Excited to deliver the next CCB Seminar at
@harvardmed
.
Looking forward to sharing our ongoing work in
@marinkazitnik
's lab on multimodal deep learning for drug repurposing and precision medicine.
🗓️ Date: Monday, October 30th
🕒 Time: 3PM ET
📍Location:
@HMSCountway
or Zoom
Some have speculated that
@OpenAI
's Sora was trained on
@UnrealEngine
5.
New work uses UE5 to render CryoET datasets with millions of molecules in complex biological scenes:
What if we could put 2 + 2 together, and finetune Sora for biology viz?
Video and images are time and labor intensive to produce.
When Sora was announced by
@OpenAI
, some of my favorite prompting requests – whether joking or not – were to visualize biological phenomena or objects like cells and proteins. 4/9
In a
@ScienceMagazine
editorial, David Baker
@UWproteindesign
and
@geochurch
propose encrypted global screening and tracking of all synthesized DNA sequences. 🧬
In an emergency, a “selective revelation” policy would allow tracing design history. 🚨
1/3
Grateful and excited to share that I have been named a 2024 Barry Goldwater Scholar.
I have many to thank for this honor, starting with my mentors
@marinkazitnik
,
@geochurch
,
@jenny_m_tam
, and
@sdas617
. 1/4
Excited to share that I’ve been selected as a 2023 Time Fellow. ⏳
I’m grateful for the support of
@time_initiative
(led by
@c_hudpaz
) and
@AFARorg
. Towards a world free of age-related disease! 1/3
🚀 Introducing our 2023 Time Fellows! These trailblazers are gearing up to redefine the future of aging research. Exciting times ahead as they embark on this transformative journey! Check out the faces behind the brilliance. 🌟
#TimeInitiative
#aging
#agingbiology
Exciting talk by
@yusufroohani
at the Stanford Graph Learning Workshop on universal cell embeddings learned from
@cziscience
CELLxGENE single-cell data:
- 🖥️ 500+ datasets,
- 🧫 45M cells, and
- 🔬 682 cell types
projected into one single embedding space. 1/2
Join us for the 3rd Stanford Graph Learning Workshop.
Live stream is starting in less than 12 hours -- Tuesday Oct 24 at 9am PST.
📢 Program:
Live stream at:
Biology is an “engineering discipline waiting to be unlocked.” 🗝️
–
@srikosuri
@OctantBio
is a legendary choice to kickstart the S³ five-episode biology blackout month. 1/5
What does synthetic biology, chemistry, robotics, and AI have in common?
They're all being used by
@OctantBio
to discover new drugs for previously untreatable diseases.
Episode 15 of S³ dives deep into the new and cutting edge world of drug discovery.
Tour-de-force keynote from
@reshmapshetty
, co-founder of
@Ginkgo
, on automation and AI to engineer biology.
Reshma quotes
@nvidia
’s Jensen Huang, “Biology has the opportunity to be engineering not science.”
Thank you,
@reshmapshetty
, for sharing your vision of the future. 👇🏽
I’ve been eagerly awaiting the first foundation model to fulfill the central dogma: a language model for DNA, RNA, and proteins. 🧬
Thanks to
@pdhsu
@BrianHie
and team at
@arcinstitute
, it’s finally here. Upon first read of this paper, Evo looks really exciting and impactful.
Is DNA all you need?
In new work, we report Evo, a genomic foundation model that learns across the fundamental languages of biology: DNA, RNA, and proteins. Evo is capable of both prediction tasks and generative design, from molecular to whole genome scale.
This is one of those papers that makes you marvel at the human brain.
“This connectome describes a piece of human brain tissue the size of half a grain of rice that nonetheless requires 1.4 petabytes (1.4 million gigabytes) to encode...” 1/2
This year is the 10th anniversary of the Google Research’s Connectomics team! In celebration, today with
@MCB_Harvard
we’re publishing a 1.4 petabyte human brain connectome with 57k cells and 150M synapses in
@ScienceMagazine
→ &
Full house, and then some, for
@james_y_zou
’s talk at
@HarvardDBMI
today on “Biomedicine in the age of generative AI,” hosted by
@zakkohane
.
