>FASTA_24
The biofounder who cut open his leg; LuxBio sells glow sticks to NASA; Geltor's new consumer peptides; Keto x schizophrenia study; CRISPR-associated transposases; Open CRISPR-1; Become a God
>FASTA: weekly short reads of the global biotech ecosystem | Papers and patents, acquisitions and bankruptcies, biotech philosophy | Read in under 5 min | Follow on LinkedIn, X, YouTube, and Instagram! | Versión en Español
Pilgrim is proud to sponsor >FASTA! We’re developing the next generation of military medicine to meet the operational demands of modern warfare—moving beyond theory and bringing biotechnology from the benchtop to the battlefield.
1/10: Our sponsor cut open his leg and raised $4.3M
While Palantir and Andruil build defense software and hardware, soldiers still use gauze and die primarily of hemorrhage on the battlefield. Done with Nature papers, dusty patents, and PowerPoint founders, Jake Alder from Pilgrim Labs showed his investors how their rapid wound-healing nanotech works on himself.
Kingsfoil (yes, from The Lord of the Rings) uses electrical currents to accelerate clot formation and guide tissue-regenerating cells to the injury site. This and other products in their pipeline — which include lipid nanoparticles and a biosurveillance system — could get expedited approval through a special process between the DoD and the FDA, and be offered to consumers for medical use in the future.
2/10: Why LuxBio sells glow sticks to NASA
Glow sticks. You’ve seen them at concerts, your aunt’s wedding, and emergency cases (hopefully just in movies). When the US military developed them, they used chemicals that are now illegal. However, still today, 17 out of 20 surveyed glow sticks have been found to contain outlawed chemicals, and in France alone, 2.4 million people have called poison control centers after exposure to glow stick liquid in the past ten years.
Despite our weird quirk of making everything glow, biotechnologists haven’t seen beyond luciferase, which can’t last long enough to see Aunt Mary’s breakdance at 2 am. Hence LuxBio engineered a bioluminescent enzyme to have a slower decay curve, reduced affinity to inhibitors, increased thermostability, and increased production yields. NASA was, indeed, their first customer.
3/10: Geltor is back in the game with consumer peptides
After the widely felt slump in consumer biotech, Geltor has announced that their revenue grew ~75% over the course of their new fundraising round. They have launched a vegan collagen polypeptide in LatAm, signed a collab for their peptide AI design platform, and received the first and only “no questions” letter for their ingestible biotech type 21 collagen (PrimaColl®).
4/10: Prepare for more biotech defense bills
A centralized portal for biological data to feed AIs, a genome catalogue of national park species, new biosecurity measures, and a Cloud Lab Act all sound like something Drew Endy has talked about for years. Well, the NSCEB has now recommended at least $15 billion over the next five years to unleash more private capital into biotech — RELEASE YOUR CREATIVE BIOTECH POWERS is what they say.
5/10: A keto cure to schizophrenia?
Though they’re often the most efficient treatment for schizophrenia, antipsychotics can induce weight gain and poor diet quality. Insulin resistance is significantly higher in schizophrenia, which further affects brain function. Down the line, associated comorbidities can reduce life expectancy by up to 25 years.
A few months ago, I found out about a YouTuber who claims to have cured her schizophrenia by following a keto diet. Now she takes no medication and has no symptoms. I couldn’t find enough studies on that at the time, but now Stanford researchers will conduct a clinical trial to evaluate the effect of ketogenic metabolic therapy on the quality of life in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder. This will include metabolic and proteomic profiling to identify changes in psychiatric, physiologic, and metabolic markers.
6/10: Evolved CRISPR-associated transposases (CasTs)
This one’s a bit overdue, but for those who used to live under a rock, you should know that CRISPR-associated transposases use transposase proteins (duh) to move gene-long donor DNA inside the genome and, that way, treat diseases that involve multiple mutations within the same gene.
They used to have an embarrassing 0.1% insertion efficiency in human cells, but David Liu’s lab developed a phage-assisted continuous evolution (PACE) system that increased the enzyme’s activity in human cells by 200x.
7/10: Profluent's Open CRISPR-1 outperforms baseline
Their model can generate 4.8x the number of protein clusters across CRISPR–Cas families found in nature. Several of the generated gene editors show comparable or improved activity and specificity relative to SpCas9, while being 400 mutations away in sequence. I found it interesting that, in total, only 48.2% of generated proteins were functionally complete (had core Cas9 domains).
Profluent is a spin-out of a Salesforce-funded project to develop an LLM for amino acids. OpenCRISPR-1 is publicly available and free to license for ethical research and commercial use. Their CRISPR-Cas Atlas, the most extensive dataset of CRISPR systems, is also open-source.
8/10: Strand Tx raised $153M
Their Phase 1 clinical trial showed that its mRNA can shrink tumors in cancer patients who had otherwise run out of treatment options. Investors include Regeneron Ventures, Amgen, and Eli Lilly. Jake Becraft, founder and CEO, believes that the biggest barrier to these new and personalized medicines is delivery.
9/10: Josie Zayner’s story
One of my greatest inspirations in biotech, the founder of The ODIN and The Embryo Corporation, told stories about creating her space in this world. From building a musical instrument out of proteins as a biophysics PhD student at UChicago, to leaving NASA, Josie has been empowering and inspiring others to create new, beautiful biology. Some of the concepts she’s been thinking deeply about for years, I’m only beginning to internalize. Like being an amateur god…
10/10: Stop playing God. Become one.
“Playing God” is perhaps the most popular phrase in bioethics. Three decades or so later, we haven’t gone anywhere new. So last night, I felt like playing the Devil instead, haha! — Seriously, let’s start by asking: what is so bad about being a god? What is a god in the first place, when there are thousands of different religions all over the world???
I think the problem is not that we don’t want gods. If you’re somewhat agnostic like me, we have created them, because we want them to exist. The problem is that gods != humans. We don’t want other humans to be gods and have control over us.
When we talk about AI gods (or “Superintelligence™”), we wonder whether they’ll be benevolent or malevolent. But, when it comes to biotech gods, the most popular narrative is not that they will solve all our problems and create a world of abundance, but that they will be tyrant kings.
If this reflects our religious beliefs, then maybe some religions could conceive of humans becoming biotech gods. For instance, I recently learned that Buddhism believes that the potential for enlightenment lies in each one of us…
For now, I believe we should seriously reconsider what it means to be a god. Our world is not nearly as beautiful as it could be, and our imagination is to blame, at least in part. Biotech could indeed make us gods, so it’s time we stop playing and start taking responsibility to create the world(s) we want to see.
