tumors can develop mechanisms to escape this surveillance; Among them is the exploitation of what are known as “immune checkpoints”, which are mechanisms that act as brakes that prevent the immune system from attacking cells excessively.
Immune checkpoint inhibitor drugs, such as some newer cancer treatments, disable these brakes to reactivate anti-tumor immunity. But some cancers are able to develop other means of escape, and a number of patients do not respond to these treatments.
Hence, a team led by researcher Toshiro Shirakawa from the Department of Urology, Graduate School of Medicine at Kobe University, Japan, searched for a new way to enhance immunity using Bifidobacterium longum, a bacteria known for its use in some probiotic products, and its ability to interact with the immune system in the intestine.
The researchers genetically modified the bacteria so that they presented a large portion of a modified protein known as Wilms tumor 1 protein (WT1), an antigen associated with a number of tumors. The goal is to deliver this antigen through the digestive tract to the gut-associated lymphoid tissue, where it can interact with the immune system.
• A trial on patients who have exhausted treatment options. Researchers tested the experimental oral vaccine in a phase 1 clinical trial that included 12 patients with metastatic urinary tract cancer who had exhausted standard treatment options.
The results of the study were published in the journal JCO Oncology Advances on July 7, 2026, and showed that the treatment was well tolerated. The only side effect associated with the treatment was a temporary rise in levels of interleukin-6, a molecule involved in regulating the inflammatory response, which appeared in only 3 patients, and all cases were mild and not serious.
But the most interesting aspect emerged in the immune response; The researchers were able to monitor a cellular immune response directed against the Wilms tumor protein in six of the twelve patients. The surprise is that these patients all already had a weak response to the antigen before receiving the vaccine, and they also remained for a longer period without progression of the disease compared to other patients.
As for the six patients who had no detectable immune response to Wilms' tumor protein before treatment, the vaccine did not show a clear ability to create a new response in them.
Monitoring a vital sign helps identify patients most likely to benefit from it
Boost immunity
• A vaccine enhances immunity more than it initiates it. These results suggest the possibility that the experimental vaccine may act as a booster of an existing immune response, rather than a vaccine capable of triggering a new response from scratch.
If confirmed in larger studies, a pre-existing weak immune response to the Wilms tumor protein could become a biomarker that helps doctors identify patients most likely to benefit from this type of treatment.
After the end of the trial, 7 patients received additional treatment with Pembrolizumab, an immune checkpoint inhibitor, at the discretion of their doctors. Shrinkage of tumors was observed in 3 of them, and all of them were patients who developed an immune response against Wilms' tumor protein after receiving the experimental vaccine. However, the researchers stress that these results do not prove the effectiveness of the vaccine, given the small number of participants and the non-random nature of the follow-up after the end of the trial.
Shirakawa said the study was not designed to prove the treatment's effectiveness; Rather, to generate hypotheses that can be tested in subsequent studies.
• Towards a new generation of cancer vaccines. The researchers believe that the results justify continuing to study the experimental vaccine (B440), especially in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitors, or using it before these treatments.
The team is currently conducting a phase I and II clinical trial testing the experimental vaccine in combination with the drugs “Nivolumab” and “Ipilimumab” in patients with nonremovable malignant pleural mesothelioma.
Although there is still a long way to go before knowing whether this approach will become an actual treatment, the study opens a new direction in cancer treatment, which is the use of genetically modified intestinal bacteria as an oral means to deliver cancer antigens and stimulate the immune system from within, and perhaps combine it in the future with existing immunotherapies.
With the increasing impact of climate change on agriculture, knowing what is grown and where, and the size of the cultivated areas, has become an important factor in estimating food production and preparing for food shortages. However, obtaining this data remains a challenge in many countries, especially those that depend on small farms that are difficult to survey in the field on a regular basis.
In this context, artificial intelligence, using satellite images, opens a new field for crop monitoring and mapping quickly and at a lower cost. A study by researchers at the British University of Cambridge showed that an artificial intelligence tool developed by the team could help governments and organizations concerned with food security draw more accurate maps of crops on small farms, using satellite images, at a lower computational cost, allowing production estimation, monitoring agricultural changes, and better preparation for potential food shortages.
Artificial intelligence tool
The researchers tested Tessera, an open-source AI model trained on satellite images, to map crops in the groundnut basin of Senegal, an agricultural region that relies heavily on the work of small farmers and rain-fed agriculture.
Tests showed that Tesira was able to identify the correct crop type in about 84 percent of cases. The study comes at a time when there is an increasing need for accurate agricultural data to monitor the impact of climate fluctuations on food production, especially in areas where a large portion of production depends on small farms and rainwater. In West Africa, changing patterns of rainfall and drought represent a risk that may affect crop production and food security.
How does Taysira work? The tool relies on analyzing satellite images over the course of an entire year, and converting each 10-square-meter spot on Earth into a series of numbers known as “Embedding.” This digital representation carries information about how the land and the crops growing on it have changed over time.
A simple algorithm and a limited number of field data points can then be used to identify crop types and create a large-scale map of them. This method reduces the need to collect large amounts of field data, or perform expensive calculations to analyze satellite images, which may make crop monitoring more available to governments and organizations that lack the resources to use traditional methods.
The researchers compared Tesira's performance with two widely used methods for mapping crops from satellites, in addition to AlphaEarth, a similar model developed by Google's DeepMind lab, but whose infrastructure is not publicly available. The crop mapping models were tested during 2018, 2019 and 2021, evaluating their accuracy, reliability, reusability, and computational cost to run them.
Monitor future expectations
The results showed that Tesira maintained better performance when it was trained using data from one year and then applied to another year, indicating the possibility of benefiting from it in subsequent years without the need to conduct new field surveys every year.
Dr. Madeleine Lisaios, the lead researcher of the study at the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge, told Asharq Al-Awsat that one of the most prominent benefits of Tesira in agricultural applications is that it enjoys greater temporal stability of the data compared to traditional machine learning methods.
She explained that data collected 5 or 10 years ago can still be used with current models, which was difficult to achieve with traditional methods, allowing us to benefit from existing data and reduce reliance on new collection campaigns on an ongoing basis.
She added that the tool also reduces the technical expertise needed to benefit from satellite images, especially for small farmers, noting that the costs of storing data and running models can be reduced by between 10 and 20 times compared to traditional methods, while eliminating the need to calculate complex, custom features or indicators, which makes the use of satellite images in food security applications easier.
Lisaios explained that Tesira provides a technological infrastructure that allows agricultural analyzes to run even on a mobile phone, with a limited amount of technical input, making information extracted from satellites more available for local farmers to analyze their areas themselves. She said that this availability could contribute to reducing the digital gap in the agricultural sector, and also provide data that helps understand agricultural trends and support decision-making.
More broadly, governments and smallholder supporters can use this information to plan agricultural extension programmes, workshops, and input distribution, as well as monitor the spread of crop diseases, climate impacts, and land management patterns, helping to target support to areas and farmers most in need.
Regarding expanding the use of “Tesira” to other African countries, Lisaios said that the approach can be applied in various agricultural regions on the African continent. Adapting it to different crops, climates and farming systems requires a minimum of 12 high-quality samples or tags for each target crop in the region, after which the tool can be used as a turnkey product to extract information that supports agricultural and food security applications.
