Science in 2025: the events to watch for in the coming year
New and repurposed obesity drugs, daring space missions and climate-action policies are among the developments set to shape research in 2025.
By * Miryam Naddaf
NASA’s SPHEREx observatory will survey the whole sky during its two-year mission. Credit: BAE Systems
Weight-loss wonder drugs
Following the runaway success of ‘miracle’ drug Wegovy (semaglutide) and other GLP-1 agonists, 2025 is likely to bring results and approvals for a new wave of treatments targeting obesity. The pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly in Indianapolis, Indiana, will wrap up a phase III trial for its oral pill orforglipron, evaluating its long-term safety in people with type 2 diabetes. The drug is easier to produce and potentially cheaper than existing treatments.
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Trials for Eli Lilly’s triple-action drug, retatrutide, will continue throughout 2025. In its phase II trial, retatrutide showed unprecedented efficacy, with people on the highest dose experiencing a 24.2% weight loss over 11 months (currently available drugs tend to yield around 15–20% weight loss over a similar period). Another company, Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California, is preparing a phase III trial for its drug maritide, which can be taken monthly and targets two pathways involved in blood sugar control and metabolism.
Researchers will continue to explore the potential of GLP-1 agonists to treat other illnesses, including Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s and addiction.
The year could also mark a turning point in how pain is treated. US regulators are expected to complete a review of a non-opioid painkiller called suzetrigine in January. If approved, the drug, developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals in Boston, Massachusetts, would be part of the first new class of drugs to treat acute pain in more than 20 years.
Trump takes over
Donald Trump’s return to the office of US president in January could bring sweeping changes to US science — with global ramifications. During his previous term in office, Trump pulled the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, an international commitment to limit global warming to 1.5–2 °C above pre-industrial levels. Some researchers are concerned that he might do so again, as well as rolling back climate regulations on power plants and automobiles.
Trump is also expected to introduce policies that have implications for reproductive health and medicine. His nomination of Robert Kennedy Jr — known for his scepticism towards vaccines — as health and human services secretary has been criticized by scientists. The appointment of billionaire Elon Musk to lead an advisory body named the Department of Government Efficiency could impact the budgets and workforces of science agencies. During his election campaign, Trump promised to repeal President Joe Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence (AI), a guideline for developing AI technology safely and responsibly.
Donald Trump will become US president for the second time on 20 January 2025.Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty
Pandemic prep
March 2025 will mark five years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused millions of deaths, forced widespread lockdowns and spurred the rapid development and roll-out of vaccines.
The world is still learning how to prepare for and prevent future pandemics, and member states of the World Health Organization (WHO) missed their original June 2024 deadline to agree on a global pandemic treaty. Talks reached a deadlock over disagreements on rules for sharing samples and genomic sequences of pathogens, and for the use of technologies that can help low- and middle-income countries to produce vaccines, drugs and testing kits quickly during pandemics. Member states are now aiming to finalize the agreement text by May 2025. These efforts come at a crucial time: in August, the WHO updated its list of pathogens that could spark the next pandemic to include more than 30 microorganisms, including the viruses that cause influenza A, dengue and mpox.
Probing particles
Particle physicists are hoping to see the European Spallation Source in Lund, Sweden, begin operations in 2025, after more than a decade of construction. This colossal machine will generate neutron pulses by firing a beam of protons — accelerated to nearly the speed of light — at a heavy-metal target. Scientists will use these neutrons to probe the structure of materials.
Meanwhile, a detailed feasibility study for a proposed US$17-billion supercollider at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory outside Geneva, Switzerland, will wrap up in 2025. The study will evaluate the cost, technical aspects and environmental impacts of building a particle accelerator 91 kilometres in circumference: the Future Circular Collider (FCC), intended to succeed the Large Hadron Collider. The report will feed into a final decision on the FCC in 2028.
Following the success of semaglutide, several new weight-loss drugs are in development. Credit: Gavin Rodgers/pixel8000 via Alamy
Mind-reading machines
In 2025, China plans to test brain–computer interface (BCI) technologies that could compete with implants made by Elon Musk’s firm Neuralink, based in Fremont, California. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has announced plans to develop BCI devices for applications ranging from medical rehabilitation to virtual reality. One of these products is NEO, a wireless and minimally invasive BCI with eight electrodes placed over the brain’s sensorimotor cortex, designed to restore hand movement in people with paralysis. Clinical trials for NEO began in 2023, and early results showed that a participant with spinal-cord injury was able to eat, drink and grasp objects after nine months of using the BCI at home. The researchers behind NEO plan to expand to larger trials in 2025.
Exploring the Universe
In a historic first, 2024 saw a private spacecraft land successfully on the Moon. Now, 2025 looks set to be a busy year for lunar traffic. In January, Tokyo-based company ispace — which came tantalizingly close to landing its own craft in 2023 — will launch its next attempt, a mission called Venture Moon, which will carry a lander and a micro-rover. Not far behind, Intuitive Machines in Houston, Texas, will send a lander to the lunar south pole. The spacecraft will carry a NASA ice drill and mass spectrometer to analyse material beneath the lunar surface. As part of the same mission, NASA’s box-shaped spacecraft Lunar Trailblazer will orbit the Moon and map its surface water.
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Two missions to study solar winds — streams of charged particles that flow from the Sun’s outer atmosphere — are set to launch in 2025. The SMILE (Solar Wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer) satellite, a joint project between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, will study how solar wind interacts with Earth’s magnetic field. NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission will look deeper into the Sun’s atmosphere, capturing 3D images that will help to clear up questions about how that energy flows into the Solar System, something that has puzzled astronomers for 60 years.
Another NASA mission set to launch in 2025, the SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) observatory, will map the entire sky in 102 colours for the first time using near-infrared light. Over two years, the satellite will collect data on more than 450 million galaxies and over 100 million stars in the Milky Way to help scientists understand the origins of the Universe.
ESA’s Biomass mission (artist’s impression) will use radar to study Earth’s forests from above. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab
COP turns 30
The November 2025 COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil, will mark 30 years of United Nations climate talks. Countries hope to finalize funding decisions left unresolved at the 2024 COP29 conference. These include how to secure $300 billion annually in climate finance pledged to support developing countries by 2035, how much will be delivered as grants, rather than loans and where the money will come from.
Negotiations for a UN plastics treaty are also set to continue, after the latest round of talks ended without a final agreement in December. The treaty seeks to establish a binding international framework to regulate plastic products.
Forests seen from space
Climate researchers will have new opportunities to study forests and natural disasters with the launch of two satellites. The NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) mission, a collaboration between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation, will map nearly all Earth’s land- and ice-covered surface twice every 12 days. ESA’s Biomass mission, launching from Kourou, French Guiana, will use radar to measure forest biomass and study its role in the carbon cycle. Observations from these missions could feed into future discussions on commitments to end deforestation.
doi: Science in 2025: the events to watch for in the coming year
Last edited by @suen 2024-12-18T04:18:53Z
