
I run @PopVaxIndia (https://xitter.cf/t.co/dOKb3wZ7pr) – we develop mRNA vaccines and therapeutics using computational protein design. I write at https://xitter.cf/t.co/reAXhjkSrU
Hyderabad / Mumbai
Joined August 2009
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On August 31, the first two participants were injected with @PopVaxIndia’s first fridge-stable RNA vaccine candidate in a Phase I clinical trial in Australia. We built this vaccine at our RNA Foundry in Hyderabad – from computational design to GMP manufacturing. Here's how:
Soham Sankaran retweeted
Going for a walk in India often feels like a video game.
On the footpath you're dodging:
- Holes
- Hoardings
- Construction
- Electrical boxes
And when you finally give up and hit the road you're brushing shoulders with autos, wrong-side drivers, buses and water tankers.
Soham Sankaran retweeted
It is true. Neal Stephenson will be on the Core Memory podcast this week, and we will be digging into space, AI, swords, BCIs, the nature of reality and his new book
One of Samarth's most intriguing ideas -- we've been talking about it for months. Well worth the read!
It may be possible to train music generation models which have a shot at treating, and perhaps even preventing Alzheimer's.
It'd take ~$5m to build and run trials for what could become one of the most widely deployed public health interventions.
jajoo.sh/gamma
Have been saying that a lot of long COVID may be viral reactivation for a long time! @VitalikButerin and Balvi have been funding pioneering work in this space, including some of Akiko's!
Grateful to @NPR for the chance to talk about how stress and infections like COVID can stir dormant viruses in our bodies, and what that may mean for our immune system. Still much to learn, and I’m thankful to my team and colleagues for their work 🎧 npr.org/2026/10/23/nx-s1-598…
Soham Sankaran retweeted
For code to be considered law, it has to be open. But codification of law with software is resulting in black box governance, where one won't know what is the code? We are ending up with Kafka's trial where you are punished because they won't tell you what the law is.
I wonder if an Indian deeptech fund run by actual deeptech founders could raise $100m... @akadogluk @Itamar_Bitan and I have been talking about this. Maybe @ashleevance can find us some LPs.
We should call it the Cowardice Fund!
infinitesunrise.com/p/overco…
Why are Indian VCs so afraid to take risk and make money?
Someone should go to India and take risk and make money.
Our story - corememory.com/p/a-new-india…
Soham Sankaran retweeted
It's not just that Indian VCs tend to have far less risk-appetite than US VCs, which is frustrating but one can be charitable (straitjacketed by LPs, European and other geo VCs are similar). It's the delta of quality between US vs Indian VCs that makes founders lose respect.
(n = 80, 65% US)
1. I can't think of any US VC interaction that went past 4 weeks and didn't lead to a check, most tend to say no quick. I can think of multiple (5+) Indian VCs that dragged things on with multiple calls and field visits, asking the same questions, then passed for inane reasons. The worst just ghosted us (happened at least 3 times)
2. Related - For our preseed/seed, US VCs often passed for not having conviction in idea/team. Indian VCs often passed for "lack of commercial traction". This is pissing off for anyone building in deeptech/bio and short-circuits how ambitious founders can be
3. While many great US VCs were never founders themselves, as others have noted, there are enough former-founder VCs + higher level of respect for what it takes to be in the trenches, that it reshapes cultural norms to be way more founder-friendly
4. Related - While there are many great Indian VCs, the proportion with partners/analysts who drip with arrogance is much higher than it should be. Every founder can tell you awful stories about the fresh-off-IIT/IIM analyst who thought they knew more about their tech/business from an hour of chatGPT. What does it tell about the funds that their hiring process leads to having such ppl gatekeeping their dealflow?
5. In general, being a founder in the US is higher status than being VC, the reverse seems true in India
1) @ashleevance is providing spotlight to a sector which is under-served.
2) Sample size of 15 is >15, each of those founders have their own networks & echo that experience.
3) most of the VCs who are taking offense are ghosters.
The good ones know a lot more needs to be done
Fascinating that this could go unnoticed for so long!
Soham Sankaran retweeted
1/2 While reading the RFD4 paper, I think it's over for triangular attention in future co-folding models, favoring more computationally efficient triangular matmuls as an inductive bias to inject geometric reasoning along with other modeling tasks during training
Soham Sankaran retweeted
What is happening in Andhra Pradesh is extraordinary. Opposition candidates are being brazenly prevented by the ruling TDP goons from filing nomination papers. All in full view & connivance of the police & poll officers!
TDP making a mockery of Democracy
Soham Sankaran retweeted
Ever wondered what it’s like to learn robot autonomy @Stanford? Now you can.
