We're so back (in SF). I'll be here until end of May; if you're in biotech/tech/techbio we should meet up!

Amylyx $AMLX to pull ALS drug from market, cut 70% of staff statnews.com/2024/04/04/amy… via Allison DeAngelis News aside, I have deep respect for the way Josh and Justin have handled the Relyvrio situation. A lot of companies talk about prioritizing patients over business. Amylyx

We did an internal experiment using LLMs to parse and visualise ORRs from AACR clinical trial abstracts. Worked pretty well; check out the results in the link (click the bubbles to open the relevant abstract) aacr.convoke.bio

Join us in Berkeley on Monday to hear from @atelfo on opportunities in BioML outside of R&D. Alex's blog is amazing, and I'm very excited to hear from him in person! lu.ma/w7febkow

Announcing the 2024 Roots of Progress Institute Blog-Building Intensive, the second cohort of our 8-week program for aspiring progress writers to start or grow a blog. Learn about progress studies, get into a regular writing habit, improve your writing, and build your audience

My new essay for Asimov Press is ostensibly about the unlikely origin story of the lab mouse. But it's actually about the role of chance in scientific discovery, and how random contingencies can lead to technological lock-in

Nearly identical CRISPR medicines can be *reprogrammed* to treat entirely new diseases. It's "a platform for cures" as Fyodor Urnov would say. I wrote an in-depth essay about the challenges and opportunities in scaling from "one to a thousand" cures: centuryofbio.com/p/scaling-cris…

Ten things we learned while editing Alex Telford's piece, "Origins of the Lab Mouse." 1. Gregor Mendel—the Austrian monk who founded modern genetics—originally wanted to breed mice (not peas). He was forced to use peas due to concerns from a prudish bishop. x.com/salonium/statu…

5 suggestions for the FDA, CDC, and ARPA-H. (Well, actually 8, but the final 3 are cheating.) This post gets a little detailed, but the orienting prompt is: what policy changes would make medical research more impactful? Hope you enjoy: blog.jacobtrefethen.com/policy-ideas-p…

From a recent IQVIA report: trial enrollment timelines have increased across all phases and TAs by an avg. of 26% since 2019 Driven by: increased N per trial, growing trial complexity, and fewer sites / countries (partially geopolitical)

Fun anecdote about the early scale-up challenges with mammalian cell manufacturing at Genentech: conventional wisdom at the time was that mammalian cells were too fragile to grow in large bioreactors, Genentech scientists got around this by stirring the tanks "very, very slowly"

I'll be in the UK (London/Oxford/Cambridge area) for a week or so - any pharma/biotech folks want to meet up?

I've noticed that biotech cos built around a computational discovery platform have a different philosophy on company building and how to use software to gain sustainable advantage vs. 'traditional' biotech or pharma. I reflect on this in a new blog post: atelfo.github.io/2024/09/17/a-n…

What if I told you that I co-founded a startup in 1987 that obtained world-wide rights to GLP1 as a metabolic Rx, collaborated with Pfizer to show key activities, & abandoned it in 1990 when Pfizer lost interest? I tell the previously untold tale in an open access paper now up