If the turnout and enthusiasm is any indication, this is exciting research at the frontier of generative AI. 1/4
Our latest paper is out now in
@jmirpub
: .
Together with my co-first author
@ColinMagdamo
and our incredible team at
@MassGenBrigham
, we developed a semi-automated NLP-powered annotation tool (NAT) to facilitate phenotyping of cognitive status. 🧵 1/15
One marvelous week into statistical mechanics, here's a tweet of a photo of a tweet of an apt photo (courtesy of the LS50 TFs and
@quantian1
). The next line of Goodstein's introduction reads, "Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously."
The only thing better than the plant-based food 🌱 (ft. delicious “chicken” nuggets from
@RebellyousFoods
) at the
@fiftyyears
summer party last night was the incredible company and conversation. 1/10
New
#TranslationPodcast
episode out now! I chat with
@jykishi
, former Technology Development Fellow at
@wyssinstitute
, about her new
@naturemethods
paper on Light-seq, a breakthrough spatial sequencing method that’s both accessible and precise.
🎙️: 1/14
Tour of the new
@wyssinstitute
space at 201 Brookline Ave, T-7 days until the move!
Excited to work in this incredible building with
@geochurch
@jenny_m_tam
and team. 1/2
Kickstarted the new year by diving deep into the mechanics of impact-driven biotechnology entrepreneurship with
@fiftyyears
. Excited to continue learning how great founders leverage science to solve critical global challenges, and grateful to be a part of this team!
I'm excited to share our latest work: . Together with my co-first author, Clara Muñoz Castro, we developed a novel protocol of multiplex IHC on human postmortem
#brains
followed by
#deeplearning
image analysis to study glial reactions in
#Alzheimers
. 1/6
“I'm going to say something provocative... interpretability is hopeless.
There's no reason that something like a signaling pathway, with millions of interacting components, should be comprehensible to our human neural architecture.”
–
@MoAlQuraishi
at
@gembioworkshop
1/n
Congratulations Time Fellowship Grant Awardees for pioneering groundbreaking projects in aging biology! They’re investigating the aging brain, long-lived bats, and leveraging AI for longevity medicine. See all 12 grant winners here.
#AgingBiology
#aging
Today was
@HarvardDBMI
’s 5th Annual Science Day, hosted at
@Merck
.
What a day. Incredible convergence of groundbreaking biomedical research and tight-knit scientific community.
@AdaFang_
and I from
@marinkazitnik
’s lab were poster neighbors! 1/2
If you haven’t met
@ayushnoori
you need to!! One of the most kindest & smartest people I know (also very humble haha), so glad he’s part of the
@NucleateDojo
team leading partnerships!
Shoutout to
@ATrotmanGrant
for introducing him to the dojo team!
Thank you to those who attended today, both in-person and virtually. We had > 55 attendees, the most widely attended CCB Seminar thus far.
Very grateful for the support and feedback of the community. 🙏🏽 1/3
Excited to deliver the next CCB Seminar at
@harvardmed
.
Looking forward to sharing our ongoing work in
@marinkazitnik
's lab on multimodal deep learning for drug repurposing and precision medicine.
🗓️ Date: Monday, October 30th
🕒 Time: 3PM ET
📍Location:
@HMSCountway
or Zoom
Tour de force from
@Emily_Alsentzer
at
@HarvardDBMI
, who asks, “Can we leverage medical domain knowledge to produce more generalizable and scalable ML for healthcare?”
