jfarlow

9 ms·

31.
by jfarlow 6y ago
One thing I have noticed and felt is that there is a very steep energy well that slides you into drug development if your technology is anywhere even near - as drug development has financial returns that are an order of magnitude (or two
32.
by jfarlow 6y ago
There are a number of other incubators that are serving some of that role. The community is growing, but it's still fairly small. In the biotech space part of that incubation/culture can come in the form of shared lab space. Her
33.
by jfarlow 6y ago
It looks like there's still a lot in a draft form here, but the kind (and honestly, the breadth ) of information here is difficult to come by outside of experience. And it is really valuable to have some of those bullet points articu
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by jfarlow 6y ago
I think it's important not to say that biology is somehow 'spooky', or not governed by physical rules. We actually know the outlines of those rules pretty well - they're just complicated. The really big difference is th
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by jfarlow 6y ago
There is a niche of companies that are starting to let software eat biology. It's one of the latecomers to utilize the improvements, but they do exist. [My company is one - we have pure software engineers on our team, we build synthet
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by jfarlow 6y ago
FPBase is a model for what open-access academic databases should look like for novel protein sequences. It's a thankless job to do all of the comparisons/reviews of proteins with similar functions. And then even more of a challen
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by jfarlow 6y ago
In a fleet, or at least all the time, that's not so bad. Get 6 running, shifts of 2, you can haul quite a bit in a week with some electricity.
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by jfarlow 6y ago
The Cas9 protein (from the CRISPR system) has 2 functions: 1) It binds to DNA based on where a template RNA strand matches DNA in a genome. That RNA strand has 2 pieces - a piece that attaches to the Cas9, and a piece that matches whatever
39.
by jfarlow 7y ago
So the process used in this testing is so common that research labs and any biochemistry lab in any college or high-school can run the test. But they probably shouldn't because they have no practice nor experience providing a diagnosi
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by jfarlow 7y ago
The other way to think about it is the difference between 'clean' and 'sterile'; having no influential chemicals present (clean), and having no living units capable of replication present (sterile). They are actually di
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by jfarlow 7y ago
From a technical perspective, it is a simple test. Hard part is chain of custody and sample integrity - controls, etc.
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by jfarlow 7y ago
And it was only reported there because every other country was at war and censored internal news: https://www.history.com/news/why-was-it-called-the-spanish-f...
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by jfarlow 7y ago
It's also a lot like an announcement of any other tool of great importance: a new programming language, a new rocket engine, a new alloy, a new psychological principle - or any other discovery of import. It's profoundly interestin
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by jfarlow 7y ago
Penrose's 'Road to Reality' [1] is a kind primer on where the math comes from, as it applies to physics. Kind of a philosophical walkthrough of how math applies to physics. It is nowhere near as concise as Feynman's le
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by jfarlow 7y ago
In the bay area: We are! (Serotiny): https://serotiny.bio Synthego: https://www.synthego.com/ Mammoth: https://mammoth.bio/ Zymergen: https://www.zymergen.com/ Boston: Arbor: h
46.
by jfarlow 7y ago
Serotiny | Bay Area, CA | Full-stack Engineer, Frontend Focus | Full Time Serotiny is a synthetic biology design firm that invents custom proteins to cure cancers and genetic diseases. We help design proteins involved in CAR-T therapies, CR
47.
by jfarlow 7y ago
Small biotech cofounder here - curious how you think about lab supplies and interactions with other of your customers. One thing that is curious is that you have a list of your life-science customers, but that's also a list of clients
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by jfarlow 7y ago
Serotiny | Bay Area, CA | Full-stack Engineer, Frontend Focus | Full Time Serotiny is a synthetic biology design firm that invents custom proteins to cure cancers and genetic diseases. We help design proteins involved in CAR-T therapies, CR
49.
by jfarlow 7y ago
This is a movie of a human kidney cell dividing [1]. The red chunks are its DNA. But they're 'chunky' because the 'whole genome' is partitioned into 23 chunk - each chunk is a 'chromosome'. And each chro
50.
by jfarlow 7y ago
Nothing in biology is exactly the same - or said another way, biology is optimized at many different scales - from basic (even quantum) physics, all the way up to social adaptations. So screwing with codons could have very subtle effec
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by jfarlow 7y ago
That is likely the primary issue. Same with a bunch of cool sci-fi things you can do with gene editing in other organisms. Most organisms are exceedingly energy efficient. [Build me an humanoid-like robot with all its attendant capabilit
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by jfarlow 7y ago
Serotiny | Bay Area, CA | Full-stack Engineer, Frontend Focus | Full Time Serotiny is a synthetic biology design firm that invents custom proteins to cure cancers and genetic diseases. We help design proteins involved in CAR-T therapies, CR
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by jfarlow 8y ago
yep - I missed that concept too. "...ordered by {time spent there}->(how long it was on the front page)"
54.
by jfarlow 8y ago
Super cool work! It has a fossil layer in addition to the geographic features. I have always been curious about actually visualizing the 3D layers of geographical time, including the access to what was living at the time. And it has an API
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by jfarlow 8y ago
Pretty cool! > Anich says that Jon Martin—a forestry professor and coauthor on the paper—was exploring a Wisconsin forest at night, using a UV flashlight to scan the canopy for lichens, fungi, plants, and frogs that occasionally fluoresc
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by jfarlow 8y ago
For instance, though not specific to HIV, and not exotic from a physicist's perspective, but certainly exotic in terms of taking physics into account at a different abstraction layer when compiling down to DNA: DNA seems to be able to
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by jfarlow 8y ago
Except this exact thing was accomplished and published a few months ago [1, 2]. The Baker lab at the University of Washington designed a synthetic fluorescent protein, de novo. [1] Meta-Meta-Article: https://www.bakerlab.org&#x2
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by jfarlow 8y ago
Design tools are absolutely useful to researchers. However, the economics of building/selling software to researchers don't work. The state of the art DNA design app that is the gold-standard for every molecular biologist is n
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by jfarlow 8y ago
We can and do go from phenotype -> genetic code as long as the phenotypic ask is something we have some familiarity with. There are enough examples out there that even though the toolbox is still small, there's plenty of new things
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by jfarlow 8y ago
I think the fun part is that it's not necessarily super competitive, yet. A lot of these tools are still complementary. But they're also not quite integrated yet either. Always looking for good work. The field is growing rapi

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