The Biotech Futurist

A transformer pretrained on gene-essentiality scores now reads an ordinary transcriptome and returns an inferred vulnerability profile, so the expensive screen is needed for training and not at the moment of use. A review of virtual cells published the same day reports that independent benchmarks find scale alone does not buy generalisation outside the training distribution. A model that predicts antibiotic resistance from routine ...

A chemical-biology paper names a failure mode of structure prediction and gives it a word: models place ligands where the training data already were. Two other fields published the same complaint about units on the same day, one for nuclear mechanics, one for sleep trackers. In an English assessment unit, a deterioration score was computed without the oxygen a patient was receiving and without the confusion she had developed. A nan...

A new brief counts 577 approved diagnostics for six epidemic diseases in Africa and finds half of them cannot run where people first ask for help. In eastern Congo, a researcher says patients take Ebola for malaria and arrive when nothing can be done. Germany decided the same week to pay for mammography from age 45, with its own panel estimating that about one screen-detected tumour in seven would never have surfaced. Mayo's electr...

The director of Europe's largest photonics diagnostics institute put numbers on what a new clinic test may cost: €5,000 to €10,000 for the box, about €1 for the test, an answer in 10 to 15 minutes. On the same day a book introduction observed that a molecular biology lab still looks like one from the 1960s, and a surgical trial in Alexandria replaced a routine operation with a daily blood marker. Korea published what happens when p...

Half of the recent intensive-care stays in the most used public ICU database have no infusion rows at all, so part of the drift that people train models to chase belongs to the recording system. A cardiology group reports that the information in circulating troponin sits in which compartment carries it. A four-metabolite urine panel separated eight cancers well, and its authors did the screening arithmetic themselves and landed on ...

Some antisense oligonucleotides kill prion-infected mice and leave healthy mice unharmed, so the standard preclinical safety test cannot see this toxicity at all. The same shape of problem recurred all day. A nine-valent Escherichia coli vaccine raised strong antibodies in 17,701 older adults and protected nobody. A trauma biomarker read for years as endothelial turns out to sit in epithelium. A national census of Tanzanian laborat...

Two papers today trace the two most useful DNA machines in biology back to the same conflict, bacteria against their viruses. One is a bacterial reverse transcriptase that adds repeats the way telomerase does. The other, proposed as the ancestor of CRISPR, is a phage protein that reads double-stranded DNA with a code skipping every third base. Both carry the same three-part design: an enzyme, a noncoding RNA built of tandem repeats...

Today's items line up along one chain. A phone-mounted fundus camera with offline AI screened more than a thousand people in Liberia, and a label-free whole-blood imager was tried on sepsis in an intensive care unit. The UK accepted all 44 recommendations of its AI commission, including monitoring devices "throughout their working life", and Zambia showed a regulator can approve a drug in 12 working days by relying on reviews alrea...

How about play in animals?

Today I have the pleasure to discuss outstanding research in ethology with Elisabetta Palagi from the University of Pisa, who has been a leader in Primatology for over 30 years, and, among several successes, was recently awarded the Animal Behavior Society Fellowship Award for her outstanding research.

In this episode, we explore animal play behavior, focusing on social play. We examine its definition a...

What if we had a ChatGPT for transcriptomics, what if we could predict how the gene network is changed in diseases for which we have scarce molecular data?

Today I have the immense pleasure to discuss transformers in single-cell transcriptomics to make huge predictions about gene modulation with Christina Theodoris, who today first-authored a paper in Nature entitled “Transfer learning enables predictions in network biology&r...

What if told you that your lifespan is probably predictable from a biopsy?

Today I have the pleasure to discuss state-of-the-art epigenetic clocks for biological age and lifespan estimation to develop interventions that slow down aging with my former mentor Professor Alessandro Cellerino. Prof Cellerino is a world leader in aging and longevity research. He is an Associate Professor and Research group leader at the Scuola Normale Su...

What if gene editing went on a date with nanomedicine?

Today I am lucky to spend some time talking to my former mentor Vittoria Raffa about all the fundamental molecular biology of gene editing, and the open challenges to translate CRISPR-based technologies to the clinic. Will nanomedicine and synthetic biology be the right partners for gene editing to make it? Vittoria is an Associate Professor of Nanomedicine and Molecular Biolog...

What’s the revolution of synthetic biology and metabolic engineering in Industrial Biotech?

Welcome to the latest episode of The Biotech Futurist, where we drive around the fascinating field of industrial biotechnology. Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing Stefano Bertacchi, a passionate researcher and EU bioeconomy ambassador. Stefano shares with us his journey, from his interest in microorganisms and yeasts to his cur...

What if we had non-directive, unbiased genetic counseling all over the world?

Today I have fun talking to Victoria (Tori) Suslovitch, friend and coworker from the Yu Lab in Boston. Tori is a genetic counselor, and she has been supporting the logistical, educational, and emotional needs of patients and families enrolled in translational genomics studies for a long time.

Tori and I try to give an exhaustive overview of the world of g...

What if we could record several molecular events happening inside cells along time?

Today I have the pleasure to discuss an outstanding tool to record molecular events in time with Professor Adam Cohen. Adam is a Professor of Chemistry, Chemical Biology, and Physics at Harvard, he has countless academic and extra-academic achievements that led to his MIT Technology Review nomination to the 35 world's top innovat...

What if we could detect a tumor, monitor for metastasis, and track the response to therapeutics from a simple blood draw instead of an invasive tissue biopsy?

Today I have the pleasure to discuss state-of-the-art liquid biopsy techniques with Professor Chiara Cremolini, who I met virtually during my time in Pisa. Chiara is an Associate Professor in Medical Oncology at the University of Pisa, where she performs translational researc...

What if we could treat aging as any other disease?

Today I am excited to meet Eleanor Sheekey on my podcast. Eleanor is a PhD student at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, where she focuses on p53 biology. Eleanor has a beautiful YouTube channel where she distills the most innovative research in aging with a creative and engaging rhythm, The Sheekey Science Show.

Eleanor and I go through some of the most promising trends i...

What if therapeutics for genetic diseases became as routine as transplant surgery?

Today I have the pleasure to discuss the rise of interventional genomics with the very unique Winston Yan. Winston did his PhD in the Feng Zhang lab in the very early days of the CRISPR revolution, founded Arbor Biotech, became a leader in the new field of interventional genomics with the N=1 collaborative to bring advanced therapeutics to patients w...