Transon Nguyen

CEO & Co-Founder @eigentx. Previously VP Eng + Head of Lab Automation @notablelabs. Bioengineer, foodie, pianist, photographer, gamer.

[Eigen Therapeutics @EigenTx]

📅 Join us at #AACR25 on Sun, Apr 27, 2-5 PM, Section 16, Board 5 (Poster #338) for an in-depth look at how our priming platform expands the patient population & improves efficacy of ADCs and RLTs via selective antigen upregulation to tackle heterogeneity! https://t.co/nDzTyuMzkj

[Transon Nguyen @transonn]

Spotify: https://t.co/uHKEWR99NA
Apple Podcasts (audio only): https://t.co/8LvLhcqTKS
YouTube: https://t.co/rLH7M7tmME

[Transon Nguyen @transonn]

Had a great conversation with @nabilwrites on his podcast, Discovery Engines! We talked about Eigen's priming therapies that expand the number of patients who can benefit from ADCs and radiopharmaceuticals, and lots of other great topics in this 1-hour podcast.

Links below👇

[Nabil Laoudji @nabilwrites]

I love this insight from @transonn, CEO of @EigenTx , a Bay Area biotech startup leveraging lab automation and AI to accelerate the development of cancer priming therapies.

In my lab tour and conversation with Transon, we explored:
+ How Eigen designed their lab for speed and flexibility
+ Eigen’s custom-built LIMS and automated workflow
+ Why priming is crucial for ADC and radioligand cancer therapies
+ Why empathy is so critical to their company culture
+ The value of emerging AI foundation models

If you’re curious about how cutting-edge #biotech startups are really using #AI and #labautomation, check out the full episode. Link in thread.

[Vibe Bio @VibeBio]

This #RareDiseaseWeek, we’re proud to celebrate our friends at @eigenTx + their work revolutionizing #cancertreatments. Their innovative platform is enhancing targeted therapies, offering new hope for rare disease patients. Learn about their work here:
https://t.co/TVAhRtFZ9u

[Transon Nguyen @transonn]

Welp, it's quite a coincidence that if you buy something from the Toronto airport newsstand (named "Relay"), the transaction shows up on your credit card as "TOR RELAY".

[Transon Nguyen @transonn]

This was my first time trying this and I can now confirm: traveling with external monitors is a certified game changer.

[Transon Nguyen @transonn]

For the last year I've been using a homemade bot with the ability to run shell commands in sequence (yes, footgun, but it's actually awesome).

Recently switched LLMs and I'm amazed to see it defy me! The bot didn't listen to my (hacky) instructions and made a PR, the right way.

[Transon Nguyen @transonn]

@Kamran_Allele @dr_alphalyrae @tangming2005 @EigenTx What worked for us was setting the example that we, as a company, should consider data at the _onset_ of most major decisions.

Starting Eigen -> what's the data model of a priming therapy company?
Developing a new assay -> how should results be structured in the data lake?
etc.

[Transon Nguyen @transonn]

@Kamran_Allele @dr_alphalyrae @tangming2005 @EigenTx Some of the tools we use:
-S3 (data lake)
-Airflow (data pipeline orchestration)
-Green Button Go (robotic workcell scheduling)
-Homemade LIMS to tie it all together

But what's more important than tool choice is culture! Whether scientist or engineer, everyone thinks about data.

[Transon Nguyen @transonn]

Had a fantastic time chatting with @bradloncar yesterday during the AI x Bio Summit at the iconic @NYSE! It's been inspiring to see many great minds in biotech come together for one day.

[BiotechTV @BiotechTV]

AI x Bio Summit: Co-Founder @transonn describes how AI is enabling @EigenTx to become a discovery engine for priming therapies.

Full video: https://t.co/vaOeN5u2M2

[Alex Konrad @alexrkonrad]

News: Max Altman has launched a VC firm, Saga Ventures, with ex-Flexport exec Ben Braverman and 2x founder Thomson Nguyen.

Altman, the third bro with Sam and Jack, tells @Forbes he wants to back startups building for "every American," not other techies.

https://t.co/2jJJGy5unr

[Thomson Nguyen @itsthomson]

Hello World! Just shipped @Saga_Ventures with @maxaltman and @braveben--excited to be working with these two (and thousands of founders) for a long, long time to come.

[Transon Nguyen @transonn]

Come check out our #AACR2024 poster!

[Eigen Therapeutics @EigenTx]

📅 Join us at #AACR2024 on April 9, 9:00 AM - 12:30 PM, Poster Section 42, Board #14 (Abstract #5092) for an in-depth look at how our priming platform expands the therapeutic window of antigen-directed therapies (ADCs, RLTs) through antigen modulation! https://t.co/9cqLaEyW46

[Transon Nguyen @transonn]

JPM must be setting some kind of record for lanyards issued per capita.

[Transon Nguyen @transonn]

We're at #BIO2023 which can be a pretty rapid-fire meeting-heavy conference; it's handy to have a notebook to jot down thoughts during a meeting.

But even your notebook can be a great chance to stand out! Behold, our first piece of eigenswag at @EigenTx:

[Transon Nguyen @transonn]

@whale I like to change it up by weather. Burberry London is my all time fave for winter/cold days. Terre d'Hermes for warm, even hot days. Right now I jump between Creed Himalaya, Viktor & Rolf Spicebomb, and Tauer L'air Du Desert Marocain.

[Transon Nguyen @transonn]

Weekend #2 hacking on this: eigenbot now has an intent classification agent (on GPT-4) to figure out what to do with a message: send to GPT-3.5 to chat, generate a GraphQL query to our LIMS on the fly for internal questions, etc. It's a natural language interface for everything!

[Transon Nguyen @transonn]

My weekend project: a Slack bot built on GPT-3.5, with some context on our company. I'm sure there's cool work being done with generative AI for drug discovery, but I think there's a quicker tractable win in improving our operational efficiency with it. Let's see where this goes!

[Transon Nguyen @transonn]

...and of course, the bot was built with the help of GPT-4. I think GPT-4 literally 2x'ed my development speed for this thing.

[Transon Nguyen @transonn]

My weekend project: a Slack bot built on GPT-3.5, with some context on our company. I'm sure there's cool work being done with generative AI for drug discovery, but I think there's a quicker tractable win in improving our operational efficiency with it. Let's see where this goes!

[Transon Nguyen @transonn]

...and with that, time to close up shop for today. Our UPS has about 16 hours of run time to keep the incubators happy at 37°C + 5% CO2, which is more than enough time to come in tomorrow morning and restart the gas generator if this outage continues. Science doesn't wait.

[Transon Nguyen @transonn]

Biotech startup scrappiness! High winds just caused a power outage in our area of Redwood City, but the lab must go on. Turn on our hotspot, get out the electric lanterns, connect critical equipment (+ a subset of robots) to our gas generator, and carry on.

[Transon Nguyen @transonn]

7 hours into the outage: refilled generator, put it under a makeshift tarp because wind + rain is picking up, office is running on Li-ion battery packs. And we finished our high-throughput screens!! 16M single-cell data points generated, during an outage.