This week saw many announcements from NVidia coming from its GTC conference, the Baker lab used RFDiffusion to design antibodies, and the CZI created an AI advisory board with some heavy hitters.
Pharma and Biotech
2024/03/21 Chan Zuckerberg Initiative: The CZI announces the creation of an AI advisory board as well as an AI residency program. The board includes some big names in AI, including Sam Altman, Regina Barzilay and Joelle Pineau.
2024/03/21 Owkin: Sanofi extends its partnership with Owkin to include work on drug repositioning.
2024/03/21 BusinessWire: Profluent raises a $35m round after an initial $9m one. The company bases its technology on ProGen (in which the CEO was first author), a protein design model; they intend on designing better scaffolds for CRISPR-based therapeutics. While the technology of protein design is rather serious, I can’t stop from noticing that this press release, which claims to “finally program biology with AI and CRISPR”, is the kind of boast one would hear in a bad B-movie; they are just missing on adding an NFT to the blockchain to complete the buzzword bingo.
2024/03/20 STAT+: Explains the story of Lenmeldy, a gene therapy for treating metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD). This disease is caused by mutation affecting the production of the arylsulfatase A enzyme. While the issue of pricing for such therapies will be important, as it is the most expensive drug yet with a cost of $4.65m, I found that the delivery mechanism was extremely ingenious and more interesting. Researchers infected immune cells with a lentivirus (harmless version of HIV) that inserts the sequence for that enzyme into the patient’s DNA. The cells will then go on their own inside the brain and secrete the enzyme there. Hijacking the immune system for drug delivery is extremely impressive and likely to be used for other neurological diseases.
2024/03/20 TechCrunch: Cure51 raises a $15m seed, led by Sofinnova Partners. The company plans on building a database of cancer survivors, containing long term monitoring, and characterizing them at the molecular level. It claims to differentiate itself from the likes of FlatIron by its focus on survivors as well as more thorough assays.
2024/03/19 Yahoo!Finance: Abridge, a company focusing on AI for clinical documents and notes summarization, announces a partnership with NVidia.
2024/03/18 Fierce Biotech: Biden signs an executive order granting funding to the NIH and ARPA-H to launch a research program on women's health, particularly issues relating to post-menopause.
2024/03/18 Fierce Biotech: NVidia is partnering with J&J Medtech to include its Holoscan and IGX technologies in surgical robots.
2024/03/18 Novo Nordisk: The Novo Nordisk Foundation, as well as the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark, are committing $87m and $14.5m respectively in order to build a computing center for researchers in Denmark. This computing center will be built in partnership with NVidia.
2024/03/18 NVidia: NVidia launches the NIM suite of microservices that can serve existing pipelines relevant for drug discovery and healthcare (ESMFold, DiffDock, DeepVariant, etc…). Also covered in Fierce Biotech.
2024/03/18 STAT: The current lack of standards for privacy, data management, or security with new AI models used in the healthcare industry is leading investors and hospitals to seek out new companies tackling these issues. Since this area will for sure be important, it seems like a reasonable way to hedge for folks wanting to be involved in AI, but having cold feet about how it will be regulated.
2024/03/16 STAT: During the pandemic, white-collar workers fled the cities, while at the same time white-coats were forced to work in person and were a high growth industry. Property developers became extremely bullish on the need for lab spaces, and started many projects assuming that the growth would continue. This hope did not pan out, and while the industry is still laying off people, these new buildings are being delivered, but with no tenants.
2024/03/13 Fierce Biotech: Mindstate Design Labs has collected over 70,000 “trip reports” of using psychedelics. Using text processing on these reports and joining that information with the psychedelic used, they are hoping to build a quantitative understanding of the effect of the different drugs. Thanks to this data, they just submitted their first IND. I know that the joke is that tech people in SF are all on drugs, it seems they decided to put their tech skills towards the development of better ones.
2024/03/12 Reuters: Italy sets up a $1000m investment fund to promote AI.
Papers and Science
2024/03/19 TowardsDataScience: Michael Bronstein wrote a long and insightful piece about the future of AI x Bio.
2024/03/18 BiorXiv: Atomically accurate de novo design of single-domain antibodies — The Baker lab uses its RFDiffusion model to design new antibodies. This got coverage in “In the pipeline” as well as Endpoints.
Community events
2024/03/28 — Los Angeles — BioSync AI Mixer https://lu.ma/biosync
2024/03/28 — London — Lab Legends: March Happy Hour https://lu.ma/LabLegends_03.24
2024/03/27 — online — BiB Journal Club - Interactive MILRD Session, more info here
2024/03/25 — Lausanne — AI x bio afterparty @ AMLD EPFL https://lu.ma/amldepfl
2024/03/25 – Ghent – Bits in Bio Belgium // 2024.2 https://www.meetup.com/bits-in-bio-belgium/events/299749435/
Jobs announcements
Machine Learning Scientist at NewLimit
AI Intern at Flagship Pioneering
Bioinformatics Scientist at Raytheon BBN
Biological Foundation Model Product Manager at Bioptimus
Data Scientist – Computational Biology at Bioptimus
Machine Learning Engineer at Bioptimus
Machine Learning Engineer at Epoch Biodesign
Senior Scientist at BioDrive
Technical Assistant I (Hrvatin Lab) at Whitehead Institute
We very likely missed quite a few announcements, don’t hesitate to DM @gama_search if you see anything missing or needing corrections.
Or DM me if you have seen some cool paper / news coverage that you would like to see on next week’s newsletter.