Ubadah Sabbagh

neuroscientist by training, biotech guy @arcadiascience and open science guy @asterainstitute• syrian immigrant • former @mit @virginia_tech • الأمل موهبة

[Ubadah Sabbagh @neubadah]

prudent reminder for scientists today, from a thousand years ago

[Ubadah Sabbagh @neubadah]

@belindazli @AnthropicAI Congrats!

[Ubadah Sabbagh @neubadah]

@steventen Very interesting, is there a technical report on this anywhere I can read?

[Ubadah Sabbagh @neubadah]

The discourse on twitter would have us treat China’s R&D edge as a collection of factors to litigate, but it’s better understood as a system that compounds.

[Niko McCarty. @NikoMcCarty]

Lots of people in biology writing about China focus on clinical trials as the source of speed. Clinical trials are important, but China is doing lots of things to make things go faster. Everything is vertically-integrated in a way that will be difficult for the U.S. to match.

Consider BCIs:

The most recent five-year plan (adopted in March 2026) lists brain-computer interfaces as one of six “frontier” technologies to be prioritized in China through 2030. When the government sets a national strategy, the country organizes around it.

Many of the LPs in China’s VC funds are government. Many VCs are focused on specific regions. These regional VCs often make investments into companies that are contingent on those companies moving to their city. Hangzhou is wealthy right now, and so they are investing in BCI companies and coaxing them to move into the area. Valuations for BCI companies go up, because the VC funds want to compete under this five-year plan handed down by the central government.

As the companies come in, the region builds infrastructure. Shanghai, for example, already has an entire floor in a hospital that just implants BCIs into patients. Across the street, construction has begun on a hospital devoted solely to BCIs. There are many non-human primate facilities nearby,so companies can rapidly implant their devices. Not far away, at Fudan University, is one of the world’s largest brain imaging centers for research, with many 3T, 5T and 7T MRI machines. This is all located in a relatively small area.

The landlords who run the business parks also compete to attract companies. They offer sweetheart deals. We visited one neurotech company that gets 10% of their research costs reimbursed by their landlord.

The government doesn’t sit idly after issuing the five-year plan, either. They also allocate capital to support the priorities. At Westlake University, there is an academic group that designs chips for BCIs. They said that the government reimburses two of their main costs:

1. Subscriptions to Cadence, the software that engineers use to design chips. Each seat costs about $10,000 *per month* in the United States, but this is reimbursed in China.

2. Tapeout costs. When the researchers send their designs to TSMC, those costs get paid back to them. This means BCI researchers can move super fast and don’t need to worry as much about raising capital ahead of time.

And then, of course, there are the clinical trials. BCIs can be implanted under existing IIT (or investigator-initiated trial) rules, which enables these companies to move faster than their U.S. counterparts. There are apparently a dozen-plus BCI companies in China now, many of them quite new. STAIRMED and Gestala are explicitly competing with Neuralink and Merge, for example, and seem to be making rapid progress.

Similar rules apply to other biotechnologies. Vertical-integration like this is difficult to match in a capitalist republic.

[Lior Pachter @lpachter]

Arguably the most boring step in genomics is the first one: normalization. Settled science. Scale + log. Move on.

Except that here's been a huge blind spot in the field. And it matters for AIxBio. A 🧵about what I think may be one of the most important papers I've written. 1/

[Ubadah Sabbagh @neubadah]

increasingly seeing people converging on the same templates of thought and calling it expertise. judgment is the thing that's ours (for now), but im seeing too much abdication of our role here. in exchange, we get the enslopification of knowledge work, and the worst of it comes from people who should know better.

[owl @owl_posting]

if you believe in scientific superintelligence in the life-sciences, and you also believe that china ascendency to biotech is worrying, *and* you also believe that the outsourcing of wet-lab work will continue: ‘cloud labs becoming a reality’ is one of the easiest logical conclusions

of course, the exact shape that a cloud lab takes is a bit less predictable. do they go all in on intelligence, and spread to every corner of wet-lab biology? or do they stay focused, building beachheads, establishing trust in it, and then moving onto the next? or something else entirely? there are good arguments for each, and most cloud labs companies are a gamble on a particular shape

the shape that @c_m_ponce has bet on in his company—Tetsuwan Scientific—is incredibly interesting, and one whose theory of change is something that only becomes obvious after long, drawn out conversations with Cristian: fix the translation layer, and you make it easier for *both* agents and humans to interact with the system. bizarrely good aesthetics for a biotech startup too

[Ubadah Sabbagh @neubadah]

many have asked for an extension, because by the time they heard of the sifr prize, final exams and Eid were overlapping with the it. so, we've extended the deadline!

[Ubadah Sabbagh @neubadah]

im awarding $2,500, $1,000, and $500 to the best essays answering the question: what should exist for science and technology in the Arab world, but doesn't?

your essay should describe a specific problem in the region, the innovation it would take to solve it, and how you'd actually start.

https://t.co/EBD1jKCVhA

[Ubadah Sabbagh @neubadah]

@SalahBouchma That’s the plan!

[Ubadah Sabbagh @neubadah]

anyone anywhere is eligible

[Ubadah Sabbagh @neubadah]

@FarzaTV i love the approach you took in this doc, good luck man can't wait to see what you guys build!

[Ubadah Sabbagh @neubadah]

@dr_alphalyrae this!

[Michael 英泉 Eisen @mbeisen]

This response by @arxiv just cements the fact that when faced with embracing or distancing itself from AI, academic science is making a third worse choice: consigning itself to living forever in its wake.

[Ubadah Sabbagh @neubadah]

this just single handed killed my fintech startup (vibe coded locally hosted financial planner)

[ChatGPT @ChatGPTapp]

A preview for Pro users: a new personal finance experience in ChatGPT.

Pro users in the U.S. can securely connect financial accounts, see where their money is going, and ask questions based on the information they choose to connect.

Your full financial picture, now in ChatGPT.

[Ben Southwood @bswud]

Works in Progress publishes regular updates on what is happening in biology. The field is moving forward incredibly quickly, but there is a lot of untrustworthy froth on Twitter, and it’s hard to know where you are.

So it’s not surprising to me that these, by @salonium & @NikoMcCarty are some of the most popular articles we post. They’re so exciting and interesting.

https://t.co/KSCPrRzTPN

[Ubadah Sabbagh @neubadah]

22 countries now, in less than a month.

submissions are still open at https://t.co/s78Sj3zlNV.

anyone anywhere is eligible.

[Ubadah Sabbagh @neubadah]

two weeks into the sifr prize.

describe a problem in the region that requires R&D to solve, and how to build the solution. you could get $2,500. anyone anywhere is eligible.

https://t.co/s78Sj3zlNV

[Ubadah Sabbagh @neubadah]

@RuxandraTeslo @andrewwhite01 Brilliant

[Ubadah Sabbagh @neubadah]

@ashleevance qasar

[Ubadah Sabbagh @neubadah]

@amedhat_ if im not mistaken, openclaw's background memory consolidation system is also called dreaming

[Ubadah Sabbagh @neubadah]

@parmita easy yes