Gabriel Duarte

🇦🇷 | rethinking how education looks like at Volantis. ( | always a bio geek.

[Gabriel Duarte @gabrield_df]

@FrancoE114696 @arq_finance please do @arq_finance

[i²cjak @i2cjak]

update: extremely rich boomer in final years of life wants to shut down economy on the way out, stop all scientific development

[Kenny Workman @kenbwork]

Genentech is the flagship example of an industrial research organization. Their culture of open science and free flowing publication is rooted in a strong contrarian foundation we should all remember.

In the 1980s, secrecy, siloes, zero sum IP fear was far more rampant in biotech than today:

Kary Mullis discovered PCR at Cetus in 1983 (tripping on acid) but it remained unpublished for two years until patents were secured.

Amgen's recombinant EPO, a blockbuster candidate for the enormous anemia market, was filed secretly in 1983, partially published in 1985 and fully described on patent approval in 1987.

Genentech was a startup of scrappy scientists (and a single brother of finance) and dead by default. The lore is riddled with the usual heroics: regular all night cloning sessions sustained with coffee, pizza and lots of beer (they called this "pizza and plasmids"). In competition with global scientific talent, they were the first to clone human insulin with recombinant DNA. They succeeded in 1978 and filed a patent.

What is often glossed over is they then immediately published a detailed description of how they did this in a now legendary paper. Enough information for anyone to copy it. Well before their patent was approved and sabotaging their lead commercializing the tech.

It seems kind of stupid to give every enormous and well-capitalized pharma juggernaut an actual blueprint to cannibalize your product. Sure the founding team achieved eternal scientific fame with this discovery but they could have met the same fate in the capital markets as our friend Kary Mullis: a $10K bonus from Cetus, a nobel prize (very nice) and a later life surfing in sunny La Jolla coping hard on the $300M sale of his PCR patent by Cetus (of which he received not one penny).

The resources, clinical expertise and odds were stacked against Genentech and they just gave up their hand. Why? I think two big reasons.

The first is very B2B SAAS coded: Boyer and Swanson needed to create a market for this new technology or their company would fail. Skepticism, from both Wall Street and the ivory tower, around recombinant cloning as a viable way to treat actual people of disease, was very high.

This is a strange thing to think about with a hard science venture, where success seems purely contingent on fighting nature and making a working drug. But the mechanics of drug development are much more intertwined with normative value and human perception than one would think.

From the obvious (who decides to fund you so you can live and not die) to the less obvious (great scientists need to believe in the technical viability of your mission to join your team) to the 4D chess (convincing regulators to even allow FIH trials and approve an IND before you run out of cash, convincing PIs + hospitals to then enroll their patients in trials and of course selling big pharma on the concept to manufacture + distribute the drug throughout this process)

Publication in a prestigious journal like Nature created a scientific market. They raised $10M in 1979, established their young team as world leaders in arguably the most important biotechnological revolution to date and put their company on the map of every bright-eyed bioengineer hungry to change the world. This brings us to reason number two (the bigger one).

When you think of the dominant technology industries today - semiconductor manufacturing, enterprise software, "AI" - their culture and structure looks very different from the siloed and paranoid biotech sector of the late 1900s. Speed and execution matter more than IP. Tacit knowledge of process and methods cannot be copied without ripping out the mesh of humans that defines the org. A competitor could steal every single blueprint, process instruction, and piece of equipment from TSMC and be hopelessly unable to fab 2nm chips.

Talent and accumulated tacit knowledge is the scarce resource.

Nowhere was this more true than the emerging field of recombinant protein therapies. It ran on a cottage industry of artisanal talent in molecular cloning.

Hand two researchers the same bacterial pellet and one will extract high-quality, high-yield plasmid DNA, while the other gets degraded crap. The same talent might transform cells with 1 ng of plasmid DNA and get 100,000 colonies, while the other gets barely 100. Same DNA, same protocol.

A company could copy a lab’s exact plasmid, bacterial strain, and IPTG induction protocol but still fail to express a functional protein. They don't know to tweak growth temperature, induce at lower OD600, or switch to a different expression host.

You can't put this in a patent. You can't copy this. Boyer somehow saw the writing on the wall. It was a competition for people and a first mover advantage to build a moat of compounding process knowledge.

The smartest people wanted to work with the best scientists. Those scientists were at Genentech, not Merck or Pfizer. After all, they published THE paper that established molecular cloning as a legitimate method in great detail. You have to trust them. They told you exactly how they did it. Those scientists trained the next generation, embedding even more tacit knowledge inside Genentech. This compounded over time, making the expertise impossible to replicate externally.

This flywheel ended up working really, really well.

They expanded their lead by tackling the next hardest problem - human growth hormone - just a year later in 1979. They followed that with two more bangers in the 1980s: recombinant interferons (cancer/antiviral therapy) and tissue plasminogen activator (tPA, a clot-busting drug for heart attacks and strokes), moving recombinant proteins past metabolic hormones into tx proteins with bigger markets. By the late 1980s, they were global leaders in mAB therapy, which would eventually revolutionize oncology and autoimmune disease treatment.