I’m very excited about these research questions and Emily’s work to help answer them. 🙌🏽 1/2
Huge congratulations to
@benjamin0chang
for a very well-deserved Rhodes Scholarship. 🎊
It’s been a true joy to launch
@harvardopenbio
with Ben, travel together to conferences like
@SynBioBeta
, and make new friends similarly passionate about biology
@NucleateDojo
. 1/2
A year ago or so,
@KKajderowicz
organized this great ML/bio mentor mentee matching program, and today I learned that my great mentee
@benjamin0chang
was elected as a Rhodes Scholar. Super cool!
New Translation episode ft.
@LindaBGoodman
, co-founder and CTO at
@faunabio
, out now!
Linda and I discuss the
@ZoonomiaProject
and her efforts to derive insights from extreme mammalian adaptations that may improve healthcare for humans.
Learn more below! 👇🏽 1/14
On
@majoduran__
’s recommendation,
@ATrotmanGrant
and I tried El Salvadoran pupusas today and were treated to a live mariachi performance. Cross-cultural exchange with friends is one of my favorite aspects of living in a vibrant, diverse city like
#SanFrancisco
.
Kicking off the
@harvardopenbio
Future of Biology Conference with a keynote from
@geochurch
. 🧬
Thanks to all the in-person attendees and virtual registrants for an incredible turnout! Learn more about our conference at:
Recently tested out AlphaFold on
@LatchBio
's platform. Verdict: streamlined, accessible UI with great in-built PDB visualization. Kudos to
@AlfredoAndere
and team!
Alphafold predicts a protein's 3D structure from its amino acid sequence.
Latch () now allows any scientist to run Alphafold with just a few clicks and view the 3D output right within the platform.
Incredible bio community dinner by
@pillar_vc
and
@DnaDeviants
tonight in Kendall Square!
Fitting conclusion to the summer and a celebration of the formidable life sciences ecosystem across Boston and Cambridge. 1/2
We had an amazing time at the
@DnaDeviants
x
@pillar_vc
event tonight!
Many thanks to the wonderful folks at
@pillar_vc
who put this together and huge thank you to everyone who came today to mingle and learn about founder led bio! 🧬
Empowering Biomedical Discovery with AI Agents 🤖
Long-standing ambition for biomedical AI is the development of AI systems that can make major scientific discoveries with the potential to be worthy of a Nobel Prize—fulfilling the Nobel Turing Challenge
George speaking on gene and cell therapy approaches for large genetic payload delivery at the
@harvardopenbio
Future of Biology Conference.
“This is really not that far off!”
–
@geochurch
Incredible Day 1 of the
@NucleateHQ
Summit! Enjoyed finally meeting members of Nucleate’s global community in person and seeing 3D versions of 2D Zoom faces. 😁
Can’t wait for Day 2 at the
@RoyaleBoston
tomorrow!
Love working out of the new
@wyssinstitute
space at 201 Brookline.
Incredible concentration of life sciences talent who we share the building with (including, this week,
@AlfredoAndere
)!
Thanks
@ylecun
for answering our questions on open source, AI regulation, biologically-inspired architectures, and biosecurity in the age of AI at
@iclr_conf
.
Excited to share our new Translation episode ft.
@LatchBio
, which I co-hosted with
@ATrotmanGrant
.
Enjoyed chatting with the brilliant Latch team
@AlfredoAndere
@kenbwork
@kylegiff
, who are working to bridge the divide between bioinformatics and biologists. 1/5
Excited to share the final version of {metapaths}, the first
#RStats
software package to implement meta-paths and perform meta-path-based similarity search in heterogeneous KGs.
Out now in Bioinformatics:
Learn more below! 👇🏽 1/12
Highlight from last week: on Wednesday night, we co-hosted Brains & Bites with
@E11BIO
at
@fiftyyears
HQ, a community event to bring together scientists, entrepreneurs, and investors in the Bay Area passionate about neuroscience and neurotechnology. 1/6
Fantastic to catch up with
@_e_d_v_
. Blown away by the quality of his science, pace of his progress, and the dedication with which he pursues his mission.
