>FASTA_12
The death of AAVs, from supervision to super-vision, ZeonSystems’ universal experiment automation, Helixworks’ 5D data storage, The First Declaration on Human Enhancement
>FASTA by Biopunk is weekly newsletter that sequences the the biotech ecosystem, faster 😉 | From the papers to the patents, from plants to algorithms, the funding news to celebrate and the ch11s to learn from, plus a biotech philosophical meditation as dessert | 5 mini stories, in less than 5 min.
The death of AAVs
How often do you think about the irony that behind every GMO created via AAVs, there’s another GMO that grows the AAVs? This involves a lot of time-consuming and expensive steps of cell expansion, lysing, purification, and quality control that lead to a low yield of 2×1011 vectors/mL vs the 1×1014 needed for treatment… not to mention the inherent payload limitations, and safety issues that have led to unfortunate patient deaths after recent trials.
Major gene therapy companies like Vertex, Takeda, and Pfizer have thus stepped away from AAV therapies in the past year. Though they paid Dyno $50M upfront to design novel AVVs, Roche is also restructuring its gene therapy division after calculating no surplus from the estimated future revenues — Today’s holy grail for plant engineers, mammalian engineers hope becomes yesterday’s problem.
Lipids, on the other hand, can carry large ribonucleoproteins, can be functionalized with ligands or antibodies for tissue specificity, allow for transient cellular delivery, and minimize the risk of insertional oncogenesis. Acuitas, whose tech was used for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine, is developing local LNP delivery tech, including aerosolization to the lung and direct admin to the eye — Will others follow suit?
Stop supervision, bring Super-vision
In color-deficient adult primates, adding an opsin produced trichromatic vision, despite the lack of early developmental process for it. GenSight Biologics has been able to partially restore vision in blind patients with retinitis pigmentosa by administering ChrimsonR (a microbial channelrhodopsins) in combination with with light stimulation via engineered goggles.
Now, while humans only express 3 opsins (light-sensitive proteins) that allow us to see in a ~390–700 nm spectrum, there are thousands of other opsins in nature that also allow for circadian rhythm regulation and thermal detection. Zebra finch and chickens, for instance, grow opsins like SWS1 that allow them to see in a UV range.
If a microbial opsin could restore vision, and SWS1 opsin differs from the human blue cone opsin by only a few amino acids… could we edit our opsins to see in the UV range? How about engineering TRPA1 ion channels, found in pit vipers and pythons, for low-resolution thermal vision? Increase cone density in fovea for greater resolution? Design whole new super-vision proteins using AI?
ZeonSystems’ universal experiment automation
What if running an experiment was as simple as writing it down? Zeon turns lab protocols written in plain English into real-time, reproducible robotic execution. It’s different from systems you’ve seen in the past because it’s not just a pipetting box, it’s arms that can pour liquids, stir reagents, weigh reagents, handle plates, and more, without the hours of pretraining.
The Zeon philosophy is not to automate each individual piece of equipment and force you to use it, but to build tech that adapts to your setup. They do this by using AI for natural language interpretation, computer vision for labware detection and alignment, and robotic arms. This may be the science at the speed of thought we’ve all been waiting for.
Helixworks’ 5D data storage
5D memory crystals are tiny glass crystals that can hold massive amounts of information, last for billions of years without breaking down, and handle temperatures up to 1000°C. Unlike paper or CDs, where you only write on the surface, lasers can write throughout the inside of quartz at different angles using birefringence, an optical property where light is split into two rays when passing through certain anisotropic materials like crystals.
Helix wants to store data like DNA and personalized medical data in these crystals for posterity. They claim to have done that with the genome of Professor Peter Kazansky, inventor of this technology and author of the patent that describes the method for fabricating nanostructured optical elements. Through Project Silica, Microsoft Research has been working on similar technology.
Founded in 2013, the company had been focusing on developing automated enzymatic DNA synthesis for synthetic biology and gene editing applications, later on for DNA data storage. In fact, they once stored data about a video game into DNA which was added to an Energy Drink for marketing purposes. Today it’s unclear whether Helixworks is a data storage company, a DNA synthesis company, or both.
If you ask me, I understand crystal is not as prone to modifications and can stand more extreme temperatures, but I still find it weird to store genomes in non-biological materials knowing that DNA can actually store more petabytes of information per gram compared to crystals (215 petabytes/g vs 360 terabytes/12-cm disc).
The First Declaration on Human Enhancement
In light of the Enhanced Games — a privately funded competition in which athletes are allowed to use FDA-approved performance-enhancing substances — , the 4-page document outlines concepts like right of bodily sovereignty, the duty of health, and respect of national laws, while encouraging disclosure of the enhancement types and effects, efforts from the organizers to secure equal access to enhancement, and to keep respect and fairness between competitors.
The event is funded by personalities like Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan, and Donald Trump Jr, and scientists like George Church are part of their scientific advisory board. Unlike the Olympics, all athletes will receive compensation; those who break current world records will receive a $250k bonus, and a $1M bonus for breaking the 50m freestyle swimming and 100m sprint world record.
We, the pioneers of human enhancement, in order to unlock the full potential of human ability, promote fairness and opportunity, protect the right of individuals to become extraordinary, extend healthy human lifespans, and secure the benefits of science, innovation and freedom for ourselves and future generations, do now proclaim this First Declaration on Human Enhancement.
The ethos seems to live in communion with the initial ideals of Transhumanism proposed 75 years ago by Julian Huxley in “New Bottles for new Wine” which advocates for an update of ethical, religious, and political frameworks (the bottles) that can contain modern science (the wine). Huxley wrote that eugenics would soon be seen as “not only an urgent but an inspiring task, and its obstruction as immoral”.
Most journalists and ethicists seem to be stuck in the “should we” — Honey, when transhumanists are asking you “why shouldn’t we?”, and in fact, “who’s gonna stop us”, you need to upgrade your game to something more like “how can we make this work for all of us”. Open the conversation.