And the culture of open and free publication continues to capture the best talent in the world. I stood in a standing-room only seminar in Boston last Fall where Aviv Regev described the scale and complexity of their emerging research platform.

Aviv herself is a great example of continued talent capture: a world renowned researcher who picked up her lab from MIT to join gRED in 2020. She has attracted top tier machine learning and software engineers to work in tight integration with wet lab data generation at a mind boggling scale.

Genentech is now a juggernaut. One of the "pharmas". But their origin, and DNA, could not be more different from Bayer or AstraZeneca. They bet on innovation, told the world exactly what they were doing without fear and moved quickly to engineer + industrialize technology. Lesson in there.

Check out the OG paper, linked below, about recombinant insulin. What do you notice about the author list? Boyer isn't on there. At Genentech, researchers owned their discoveries.

[Gabriel Duarte @gabrield_df]

@ABC7NY dumbest decision i’ve ever seen

[Gabriel Duarte @gabrield_df]

@gaspihabif cracks!

[Gabriel Duarte @gabrield_df]

@MariosGeorgakis Completely agree! I think the main question is whether the new generation of scientists (myself included) is sufficiently informed about how these methods can validate biological hypotheses.

[Ato AI @heyato_ai]

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Millions of families are trying to help someone they love stay independent while coordinating care across relatives, caregivers, and healthcare providers. We’re building Ato into the coordination layer that brings all of them together.

[Gabriel Duarte @gabrield_df]

THE GOATS

[Ato AI @heyato_ai]

Introducing Ato, your grandparent’s next computer.

Over the past year, more than 2,500 older adults around the globe have used Ato in their daily lives through our beta program, and today we're taking our next step.

Ato helps seniors stay independent on their own terms. It gives families a simple way to stay close and the peace of mind that comes from knowing how they’re doing, without cameras or tracking.

The new Ato lives in the home, becomes part of their routine, and keeps families connected, all through a simple realtime voice interface.

Millions of families are trying to help someone they love stay independent while coordinating care across relatives, caregivers, and healthcare providers. We’re building Ato into the coordination layer that brings all of them together.

[Gabriel Duarte @gabrield_df]

@Matthias__Erb @arjunrajlab yes BUT writing for a paper ≠ transmit a new discovery

[Gabriel Duarte @gabrield_df]

allow me to invite people to work on a Origin repo with me and I'm never touching GitHub again @cursor_ai

[Peter Dedene @dedene]

Me trying to explain the vision to Claude

[Gabriel Duarte @gabrield_df]

When I’m working on a product I’m building and iterating on quickly, I find lessons.md frustrating as a concept. Some of the lessons the agent saves reflect earlier decisions that we later changed, so the file can end up mixing outdated guidance with current thinking.

[Paolo Ricatti @barrani_com]

Ingresos Brutos es el cancer del pais. La primer provincia que lo elimine se lleva a todas las sociedades de servicios automaticamente a su jurisdicción.

[Juan I. Fernandez @juanif17]

📢 LO QUE NO TE ENTERAS EN TV📺

Desde LLA CABA hicimos un pedido de informes sobre el ente VISIT BA para saber cuánto se recauda y en qué se gasta💵

Este ente cobra 1.50 USD a cada extranjero por noche de hospedaje en CABA. Solo en 2023 se estimaron 4,5 millones de USD recaudados💰

👉El PRO SE OPUSO a este pedido de informe en la votacion de hoy…y la izquierda se abstuvo❌😬

Por suerte fue aprobado igual

💡Pero oponerse a un MERO PEDIDO DE INFORME evidencia que no quieren que se sepa que pasa con esa caja🚫😅

[Gabriel Duarte @gabrield_df]

> innovative
> ask your pi to apply

[Claude @claudeai]

Starting today, 10,000 scientists across every field, from math to chemistry to physics and more, can get Claude through our new Claude Team plan for scientists. Standard seats are free, and premium seats with 5x usage limits are $15 per month, an 80% discount, for one year.

Claude is becoming increasingly capable of scientific work, with recent progress on problems from advanced physics calculations to protein design. Alongside that progress, we've been investing in the research community: Claude Science launched in June, and our AI for Science program funds high-impact projects with free credits. Today's expansion builds on both.

Principal investigators (or equivalent) at academic and nonprofit research institutions can sign up, then add the researchers in their group. Over the coming months, we plan to extend the program well beyond the initial 10,000 seats.

Learn more: https://t.co/RTG1JxWi4Q

[Chris @cijjas]

@gabrield_df

[Gabriel Duarte @gabrield_df]

@cijjas Literalmente por lo unico que quiero que me conozcan

[Gabriel Duarte @gabrield_df]

Necesito un gimnasio de escalada BUENO en CABA. Parte mil

[Mati Fernandez @matifer]

Me pareció tan confuso todo el debate sobre la mora en la Argentina, que no me quedó otra que bajarme la totalidad de la base de deudores del Banco Central y me pasé 48hs tratando de entender. Acá lo que encontré: https://t.co/rBLe0uz1zZ

[Fernando Marull @FernandoMarull]

Twitazo sobre Mora.

(La mediana de la mora de Mercado Libre es $116.000; bajisima)