Headed back to Cambridge – until next time, SF!
I earnestly hope that this breakthrough is the harbinger of FDA-approved healthspan extension drugs.
What an achievement, for
@celinehalioua
, for
@loyalfordogs
, and for the longevity field at large. 🐶
Towards a future of healthy aging and more time with our loved ones.
1 - Loyal has earned what we believe is the FDA’s first-ever formal acceptance that a drug can be developed + approved for lifespan extension
2 - We have 'technical section complete' AKA the 'does it work' data for LOY-001 - our large dog lifespan extension drug - is done
Commemorating Valentine’s Day with my
#oxytocin
socks from
@fiftyyears
! Elevated plasma oxytocin levels have been reported in romantic couples, and the neurotransmitter is involved in pair bonding and social selectivity.
Alec is a busy person. He could have used his standard
@AsimovBio
deck.
Instead, he prepped a presentation customized for the students in the
@NucleateDojo
x
@harvardopenbio
DojoExplore program.
Thank you,
@alectricity
, for your genuine commitment to teaching and mentorship! 🙏🏽
Huge thank you to
@alectricity
for joining us this week to kick off our Fall 2023 DojoExplore cohort at
@harvardopenbio
! It's going to be an incredible 6 weeks for our student teams 🦠🧬💻
Very soon, biological data will fly by all 120 zettabytes of the internet's data.
What software will biology use for all of it?
Enter
@LatchBio
for episode 17 of S³
So excited for this new
@KempnerInst
seminar series on “all algorithmic + technological questions arising in the quest for efficient ML at scale.”
Organized by the inimitable
@schwarzjn_
and with a ⭐️-studded speaker line-up:
-
@sarahookr
(
@CohereForAI
)
...more speakers in 🧵
Inspiring day celebrating cutting-edge advances in translational science across bioinspired therapeutics, diagnostics, biomaterials, cell engineering, and other domains of synthetic biology at the
@wyssinstitute
#WyssRetreat22
. 1/2
This morning, I took a red-eye flight from Boston to
@Stanford
for
@hackwithtrees
2024.
Between the time the flight took off and the time we landed, the below happened. 🤯
Had much to catch up on once I turned my phone off airplane mode…
New Translation episode ft.
@dbgoodman
out now! Dan shares the story behind his paper, "Pooled screening of CAR T cells identifies diverse immune signaling domains for next-generation immunotherapies," published today in
@ScienceTM
.
Read on to learn more! 👇🏽 1/15
SO INCREDIBLY PROUD to share 2 HUGE updates:
1) The first baby was born using
@OrchidInc
technology — and he’s super cute 🥰
2) I tested my own embryos with Orchid — we got SO much information & l feel confident now 🚀
This is the future of how babies will be born!
Calling all Boston biocomputing folks! Hang and/or hack with the
@LatchBio
team (plus
@NucleateHQ
and
@bitsinbio
) next week.
If you’re a biologist who likes software, snacks, and swag, these are the events for you. RSVP below!👇🏽
Two Boston events coming up next week. In collaboration with
@NucleateHQ
and
@bitsinbio
.
Whether you prefer a casual meetup or an intense hack day, we would love to see you there!
RSVP to hang:
Apply to hack:
The team at
@FutureHouseSF
led by
@SGRodriques
is poised to both envision and enable the future of scientific research and discovery, powered by AI. 🔮
Even more exciting that they’re structured as a non-profit research organization and backed by
@ericschmidt
. Congrats to all!
Today, we are announcing Future House, a philanthropically-funded moonshot focused on building an AI Scientist.
At Future House, our 10-year mission is to build semi-autonomous AIs for scientific research, to accelerate the pace of discovery and to provide world-wide access to
Would have been really convenient to have this companion GPT when I was doing my PhD 😭
Pathway figure -> gene list -> comp'al friendly format with basic annotations
Fast grants have proven to be an important vehicle to accelerate scientific progress (e.g., during the pandemic). 🏃🏽
Few challenges are more deserving of this support than the climate. 🌎
Climate scientists, see below! 👇🏽
Kudos
@sarakemppainen
for spearheading this effort.
