Excited to introduce @Novogaia_bio! From having worked on the origins of life to DNA origami, one pattern kept emerging: evolution designs molecules better than we do.
A thread on why learning from evolution’s designs will unlock the next generation of drugs. 🧵
https://t.co/mVVlfyU3hn
Every non-biotech person I describe Verve to is floored. They can't believe this is a future we get to live in - permanent solution for high cholesterol and strokes - even after I tell them it means editing their genes.
At the same time more than 90% of the biotech VCs I've talked to are bearish on exactly this direction.
"Why cure a disease if you can do monthly injections"
"Insurance would never cover cures"
I am excited for those people to not make any money when they are proven wrong. Its striking that no one sees that cures have been out of vogue for very silly reasons - we equated one-and-done to viral vectors, rare disease TAMs, and rare disease prices. None of those are relevant assumptions, and Lilly has multiple bets in this space to prove everyone wrong.
Notes on my trip to Shanghai. On how China has temufied all of biotech. Investigator-initiated trials. And why we are choosing to run trials there.
Link in comms
Hello, Moon. It’s great to be back.
Here’s a taste of what the Artemis II astronauts photographed during their flight around the Moon. Check out more photos from the mission: https://t.co/rzM1P0QbOl
Patterns everywhere in biology. The space between your cells are stuffed with glycoproteins, like heparans, that have floppy sugar molecules attached to them encoding different types of information. Entire body of literature called the 'sugar code' that classify these patterns + describe how they do things like guide neuron axons or cell fate commitment.
I am excited to announce what I’ve been working on for the past 2 years. General Control is a mandate to develop programmable therapies that make durable, reversible adjustments to gene expression - epigenetically activating or silencing multiple targets at once. In the past 16 months, we:
- Achieved a technical leap in epigenetic editing by engineering an editor library that outperforms leading published systems on potency and durability
- Launched a multi-target partnership with Novo Nordisk
- Generated animal data for 3 different programs and developed a lead we are now ready to translate to the clinic
- Raised 5.5M pre-seed from @age1vc@fiftyyears@tmrohan@mollyfmielke and others
Agents are finally starting to work in biology.
We’ve partnered with Anthropic and major biotech vendors - Vizgen, AtlasXOmics, Takara, 10x Genomics - to build a tool that allows scientists to steer their own analysis with natural language. Raw spatial data to publication quality figures.
Our team believes this will soon be the standard way biologists interact with data.
Spatial biology agents look a bit different from coding products:
- tailored to the molecular details of each kit type
- run in sandboxes on very large machines
- orchestrate data infra, eg. bioinformatics workflows, with tool calls
- build graphical analysis notebooks to communicate results
Detailed breakdown of engineering decisions, product philosophy and concrete flows follows:
Like space, nature's chemistry remains deeply unexplored.
Tess is searching fungal chemistry space for useful medicines.
Both Penicillin and LSD came from fungi (and were accidental discoveries)!
Think of what may happen when we search with purpose.
8/ Gaia-01 was built by a small, mission-driven team of computational biologists and ML engineers from @imperialcollege, @ucl, @tudelft, and @ETH, backed by veterans in natural-product drug discovery.
Excited to introduce @Novogaia_bio! From having worked on the origins of life to DNA origami, one pattern kept emerging: evolution designs molecules better than we do.
A thread on why learning from evolution’s designs will unlock the next generation of drugs. 🧵
https://t.co/mVVlfyU3hn
7/ Next, we’re bringing Gaia-01 into the wet lab to screen small molecules from fungi against selected autoimmune drug targets. We’re opening early access for academic and research partners to expand its applications. Read more here: https://t.co/N1U9YdGQ1Y