Surprise 1: Anthropic acquired a one-person biotech
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Surprise 2: that person is me
Surprise 3: I’m here to tell you all about it
Yes, this is what you think it is; after 6 yrs of increasingly loose anonymity: the Professor Oak reveal post
…and yes, it has gotten so boring around here that I’m literally doxxing myself to spice up the timeline
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Ok, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cody Tranbarger. I mostly tweet, but occasionally find time to dabble in drug dev & starting/building biotechs. My past lives span the VC, crossover, startup continuum; Prof Oak has been my way of keeping a digital foot in those worlds, despite having my physical feet planted elsewhere.
The past 18 mo, ‘elsewhere’ was Mithril Medicine, a co. I founded to develop bsAbs for LAMA2-CMD & other ECM-related genetic diseases.
Mithril was born out of hands-on building with @MikeNGladstone, @JasonPaulRhodes, @LifeSciVC, & team @atlasventure. Somehow, I made enough half-decent calls along the way (even a broken clock is right twice a day, eh?) to convince them Mithril/I warranted a small seed. While I can hardly rationalize such an outrageously cavalier bet, I’m grateful for it, & I'd partner with Atlas again in a heartbeat.
In typical AV fashion, Mithril’s primordial form was virtual, decentralized, & ultra-lean. This stage tends to be short-lived, but for Mithril, it worked surprisingly well, for surprisingly long, thanks in part to the rapid maturation of the AI tools I used liberally.
Eventually, Mithril became a bit of an experiment itself - to find the upper bound of how far it could scale as a single operator + a bunch of Claude (+ a stellar bench of part-time consultants).
In parallel, I started spending time with @nc_frey, @an1lam, & @CoefficientBio team; and promptly experienced, for the 1st time, AI at the frontier. Soon thereafter, Mithril stopped looking like an experiment, & started looking like a preview of an entirely new operating model.
From that spark came “Pipeline-in-a-Person.” The idea immediately resonated when we shared it here back in April; and it was central to the shared vision that led to Anthropic’s acquisition of Mithril, & my joining the team.
Why join Anthropic? Three reasons.
(1) For Mithril, the programs continue, with more resources & infrastructure behind them, and as much Claude as I can put to work.
(2) For me, the chance to start several more programs, & find out how many one person can actually run in parallel - an almost unprecedented luxury for a curious drug hunter.
(3) For our mission, a path to institutionalize & scale this new way of working, then put it in the hands of all of biopharma, all over the world - which, candidly, I find the most energizing.
Will AI x Bio cure diseases? Unequivocally yes, imo… but not by the route that gets the most airtime. Rather than timeline acceleration & compression, I see orchestration & parallelization as today's low-hanging fruit.
Most drug hunters see a handful of go/no-go calls in a career, & spend entirely too much of the rest trading emails (my inbox can attest).
Give them the bandwidth to run several programs at once, and the time to focus on scientific judgment, and I’m willing to bet they’ll make better calls. And at scale, better calls translate to more drugs, higher hit rates, broader patient impact, & likely, a disease or 10 or 100 cured. I couldn't be more excited to build toward that future @AnthropicAI.
Finally, a heartfelt thank you to BioTwitter/X. The end of anonymity is bittersweet, but if anyone’s earned a proper introduction, you all have.
It’s difficult to overstate how much this app has done for me: a decade of education, plenty of friends, many job opportunities, several mentors, a few investors, even a co-founder (fmr). It was the generosity of this community that inspired me to start posting 6 years ago, after just as many years lurking. I hope I’ve been able to pay it forward, in my own small way.
But, to be clear, Prof Oak isn’t going anywhere. Same beat, same themes, and now, a front-row seat to drug development at the frontier. Stay tuned for dispatches from the trenches; and remember...
Gotta Cure 'Em All
I have started a full time Research Scientist position to work on Gemini Large Scale Pretraining at @GoogleDeepMind! I’m based in London and super excited to catch up with old friends and meet new friends!
software engineers are going to have to tackle a new set of problems to unlock powerful multiagent systems to solve the world's hardest problems - right now is one of the most interesting moments in history to be an engineer. https://t.co/YsQ0xta4KR
AI 时代,年轻人应该怎么办?很简单,几个关键词:
1. Stranford CS336
2. Sebastian Raschka: Build a Reasoning Model
3. Nathan Lambert: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
4. 谭成义三分化
👋🏼 Overdue update: I joined @AnthropicAI, and excited to finally share what my team and I have been building.
Introducing Claude Duet, a new app in research preview where Claude works as your proactive agent. It runs on Opus 5.5, and we built it to be a partner you can trust.
It comes to you with what needs your attention, works across 6,000+ connectors and plugins, keeps going when you step away, and checks with you before it acts.
We built it for professionals and small business owners juggling a lot at work and at home. Early testers are using it to help run their businesses, take on bigger projects at work, and get time back to be more present.
I've been using Claude Duet to build Claude Duet, and it's been the most joyful and meaningful experience of my career.
I’ll be sharing regular updates here on how we’re building it, plus new features and improvements as they ship. Follow along.
Join the waitlist and help us shape the product: https://t.co/ucxIrHrNaa
@natolambert The earlier versions of GLM models should be mentioned:
-GLM130B(2022.8) https://t.co/frFFeQgSPb
-ChatGLM-6B(2023.3) https://t.co/wnCAsHWXLe
I’ve worked with @kevinweil and @manohar_paluri and they are amazing. So great to see them go after a big and important problem to accelerate scientific discovery to find new medicines. I’m excited to play a very small part as an angel investor and help them in their journey.