alright. this should be interesting

oh this is getting even more juicy and entertaining nytimes.com/2026/09/27/scien…

alright if someone is working to slow down or reverse cognitive decline or dementia, @peterthiel might be your investor

The Belmonte team (a few missing) at Altos lab in sunny San Diego. #timetobuild

so great to see this official @genentech video on their perspective about aging, lifespan and healthspan. back in 2018 when I joined Genentech as a postdoc, they probably already had a vision of aging as a therapeutic modality, which is probably why they recruited Bulck institute faculty Heinrich Jasper. unclear if they have a pipeline targeting age-related diseases but after this official PR video, you can draw your own conclusions. m.youtube.com/watch?v=9kT9RA…

anyone who has worked in science and spent enough time in a wet lab knows not to get excited too quickly over preliminary results. the fact that @AnthropicAI announced the discovery of a "potential" new enzyme is both exciting and ridiculous to me i can only assume they rushed and put out these preliminary results without wet lab validation just to clear out the speculation that they're secretly working on “drug development” and that we're all going to die

wow. a clinical allo CAR-T company completely pivoting to in vivo gene editing. cellectis.com/en/press/celle…

ArsenalBio has probably been the company to watch in the CAR-T field. Top notch founders and incredible smart team, which ended up not being enough. Despite people telling me I’m crazy or that this tech will not work, I’ve been a believer in in vivo cell reprogramming for a few years now, and it looks like ArsenalBio may have concluded that in vivo CAR-T is probably the way to go. fiercebiotech.com/biotech/ar…

i had to comment on @friedberg’s Science corner on the Moderna melanoma vaccine on the last episode of @theallinpod. although i agree that the cost of this new therapy might be high, the real price of the drug is still not disclosed. there are some speculations that the vaccine might be around 500k per dose which sounds a lot. however, the mRNA vaccine is given with keytruda (pembrolizumab), which already costs roughly $150k–220k, so that’s one of the reasons why this treatment might be so costly. nonetheless, i do hope that the final price of the drug is not close to 500k because that it is a lot of money. so i do agree with @friedberg on this. however, my real frustration with this science corner is that @friedberg made it sound that this new technology is way simpler than it actually is. first , it is true that Moderna’s approach is personalized. each vaccine is specific to every patient because Moderna and Merck identify neoantigens through next-generation sequencing, and these neoantigens may elicit an immune response. however, and this is where @friedberg is inaccurate, the identification of neoantigens is not straightforward and is actually hard to get right. in fact, that’s why Moderna and Merck use an AI-driven algorithm that predicts up to 34 neoantigens, and Moderna includes all of them in the vaccine. so there is no way that someone who has access to some tumor cells, sequences them, identifies mutations, synthesizes peptides (as he gave the example), and injects them could potentially mimic these vaccines. that in my opinion flat-out won’t work. also, the manufacturing process is far more complex than it sounds. initially one would need to obtain a tumor biopsy, perform next-generation sequencing, run the proprietary algorithm to select and rank up to 34 reactive neoantigens tailored to the patient’s HLA type, design and synthesize a single mRNA encoding those neoantigens under GMP conditions, encapsulate it in lipid nanoparticles, run full quality control, and deliver the finished doses. all within a tight window so patients don’t wait for too long. again, i do hope that the cost of these drugs are cheaper so more people can afford this, but there is no way that someone would go to Montana and print some peptides and then cure cancer.

nice write up. if I have to guess, the combo molecule is oxytocin + Alk5i ;)

oh yeah and some people still think vaccines don’t work

Belmonte, reik, Serrano = epigenetic reprogramming and partial reprogramming

I don’t think one company will solve reprogramming. But rather all the companies will uniquely solve different aspects of it. Btw, we need more reprogramming companies ;)

what’s your go-to chemical modification for in vivo gRNA stability?

Cool! So basically in the aged brain microglia = monocyte/microglia derived from HSCs?

Yep. I thought the same when I watched this! I mean probably by the “outside” you would think that our body ages at the same rate but when you look at the organ or cellular level this is completely not true!

This is very cool! People should the lead on this. 100k funding!!