1/ Solutions to the climate crisis are already here. But they're stuck in academic labs.
Often, after the basic science is done, there’s just a little more work needed to show the science has commercial potential. But no one funds this!
Introducing Manifest Climate!
Excited to share our
@gembioworkshop
paper at
@iclr_conf
this week!
We use multi-objective generative AI to design 26K+ small molecules predicted to be:
- 🧠 Blood-brain-barrier permeable
- 🎯 Dopamine receptor D2 binders
- 💊 Safe and non-toxic
- 🧪 Readily synthesizable
1/15
@paultkim_ipd
Perhaps b/c much of wet lab biology expertise is gained by practical experience rather than textbook knowledge? Lower barrier to entry to try your hand at dry lab research.
Incredible new resource hot off the press for scientists who want to translate their academic discoveries to real-world solutions that help people!
Visit to learn more.
Introducing the Spinout Playbook, a free guide to spinning a startup out of academia.
Why is this needed? The process of “spinning out” science from universities is broken 👇🧵
Celebrated the new year with the publication of my first lead author paper, out now in Neurobiology of Disease! We performed a meta-analysis of 2600 human CNS transcriptomics samples to identify common pathways driving pathology across neurodegeneration.
Wonderful new work from
@drmichaellevin
@DonIngber
at the
@wyssinstitute
, led by colleagues
@mmsperry
@halehf
. 🧊
Was fortunate to get a behind-the-scenes look at this project last year.
Applications to organ transplantation, trauma management, space exploration, and more! 1/3
New paper, awesome
@wyssinstitute
team:
"Identification of pharmacological inducers of a reversible hypometabolic state for whole organ preservation" - biostasis!
An accurate description of my friends based on our real conversation today.
Mukundh: “When you said ASAP, I thought of…”
@RikardSaqe
: “ASAP Rocky?”
@MukundhMurthy
: “AsapSCIENCE?”
Me: “Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s?”
cc:
@ASAP_Research
@AsapSCIENCE
Our
@marinkazitnik
lab team at the
@HarvardCMSA
2024 Ding Shum lecture by
@ylecun
today.
We missed getting a photo with the brilliant speaker himself – but maybe that’s another incentive to invite
@ylecun
back to Harvard again? 😁 1/4
Many wonderful things to be said about the inauguration of
@Harvard
’s 30th president, Claudine Gay, today.
A moment I’d like to share: President Gay selected my friends on the Harvard
#bhangra
team to lead the recessional from Tercentenary Theater to Old Yard. 🎶 1/2
📢 Exciting News! Our latest paper is now out in Nature Biotech 🌱🧬 We developed GEARS---an AI method to predict cellular responses to genetic perturbation. 🧪🔬
🔗 Link to the paper:
🧬 Unraveling genetic interactions in cancer, regenerative medicine,
Excited to share our
@gembioworkshop
paper at
@iclr_conf
this week!
We use multi-objective generative AI to design 26K+ small molecules predicted to be:
- 🧠 Blood-brain-barrier permeable
- 🎯 Dopamine receptor D2 binders
- 💊 Safe and non-toxic
- 🧪 Readily synthesizable
1/15
Among others, Andrew Turberfield and Erik Benson from
@OxfordPhysics
and
@KavliOxford
at
@UniofOxford
discussed the software-facilitated design and optimization of nanoscale DNA machinery, such as a DNA-based 2D molecular printer.
See .
4/11
“...including about 16,000 neurons, 32,000 glia, 8,000 blood vessel cells, and 150 million synapses.”
@ScienceMagazine
paper:
Stunning images incl. those below:
Huge congratulations to
@stardazed0
and team! 2/2
Summary of my summer: it’s been electric!
