Sonia Setayesh

Driven by biotech innovation | Partner @CivilizationVC | Cancer biology/Immunology PhD @USC | 📍LA/SF |

[Sundar Pichai @sundarpichai]

No matter how you spell it, 250 years of American innovation, ingenuity & curiosity is something to celebrate. Have a happy & safe 4th of July!

[Ran Blekhman @blekhman]

Claude Science is incredible. I gave it some sequencing data, and in 8 hours it did a full analysis, generated figures, wrote a paper, submitted it for publication, got rejected, revised and resubmitted, got rejected again, it is now applying for positions in industry

[Alex Rives @alexrives]

Together with UC Berkeley we are announcing the laser phase plate - a breakthrough in atomic resolution imaging. This is the brightest continuous wave laser in the world, 100 million times the intensity of the surface of the sun.

Phase contrast plays an important role in microscopy, but it was thought close to impossible for electron microscopy, where it would require interfering with an electron beam. Holger Mueller and Robert Glaeser proposed exactly this using a standing wave laser. It has taken over 15 years to make this a reality. Biohub partnered with UC Berkeley and Mueller to support this work and to engineer and build the technology.

Contrast has been the critical barrier to achieving atomic resolution imaging of the cell. In cryo-electron tomography, a cellular imaging technology that uses electron microscopy, the low contrast makes it impossible to resolve anything but the largest proteins within their cellular context. The laser phase plate removes that barrier.

With advances in AI this breakthrough in contrast will start to open up a new frontier in structural biology, that will allow us to see the molecular machines of the cell, and how they assemble into far more complex and dynamic systems, and understand how they work.

[Nima Alidoust @nalidoust]

Today we release Rhaister, an elegant statistical model that predicts drug phenotypes in new contexts w/ accuracies comparable to experimental assays.

And dropping Emerald Bay, a 2M cell dataset measuring long time-course phenotypes across 1000s of drug-cell line interactions.

[Xin Eric Wang @xwang_lk]

If you really think about it, despite being mocked as “ClosedAI,” OpenAI has contributed enormously to the field: GPT, GPT-2, GPT-3, CLIP, the ChatGPT paper, the GPT-4 Technical Report, the Sora technical blog, and even open-sourced Codex.

Anthropic, meanwhile, has contributed far less to the public research ecosystem while increasingly promoting fear-based narratives and restricting access through heavy gatekeeping.

The world I least want to live in is one where the future of AI is controlled by companies that prioritize secrecy, gated access, and centralized control over openness, reproducibility, and scientific progress.

[SemiAnalysis @SemiAnalysis_]

BREAKING NEWS: Anthropic's latest model will NOT help you if it thinks your ML research/ML engineering is interesting, and/or will secretly degrade its IQ so that the average engineer won't notice. We are already seeing Anthropic's latest model's moderation filters our GPU inference research and programming 😭

[Sonia Setayesh @soniasethh]

Better drugs won’t just come from better screening, they need better starting biology. That’s why our portco Infinimmune is building new Abs built on real human immunology.

Congrats to the team on the new partnership with Merck!

[BiotechTV @BiotechTV]

𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐍𝐞𝐰𝐬: @infinimmune is announcing today that Merck has struck a collaboration to use Infinimmune's Anthrobody discovery platform and GLIMPSE antibody language model to discover novel antibody therapies. The deal is worth up to $838M.

[Ali Khademhosseini @khademh]

Iranian students are some of the most incredible. US should bring them in and further improve its innovation ecosystem. Many top entrepreneurs and academics are Iranian heritage.

[Sonia Setayesh @soniasethh]

@nalidoust Amen!

[Shahram Seyedin-Noor @ShahramSN]

Over 1,000,000 people worldwide rallied today in solidarity with #Iranian protestors and the tens of thousands massacred by the clerical regime in January (and before). 30K+ are now in prison, facing torture.

The murderous mullahs in Iran have seen their last days, and whatever calamity befalls them next has been a long time coming.

People around the world are demanding #FreedomForIran.

I have seen multiple interviews by @PahlaviReza and he has come forward as a credible, popular and indispensable leader for the transition to #democracy.

We hope that transition comes and elections follow.

All this depends 100% on America keeping its word to Iranians and providing the force required to topple the Islamic dictatorship for good. This benefits all of us.

#IranRevolution2026

https://t.co/HOQPz7iAIG

[Pejman Nozad @pejmannozad]

Every life taken is a family shattered, a community broken, and a future stolen.

To the people of Iran: you are not alone.
I see you. I hear you. I stand with you!

Killing civilians is not “security.” It is violence. It is oppression. It is unacceptable.

The people of Iran deserve life, freedom, and dignity. They deserve to speak, to protest, to exist—without fear.

I stand with the Iranian people! #PeopleOfIran

[Sonia Setayesh @soniasethh]

@nalidoust Amen! Happy birthday!

[ILIA HASHEMI @IliaHashemicom]

Don't stop talking about Iran.

Don't stop talking about Iran.

Don't stop talking about Iran.

Don't stop talking about Iran.

Don't stop talking about Iran.

Don't stop talking about Iran.

Don't stop talking about Iran.

Don't stop talking about Iran.

#IranMassacre

[Jeff Huber 🇺🇸 @jhuber]

فراموش نکنید. متحد بمانید.

Don’t forget. Stay united.

#azadi ❤️🤍💚

[kooshiar @kooshiar]

3,400 Iranians in tech call for the end of the Islamic regime, urge urgent US and free world support for protesters, and endorse Reza Pahlavi as a unifying transition leader.

Signed by founders, engineers, investors, and scientists from Google, Meta, Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, Amazon, Microsoft, MIT, and Harvard.

[Fared Al Mahlool | فريد المحلول @FARED_ALHOR]

Don’t stop talking about Iran.
Don’t stop talking about Iran.
Don’t stop talking about Iran.
Don’t stop talking about Iran.
Don’t stop talking about Iran.
Don’t stop talking about Iran.

[Robert Nelsen @rtnarch]

Go Iranian people. Seize the day.

[Sonia Setayesh @soniasethh]

@ShahramSN Praying for this! 🙏🏻

[Shahram Seyedin-Noor @ShahramSN]

We are days and hours away from a sea change in #Iran as the protestors and their bravery overwhelm a corrupt regime. #IranProtests2026

It's heartening to see so many leaders from different sectors and walks of life unite behind this change.

Looks like Nowruz 2026 will be a free one, we hope. 🙏

@PahlaviReza @jhuber @wolfejosh + many others...

[Ali Karimi🇮🇷 @alikarimi_ak8]

شرافت را نبايد به دست آورد،
آن را فقط نبايد از دست داد.✌🏼

#شرافت
#همکاری_ملی
#اتحاد_رمز_پیروزی