The curious case of the queen bee has long had scientists pondering whether the head of the hive harbours the secret to a long and healthy life.
While queen bees and workers have nearly identical DNA, the queens enjoy what might be regarded as royal privileges. They are larger, fertile throughout life and survive for years compared with workers, who last a few months at best.
Now, researchers are preparing to delve into apian biology in the hope that understanding what makes queen bees thrive will unlock radical therapies to extend human lifespans and extend our fertile years.
The ambitious project is under development at the Advanced Research + Invention Agency, a government body supported by £800m to fund high-risk, high-reward research that may well fail, but could reshape society if it succeeds.
“It’s these wacky ideas that have the potential to be truly transformative to everyone’s lives,” said Yannick Wurm, one of eight programme directors announced by Aria on Monday. Wurm, a former professor of evolutionary genomics and bioinformatics at Queen Mary University of London, will oversee projects to study bees, wasps, ants and termites for human benefit.
“If we’re able to disentangle, and to reverse engineer, how nature has solved these challenges for them, that can be transformative for pausing ageing, human fertility, transport of organs and provide new means of fighting disease,” he said.
Regarded as the brainchild of Dominic Cummings, the former chief adviser to Boris Johnson, Aria is inspired by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Darpa. The US agency is credited with foundational work across technology, from the internet and GPS to stealth fighters and Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant.
Aria announced its first tranche of directors in 2023, leading to research projects on AI safety, dextrous robots, synthetic plants and an advanced brain-computer interface being trialled in the NHS. The agency gives directors freedom to fund about £50m of research in speculative and underexplored areas.
Young queen bees mate mid-flight and store sperm from many males in an organ called the spermatheca. Queens then release the sperm over their lifetime to fertilise their eggs. In the hive, workers feed the queen royal jelly, a nutrient and vitamin-rich secretion, which is thought to contribute to the bee’s longer life, along with specific antioxidants and gut microbes. Last year, scientists extended the lives of worker bees by transplanting gut microbes from queens.
Other Aria projects aim to replace plastics with programmable materials inspired by nature; harness energy from the atmosphere to enable potentially limitless flight and find ways to manipulate the innate immune system – the body’s first line of defence – to tackle infectious diseases, cancer and autoimmune conditions.
Ivan Jayapurna, who joined Aria from the University of California, Berkeley, wants to overhaul materials manufacturing and replace plastics with sustainable, nature-inspired alternatives. After the stone age, bronze age and iron age, he believes we are now in the plastics age and need to move on.
“Plastics is a useful poster child for what a bad modern material looks like, but really it’s time to rethink how we make all materials, not just plastics.” More “bio-harmonious” materials would be resilient, adaptive, self-healing and sustainable, he added.
Each Aria programme runs for three to five years, but many will take longer to bear fruit. “We often describe our programmes as sending up a flare, to say something is possible here,” said Pippy James, the chief product officer at Aria. “It’s not necessarily that at the end of that specific programme we have reached the version of the future.
“We have to get really comfortable with failure. It might be one thing that we fund becomes the next internet and all the failure and learning along the way would have got us to that point.”