Coding at
@HMSCountway
during the Boston thunderstorms: a bit of PyTorch
@LightningAI
and a bit of actual lightning! ⚡️
Today, I gave a lightning talk to
@HarvardDBMI
on my work in
@marinkazitnik
’s lab as a SIBMI 2023 student. 1/11
*SPECTRA-cular* work from
@YEktefaie
on evaluating generalizability of AI models for molecular datasets.
📊 Applied SPECTRA to 18 datasets from antibiotic resistance in TB to protein-ligand binding.
🔍 Tested 19 SOTA DL models, incl. LLMs, GNNs, diffusion models, and CNNs. 1/2
It is no secret there exists a generalizability problem in AI for biology. Despite all the advances in ML methods, the way we evaluate generalizability in ML models has not changed. How well does your ML model generalize across the entire spectrum of possible dataset splits?
📢 The 2023 Founder-led Biotech Tour
In November, we're teaming up with 50+ founders to bring the community together in four cities.
SF: 11/2
Boston: 11/7
NYC: 11/9
London: 11/13
+ virtual events including co-founder matching, speed networking, and more.
Late night fireside chat with the inimitable
@LauraDeming
and
@AlexJColville
about:
- 😴 human hibernation,
- ⚖️ health equity, and
- 💊 working towards FDA approval of the first longevity intervention to extend the human healthspan.
cc:
@time_initiative
@AFARorg
@age1vc
“When they’re not turning pumpkins into boats,
@harvardopenbio
’s activities include hosting educational workshops, providing mentorship opportunities, and providing space and resources for student-led research projects.”
@benjamin0chang
’s 🎃 voyage will go down in OpenBio lore!
Excited to moderate a panel discussion at the 2023
@SynBioBeta
Conference on community building in
#biotech
🧬 to empower students, founders, and investors. 1/4
The formidable
@jennifertsai_
and the team at
@NucleateDojo
are working to fill a massive unmet need and democratize access to student-led science research.
Please share with motivated and passionate undergraduate researchers!
Undergrad researchers are full of potential, but are often unpaid or underpaid.
We're launching an institution-agnostic grants program to enable ANY undergrad to pursue life science research. If you're interested in sponsoring grants for future biotech innovators, shoot us a DM!
Excited to share the blueprint for multimodal graph learning in
@NatMachIntell
We envision graph AI playing a key role in future image-intensive, knowledge-grounded, and language-intensive systems 1/5
I'm thrilled about the tools and resources that
@fiftyyears
is making available to support scientists who seek to become world-class entrepreneurs.
Building these support systems will help founders rapidly move discoveries from the bench to the bedside. 1/5
A VC that builds?
To best support founders, VCs can't run like law firms. They need to run like the startups they back. They need to build.
We're excited to show you some of the things we've been building at
@fiftyyears
. 1/
Natural self-assembling protein Sierpiński fractals?! This is crazy.
Awesome figure from by
@SendkerFL
@KaHochberg
in
@Nature
showing cryoEM structures of the 0th-order 6mer, 1st-order 18mer, and 2nd-order 54mer.
Happy and super excited to share our discovery of a protein fractal! We unravel the surprisingly simple emergence of these marvellous structures and show it might have even been an accident of evolution. Read the full story here
Or just stick around 🧵
For those of us who have a family history of neurodegeneration, the possibility of future dementia can be terrifying.
@sarakemppainen
is fighting back by diving into the literature. Check out her great thread below! 👇🏽 1/9
1/13 I’m scared of losing my mind.
Not in the literal sense, but in the sense of diminished memory and thinking capability.
And my fear is not completely unreasonable: numerous women in my family have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
But it isn't just my family.
🧵
The 10,000x increase in data output from the wet lab over the past 10 years necessitates new tools for analysis.
As the AWS x GitHub of biocomputing, the
@LatchBio
end-to-end platform is poised to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery to reveal new biological insights. 2/5