Julio Pernía

Helping build a strong team and product @bdeo_app

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

A father and daughter swept offshore in the Aegean Espanomi Bay and were saved by a kite surfer.

All captured on kite surfer’s camera.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

A tech consultant in Sydney spent $3,000 and two months to do what Moderna has spent billions trying to scale.

Paul Conyngham adopted Rosie, a staffy-Shar Pei cross, from a shelter in 2019. In 2024, tumors started growing on her back leg. Mast cell cancer, the most common skin cancer in dogs. He tried surgery, chemo, immunotherapy. Nothing shrank the tumors. Just slowed them down while the bills stacked into the tens of thousands.

So he opened ChatGPT and asked it how to cure his dog’s cancer.

The AI didn’t cure anything. What it did was compress months of literature review into hours. It suggested genomic sequencing, walked him through neoantigen identification, helped him build a research pipeline that would normally require a postdoc and a lab budget. He paid $3,000 to sequence Rosie’s tumor DNA at UNSW’s Ramaciotti Centre, then ran the mutations through AlphaFold to model the protein structures. A computational biology professor at UNSW saw his analysis and was, in his own words, gobsmacked that someone with zero biology training had assembled the whole thing.

Then came the part nobody expects. The science was the easy half. Australian ethics approval to run a drug trial on your own pet took three months. Two hours every night after work, filling out a 100-page application. The red tape was harder than designing the vaccine.

Once he cleared that, Páll Thordarson at the UNSW RNA Institute built a custom mRNA vaccine from Conyngham’s data. Sequencing to finished vaccine: less than two months. Conyngham drove 10 hours to deliver Rosie for her first injection in December. One month later, the tennis-ball-sized tumor on her leg had shrunk 75%.

Here’s where the numbers get interesting. Moderna and Merck just reported five-year data on their personalized mRNA cancer vaccine for melanoma. It encodes up to 34 neoantigens per patient. The Phase III trial is fully enrolled. Projected cost per patient: $100,000 to $300,000. Their pipeline is worth an estimated $2.3 billion in annual sales by 2031.

Conyngham did a version of the same workflow for his dog. Sequenced the tumor. Identified the neoantigens. Built a custom mRNA construct. Total cost: $3,000 for sequencing plus university lab time. The gap between those two numbers is where AI is about to rearrange the entire cost structure of precision medicine.

The regulatory moat is real. Conyngham could do this because veterinary experimental treatments face lighter scrutiny than human medicine. There’s no FDA Phase I-III gauntlet for a one-off compassionate use case on a dog. But the technical workflow, tumor sequencing to neoantigen prediction to mRNA synthesis, is converging toward something a motivated person with the right AI tools can orchestrate in weeks instead of years.

One guy, a rescue dog, and a $20/month ChatGPT subscription just produced a proof of concept that the pharmaceutical industry has spent a decade and billions of dollars building toward. The vaccine worked. The tumor shrank. And the only reason it happened is because a dog owner loved his dog enough to spend three months fighting paperwork.

[Roman Sheremeta 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @rshereme]

Former President of Poland Lech Wałęsa wrote the following letter to Donald Trump:

1/n

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

America, give this a listen. This is how our closest allies now view us. @MarshSongs

[Jorge Bustos @JorgeBustos1]

Dos paletos yanquis, uno dominado por la codicia y otro por el fanatismo, dos tipos absurdos que jamás han vivido la violación de sus tierras y de su gente, tratando de arrodillar a Zelenski ante los deseos del criminal de Bucha para repartirse los jirones de Ucrania. Qué basura.

[JesúsGallego🐬 @JGALLEGOonfire]

Tremenda esta carta

[Doctor Frusna @doctorfrusna]

Walter Matthau contando (como nadie 🤣) una anécdota del compañero de habitación que le tocó en el hospital, cuando le operaron su desprendimiento de retina...

[Javier G. Recuenco @Recuenco]

En el hilo turras de hoy, vamos a hablar de la razón real por la que el porcentaje de emprendedores entre la población general es ridículo y así tiene que ser. Vamos allá.

[David Criado @vorpalina]

IMPERIO AZTECA,
VIRREINATO DE NUEVA ESPAÑA
y MÉJICO

Me cuesta aceptarlo pero entiendo que a alguien le resulte difícil leer libros, contrastar fuentes, informarse,...

Pero a veces es tan sencillo como mirar 3 mapas en 5 segundos para desmentir tesis revisionistas

Abro hilo 🧵

[Inaki Berenguer @inakib]

Great article about Spain and Madrid in the Financial Times today:

Spain other victories
"Not long ago Madrid was Vienna-like in its ossification. It might now be Europe’s most vaunted city after London and Paris, and the world’s best that isn’t on or near a coast. The boom there stems from what? Regional tax incentives, to a degree, but also an openness to those modernisms — architectural, gastronomic — that first tend to stir in littoral Spain."

https://t.co/Slf82VCNJe

[Julio Pernía @ArthurJulius]

@toni_pn cuanta razón...

[Julio Pernía @ArthurJulius]

@aasuero La cosas claras, bien. A quien me recordará ;)

[José Luis Antúnez @jlantunez]

Get stuff done.

[Linas Beliūnas @linasbeliunas]

Sergey Brin is worth $105 billion yet he was a core contributor on the Gemini AI technical paper, coding basically every day.

Legend.

[Julio Pernía @ArthurJulius]

@jlhortelano https://t.co/VjDGv9KMkt

[⚫️ El DiSputado® @NoSoyLaGente]

Esto es maravilloso.

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

Galileo Galilei's first drawings of the moon after seeing it through the telescope in 1609

[Julio Pernía @ArthurJulius]

@JulioAlonso @furilo +1 a Exentys @javitaxes

[Tomas Pueyo @tomaspueyo]

What if there was a way to:
• Mitigate climate change
• Create more life
• Grow the economy
• And make money along the way?

Let's call it *Seaflooding*

[Julio Pernía @ArthurJulius]

@HarryStebbings Hands down, @Kfundvc, @MarcCley & @arrola. They’re challenging, supportive, and extremely helpful in good and bad times.