@YongLaiLab

Synthetic biologist/Assistant Professor @HKUST；Postdoc in RLE in the Lu lab @MIT；PhD in Microbiology @HKUniversity

 Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong SAR
yonglai.people.ust.hk
Joined April 2013
  • Tweets261
  • Following405
  • Followers149
13Media
One of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen: a standing ovation for the full Daraxonrasib results I feel inspired and energised, to put it mildly — we have a targeted therapy for pancreatic cancer now, and nothing is undruggable anymore
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Dr. Kanya Rajangam, Chief Medical Officer, emphasized that the encouraging SENTI-202 data support advancement into pivotal studies and exploration across additional patient populations, enabled by recent RMAT and Orphan Drug Designations. bit.ly/3XFf7ST $SNTI #ASH2025
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1/ Excited to share our new paper in Science: “Toward life with a 19-amino acid alphabet through generative artificial intelligence design.” @ColumbiaSysBio @ColumbiaBME @Columbia science.org/doi/10.1126/scie… 🦠🧬🛠️🖥️💥

Toward life with a 19–amino acid alphabet through generative artificial intelligence design

Because all known living organisms are made from at least 20 canonical amino acids, the feasibility of life using a more simplified alphabet remains unclear. In this work, we leveraged computational...

science.org
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Yong Lai retweeted
nature
@NatureMar 10
For the first time, researchers have simulated nearly every chemical reaction in a living bacterial cell go.nature.com/46UnkYp

‘Virtual cell’ captures the most-basic process of life: bacterial division

Nature - Researchers simulated nearly every molecule in a bacterial cell —and then watched it grow and reproduce.

nature.com
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🚀 Introducing Dream-VL & Dream-VLA! We’re proving that dLLMs have an amazing advantage in building VLA models. The result is stunning performance: 🏆 97.2% on LIBERO ⚡ 27x speedup vs AR models 🔥 Beats OpenVLA & $\pi_0$ ✅ Fully Open Source Blog: hkunlp.github.io/blog/2025/d…
Jiacheng Ye@JiachengYe1523 Dec 2025
🚀Building on the success of Dream 7B, we introduce Dream-VL and Dream-VLA, open VL and VLA models that fully unlock discrete diffusion’s advantages in long-horizon planning, bidirectional reasoning, and parallel action generation for multimodal tasks.
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The world has lost one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. "Nature seems to take advantage of the simple mathematical representations of the symmetry laws" Chen-Ning Yang (1922–2025)
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✨New preprint alert✨Ever tried baking sourdough at home? 🍞Fascinated by the magic of fermentation and the tiny microbes behind it? What if we could give them intelligence, logic, and teamwork across kingdom to treat complex gut disease? That’s the vision behind our SINERGY!
bioRxiv Synthetic Biology@bioRxiv_synbio11 Oct 2025
Sourdough starter-inspired living materials grown from probiotic consortia with engineered division-of-labor biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/… #biorxiv_synbio

Sourdough starter-inspired living materials grown from probiotic consortia with engineered divisi...

Genetic circuits enable precise control over cellular behavior. As circuits become more complex, implementing them within a single cell population becomes difficult. Tasks can instead be distributed...

biorxiv.org
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Proud to share our lab’s first research paper, led by my incredible PhD student Shuchen Wang! 🎉 Huge thanks to our amazing collaborators for making this possible!! @ZijayTang
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Just noticed this. It’s so interesting! 😄
Scott Mills
@scott_mills6 Oct 2025
“I’ve been baking” | #TaylorSwift talks about her obsession with sourdough 📺 watch the full chat here youtu.be/lz6sTxdnzZk
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We’re grateful to IAI journal and ASM for the invitation. We summarized a range of CRISPR-based tools for studying host-microbe interactions. The article will be published soon!🥳
ASM
@ASMicrobiology24 Jul 2025
Know a rising star who studies host-microbe interactions? Nominate an exceptional early-career scientist to author a minireview in #IAIJournal’s 2026 New Voices in Microbiology Collection. Submit your nomination by Aug. 18: asm.social/2vO
New Voices in Microbiology Meet our 2025 Minireview Authors Congratulations to these Infection and Immunity authors! Who will be recognized in 2026?

ALT New Voices in Microbiology Meet our 2025 Minireview Authors Congratulations to these Infection and Immunity authors! Who will be recognized in 2026?

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Product update: Indel Analysis lets you score insertions/deletions across your sequence using PoET-2. You can now also compare multiple 3D structures in Mol* to evaluate design alternatives. Sign up now: openprotein.ai/early-access-…
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My dept in London at Imperial (Bioengineering) is recruiting a group leader at Professor level 🧑‍🎓 Please RT. It's a great department with world-class expertise in all sorts of biomedical & biological engineering topics, including synthetic biology. 🇬🇧imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-j…
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Seeing what bacteria see from a flying UAV 👁️ rdcu.be/ehkQB #synbio #biotech @itai_levin @yonchem
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Super excited about the release of our open diffusion language model! Dream 7B has finally achieved the general language model capabilities I've been dreaming of since we started working on discrete diffusion models. Check out our blog post for details: hkunlp.github.io/blog/2025/d…
Jiacheng Ye@JiachengYe152 Apr 2025
🚀Excited to announce Dream 7B (Diffusion reasoning model): the most powerful open diffusion large language model to date.
Figure: comparison of language models on general, math, coding, and planning tasks.

ALT Figure: comparison of language models on general, math, coding, and planning tasks.

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Timothy Lu@timlu3 Apr 2025
Excited to share the latest clinical and preclinical data on our Logic Gated SENTI-202 product at the upcoming AACR meeting!
Senti Biosciences
@SentiBio3 Apr 2025
Kanya Rajangam, MD, PhD, President and Chief Medical Officer of $SNTI, shares her excitement for the upcoming data presentation from the SENTI-202 trial at the AACR Annual Meeting being held April 25-30, 2025 bit.ly/3QYtOx5 @AACR
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tbepler@tbepler111 Feb 2025
Excited to share PoET-2, our next breakthrough in protein language modeling. It represents a fundamental shift in how AI learns from evolutionary sequences. 🧵 1/13
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Engineered cells are finding their way into agriculture, living materials, consumer products and medicines. How do we design these cells and adapt regulatory rules to facilitate their safe and efficient use? #synbio #biotech rdcu.be/d8xLG
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Apply now, spread the word: three (3) fully funded Helmholtz research groups (assistant prof level) with attractive packages. Topics: RNA-based medicine, microbial RNA, and RNA-based infection research incl. RNA technologies. Great environment for young people. Come and join us.
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Yong Lai retweeted
Timothy Lu@timlu3 Dec 2024
Very excited to share details on SENTI-202 clinical trial - 2 of 3 pts achieved MRD negative CR in 1st dose level evaluated with a generally well-tolerated preliminary safety profile. Both patients continue to maintain remission (4+ and 3+ months, respectively). $SNTI
Senti Biosciences
@SentiBio2 Dec 2024
Today, we announced positive initial clinical data from the Phase 1 trial of SENTI-202, a potential first-in-class, off-the-shelf #CARNK #celltherapy for R/R hematologic malignancies, including #AML. Learn more on our webcast on Dec. 3 at 7:30am ET: bit.ly/4eUaKtb $SNTI
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Today, we announced positive initial clinical data from the Phase 1 trial of SENTI-202, a potential first-in-class, off-the-shelf #CARNK #celltherapy for R/R hematologic malignancies, including #AML. Learn more on our webcast on Dec. 3 at 7:30am ET: bit.ly/4eUaKtb $SNTI
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