Husband, Father. Working on #bioeconomy & #biosecurity policy.
Joined April 2011
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Matt Watson retweeted
1/15 New preprint: Evidence of Ebola spread among Kenema Government Hospital (KGH) staff—not just from patients, but among colleagues in an interconnected network.
medrxiv.org/content/10.64898…
Led by @Chris_Y_Shin & @msquare2013
KGH team w/ @broadinstitute @tulane @scrippsresearch @LSTMnews
Matt Watson retweeted
When I was a kid there was a TV show about a space ship where humans met the universe with competence, nobility, and expansive, powerful compassion.
This is still the future worth living in and the one worth fighting for
In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to:
Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Fund
alzresearch.org/giving/
Alzheimer’s Foundation of America Caregiver Resources
alzfdn.org/donate/
Photo Credit: Tommy Garcia
Matt Watson retweeted
This is just epic. No words. The Power Broker is a singular book, there is just nothing quite like it. Reading it was an event in my life.
Matt Watson retweeted
Artificial intelligence in drug discovery — what it is, where we stand and the path forward
nature.com/articles/s41573-0…
rdcu.be/AbCjmkuPETra
This Perspective in the November issue provides recommendations to increase the translational relevance of AI uses in drug discovery
Matt Watson retweeted
"Now we’ll have the [mRNA] development capacity together with the production capacity. That makes a lot of difference in the event of pandemics.” - Dr Patrícia Neves, Head of RNA product development at Fiocruz Bio-Manguinhos.
Brazil has produced vaccines for 50 years, but when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it couldn’t make mRNA vaccines of its own. Now Brazil’s Fiocruz Bio-Manguinhos vaccine institute is about to change that, with the first Brazilian patented mRNA vaccine platform starting human trials in 2027.
CEPI spoke to Dr Patrícia Neves, who is leading the CEPI-supported project, about what that means for Brazil and Latin America, as well as for other countries and regions hoping to learn from it.
@fiocruz
Read in full ➡️ cepi.net/innovations-for-imp…
Matt Watson retweeted
Genomic sequencing has linked Ebola cases detected in Kenya and Nigeria to the same transmission chain and to viruses circulating in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, while leaving open the possibility of an undetected chain in Uganda bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Matt Watson retweeted
A culture clash has always simmered in biotech. Academia vs. Industry. PhDs vs. MBAs. Science vs. Business.
These groups have different values and points of view. But it takes a village to develop a drug, so they had to find a way to get along
But what if it doesn't take a village to develop a drug anymore? The 1-person biotech model raises the possibility of a PhD-MBA divorce
I'm expecting many experiments in 1-person biotechs. I kind of love the concept and I really want it to work.
Some of them will be led by MBAs and supplement the scientific expertise with Rosalind. Some of them will be led by PhDs and run the business strategy on Claude. Others, I hope, will be led by weirdos from neither of these backgrounds who approach medicine in ways we've never seen before.
But navigating this transition is going to require enormous cultural sensitivity. There is a world where this is a bitter divorce - MBAs and PhDs fighting to make each other irrelevant.
There is also a world where we dissolve the old cultures and re-form as a community of people who just want to build with Bio.
Matt Watson retweeted
An mRNA–lipid nanoparticle vaccine against H5N1 influenza virus protects lactating dairy cows from infection nature.com/articles/s41587-0…
Matt Watson retweeted
We are partnering with @FireworksAI_HQ to add BioBench, our suite of evaluations on benchmarks.bio, to Fireworks’ Specialized Intelligence Index (SII).
BioBench is the largest benchmark for agentic capability and safeguards in biology, consisting of 1,337 tasks covering domains that span many facets of life science. Tasks mimic complex workflows, taking 50+ turns and running for up to 10 hours
Includes coverage of:
- Omics (including single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, epigenetics, genetic variant analysis, metagenomics, and biosafety surveillance)
- Therapeutics (testing preclinical pharmacology and discovery of ASOs, siRNAs, and antibodies)
- Applications (assessing clinically relevant application tasks based on private experimental data, patient cohorts, or individual patient cases, focusing primarily on oncology-based tasks)
- Refusal (grades the model’s/safeguard’s ability to refuse disguised biology red-team tasks while complying with routine research tasks that have dual-use characteristics)
Focused treatment of molecular assays is very important in biology. We include several of the most widely used kits, instruments, and providers. Some of these technologies include, but are not limited to:
- scRNA-seq: 10x Chromium Single Cell, Parse Evercode WT, Mission Bio Tapestri
- Spatial: AtlasXomics DBiT-seq, 10x Visium and Xenium In Situ, Vizgen MERSCOPE, Curio Seeker
- WGS: Illumina TruSeq, PacBio SMRTbell, Oxford Nanopore Sequencing
Stoked to partner with Fireworks. High quality evaluation is one of the core components of the new intelligence ecosystem.
fireworks.ai/specialized-int…
Matt Watson retweeted
I am hiring a Student Researcher at the SynthID team at @GoogleDeepMind in London. We work on provenance across all modalities: text, images, audio, video and bio sequences, deploy on every single GenAI surface at Google and with partners like OpenAI, Apple and NVIDIA.
Matt Watson retweeted
In #UNGA81 #FirstCommittee, #bioweapons took centre stage last wk. States pressed for progress on strengthening #1972BWC but divisions persist over verification & compliance. Our latest briefing examines what’s at stake ahead of December’s negotiations. tinyurl.com/yhfts4et
Matt Watson retweeted
New @FDA guidance on how a BLA can incorporate personal gene editors. This is a major step towards making editing-on-demand appealing to the for-profit sector. The academic/nonprofit sector will still have to do all the initial work ofc. And we are doing it. Right now.
Matt Watson retweeted
Bavarian Nordic will donate vaccines for a global mpox emergency stockpile to strengthen preparedness against the viral disease, the Danish vaccine maker said in a statement on Tuesday. reut.rs/4ikbNpV
Matt Watson retweeted
.@NSF is hiring the inaugural Head of its Office of Metascience to apply the scientific method to how we fund, organize, and evaluate research. Continuous improvement will accelerate discovery.
If you care about the science of science, apply:
nsf.gov/careers/openings/od/…
Matt Watson retweeted
Japan plans to introduce rules for DNA synthesis companies to prevent AI-assisted creation of dangerous viruses and bacteria. The government aims to develop safety guidelines by January 2027, balancing biotechnology innovation with biosecurity.
mainichi.jp/english/articles…
Matt Watson retweeted
I’m building a team in DC. Everyone in Washington has a stake in ensuring that reliable info about alignment and RSI reaches the public.
We need trustworthy communicators who can explain METR's loss-of-control risk assessments and goals to policymakers.
Matt Watson retweeted
Bad day for securing Bio AI with managed access or pretraining data filters. @AISecurityInst found:
1. Agents can reproduce bio-AI tools on 1 GPU for <$20 with just abstracts and public data
2. Fine-tuning can restore full capability to ESM-2 trained w/o viral proteins for <$80
Matt Watson retweeted
But this method wasn't durable: fine-tuning on publicly available viral data fully restored the capability with under ~$80 of compute, even for the largest model.
Read the blog: aisi.gov.uk/blog/pretraining…
Matt Watson retweeted
followup from my post from yesterday, Martha Nelson's lab has done an analysis of the mink H5N1 virus sequences. The closest sequences appear to be from Texas dairy cows from early in 2026 but how those viruses got to Utah mink farms is a mystery: virological.org/t/preliminar…
