>FASTA_26: "To believe in science"
GPT coming to your brain in the 30s; First GLP-1 pill?; Fix baby formula; Michael Trinh; Timed caffeine pill; HHS abandons mRNA vaccines; Harvard & Valley DAO; Poetic science; Designer fruit
>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
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☣️ BSL5
1/10: Tour of the Brophy lab
In another episode of BSL5, I visited the Brophy Lab in Stanford, where they build genetic engineering tools for plants and bacteria. This video includes a lab tour, as well as an interview with PhD student Vivian Zhong and Postdoc Alexander Borowsky on their work, hyped and underhyped plant synbio, and their perspective on ag biotech as an industry.
Stay tuned for the full release next week!
2/10: GPT coming to your brain in the 30s
The CEOs of OpenAI and Tools for Humanity will cofound Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface company. Nothing else is known apart from the fact that it may be valued at $850 million, still nothing compared to Neuralink’s recent $9B valuation.
To me, it’s no surprise that both Altman and Musk are playing in very similar stages. The human-computer symbiosis was first proposed by Martin Heidegger in The question concerning technology. What a privilege to be the generation that can make crucial design decisions that will literally change what a human is.
3/10: GLP-1 or just a scam?
EV1 is a peptide engineered to mimic the effects of both GLP-1 and GIP (Glucose-dependent Insulinotropic Polypeptide), delivered through a yeast probiotic. 30 capsules come at a $148 USD price. No human trials, no prior relevant research by the founder, no data except for some five-star reviews that really don’t say much…
Obviously, The weight loss pill is no small deal. Any big pharma that has GLP-1 agonists has a pill in the pipeline, and many related startups do too. In April of this year, Lilly’s oral GLP-1, orforglipron, demonstrated efficacy and safety in a successful Phase 3 trial. The small molecule was discovered by Chugai Pharmaceutical and was licensed by Lilly in 2018.
4/10: Fix baby formula
Consumer Reports and Plastic List found arsenic, lead, mercury, plastics, PFAS, pesticides, and other contaminants in more than half of popular baby food brands. Fix the Formula (link above) is partnering with OpenLabel Research and Light Labs to test many popular baby formulas. They’re raising $15k in case you want to support them.
How many “almond mom” brands will we see in the next 3 years that will charge a premium for nothing except that they’re free of plastics and heavy metals? 😂
📻 Biofounders
5/10: Michael Trịnh
When I first interviewed Michael, he was an undergraduate student and researcher at the University of Toronto with a couple of independent projects in his bag. He was just starting BioDojo, which at the time was just a group of less than ~50 young life science nerds from Canada and the US.
Today, Nucleate Dojo offers unique opportunities for biotech undergrads around the world, including sponsored summer houses in San Francisco and Boston. Michael spent a year doing research at the MIT Brain & Cognitive Sciences, supported by Emergent Ventures and New Science foundations, and is currently at McGill University doing Prime editing in iPSCs to generate model organoids that replicate monogenic diseases.
6/10: Timed caffeine pill
“For night-shift workers, early risers, and doers who need to stay focused and reliable. No matter what the clock says.” — Long gone are the days of three thousand alarms and a morning espresso! Today’s optimization society programs an energizing wake-up by taking a slow-release caffeine pill before going to bed.
B·Sync’s pulsatile-release system was engineered with methacrylic copolymer coatings that release less than 25% caffeine in the first 5 hours, then more than 75% within 9 hours. In an in vivo release profile in humans, blood plasma concentration of caffeine reached 5 pM only 4 hours after administration. The platform could be applied to other indications.
7/10: HHS abandons mRNA vaccine research
On August 5, the US Department of Health and Human Services announced the cancellation of mRNA vaccine research worth nearly $500M USD. Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the NIH who coauthored an open letter against COVID lockdowns, wrote that the public lost trust in mRNA vaccines.
Honestly, I don’t blame many of those people. Imagine being a 50-something-year-old who never learned what DNA was and now the government is forcing you to inject something into your body that you can’t see and has definitely caused heart problems in some…
The world needs empathetic bio education. Don’t throw facts while feeling like you’re better because you know something they don’t. Don’t provide book definitions. Meet people where they are: answer their questions about how to live longer, healthier lives, how things work. I’ve always heard the best biotech questions from folks who know nothing about biotech.
8/10: Harvard & Valley DAO
After 8 months of scientific planning, a $10k USD TEA, and negotiations with the tech licensing office, Harvard told ValleyDAO they [don’t understand DeSci and] wouldn’t work with them. All despite the DAO making clear that the projects would be funded through crypto and that they would use KYC/AML procedures.
I just know that Harvard is already in a lot of trouble with the government. While DAOs may be a way out for some researchers, there may be risks involved that none of us quite understand. Personally though, I really want to know when the day will come that crypto funds science done truly outside of traditional institutions.
9/10: Poetic science
Zinc sculptures cast from termite mounds, a bonsai tree that 3D-models how a more-evolved version will look in the future, a liquid-crystal painting that blooms in response to social media trends, and a levitating meteorite.
Agnieszka Kurant’s work is both visually appealing and intellectually compelling. For instance, Air Rights 7 alludes to the real estate practice of selling the vertical space above a property. Maintained with an electromagnetic field, the rock’s balance is as precarious as the prices of property, giving weight to the intangible.
🦕 Poets
10/10: Designer fruit
One of my punkiest biodreams is to create, or at least use, a brain-fruit interface: a brain-computer interface that connects to a fruit design interface that can design and grow any new fruit that you imagine. Theoretically, this would work through a combination of on-the-spot genetic engineering technologies and plant tissue culture techniques that can differentiate plant cells into fruit cells directly.
Before you think this is totally scientific, let me remind you that part of this has already been possible since the 80s or so. Scientists have grown tomatoes, pepper, cotton… all kinds of things in vitro, out of a plant cutting, using phytoregulators instead of growing the whole plant.
In the case of cotton, you can induce fiber growth directly from the ovules using a combination of auxins and gibberillins, which regulate cell elongation in plants. The trick is being able to do that from “plant stem cells” called callus. Companies like GALY, Pomodyne, and California Cultured have used such techniques to grow cotton, tomatoes, and chocolate respectively, out of cells.
While cell-based meat hasn’t scaled or become a real business so far, there is no doubt that plant cell and tissue culture are already a great business, either for the production of scarce secondary metabolites, plant genetic engineering, and in the future, it may become a primary method of growing food too.