Today, we’re opening up the robot autonomy teaching materials that my collaborators and I have been developing over the past several years—for anyone, anywhere, completely free.
At the heart of this effort is Principles of Robot Autonomy (PoRA), a textbook inspired by the Stanford robot autonomy course series I’ve been teaching since 2017.
Robot autonomy has evolved from a research discipline into a technology deployed in the real world. Building capable autonomous systems requires more than understanding individual algorithms: it requires understanding how perception, state estimation, planning, control, and learning work together in a complete autonomy stack.
That’s what we set out to teach with PoRA: bringing classical robotics and modern AI together in one coherent framework, grounded in both theory and practice.
Coming soon in print from Cambridge University Press, Principles of Robot Autonomy is also freely available online and comes with a comprehensive collection of open educational resources:
📖 Textbook, arxiv.org/abs/2608.03496 — Foundations of robot autonomy, from classical methods to modern AI-based approaches.
🎥 Video lectures, porabook.com/lectures/ Lectures from my Stanford courses on robot autonomy and on optimal and learning-based control.
💻 Interactive exercises, porabook.com/exercises/ — Hands-on Python implementations and Jupyter notebooks.
📝 Teaching materials, porabook.com/instructors/ — Lecture slides and resources for instructors.
🌐 Explore all PoRA resources, porabook.com/ — Including Ask the Book, an AI study assistant integrated throughout the textbook to answer questions, explain derivations, and connect ideas across chapters.
📣 Read the Stanford announcement: news.stanford.edu/stories/20…
Our goal is simple: to make high-quality education in robot autonomy accessible to students, researchers, engineers, educators, and anyone curious about how autonomous robotic systems work.
I believe that sharing knowledge is fundamental to the mission of a university. Autonomous robotics—and Physical AI more broadly—are among the defining technological frontiers of our time. We want to help more people understand these technologies, build with them, and advance the field.
A huge thank you to my co-authors, @DanieleGammelli, Joseph Lorenzetti, @katielulula, and @GioeleZardini, and to everyone who helped bring this project to life.
Explore the resources, use them in your own learning or teaching, and please share them with anyone who might find them useful!
#Robotics #PhysicalAI #ArtificialIntelligence #AutonomousSystems #Education
@Stanford @StanfordEng @StanfordAILab @StanfordHAI
Soham Sankaran retweeted
Antigen discovery and TB vax friends 🧵
We set out to find more Mtb peptides presented on MHC-I. We had a strong biological prior, a high-throughput binding screen, and a very sensitive targeted MS assay.
Of 286 candidates, we detected 2.
biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
PopVax's first vaccine entered a Phase I clinical trial on August 31. We're following this up with an ambitious pipeline of vaccines (HCV, TB, Strep A, rabies) and cancer therapeutics (liver & pancreatic cancer). Come help us develop new medicines to save 1 million lives each year! Here are some key open positions:
Principal Scientist - Analytical Method Development (jobs.popvax.com/30208) and Senior Scientist - HPLC Method Development (jobs.popvax.com/41508): We design millions of new molecules – proteins, RNA, LNPs, and more. Your job is to figure out how to characterize them at high-throughput without sacrificing rigour, repeatability, and robustness, as well as to help make those methods GMP-grade as part of the handover to QC. We intend to take new medicines into clinical trials in weeks, not years, so we need to build adaptable analytical platforms, not bespoke methods that work for only one molecule. We strongly prefer candidates with the ability to write code to build automated data analysis pipelines for their methods – LLM-generated code is fine as long as you are able to comprehensively validate the logic and output of the pipelines.
Head of Quality Control (jobs.popvax.com/41525) – We manufacture our own clinical doses at the RNA Foundry, and every analytical method we develop for a new molecule eventually has to become a validated QC method. You’ll lead the team that tests every batch to international GMP standards, take on method transfers from analytical development, and build a QC function that can keep pace with a pipeline aiming to reach the clinic in weeks, not years.
Junior Scientist - Vaccine Immunology (jobs.popvax.com/37003) – Our vaccine programs halt or advance on the immunogenicity data that comes back from animal and organoid studies. You’ll run the assays that produce that data – ELISAs, pseudovirus neutralization, and bacterial growth-inhibition assays – and coordinate animal studies with our internal teams and CROs, following each study from plan to samples to result. We prefer candidates who can write code for routine data analysis.
Head of Legal (jobs.popvax.com/41524) – Our first vaccine was manufactured in India, was filled into vials in the US, and has now entered a clinical trial in Australia. We work with dozens of counterparties – funders, governments, universities, CROs, and suppliers – with more added each week. You’ll own the day-to-day of our Indian legal work, from contracts to compliance to labour law, work with the legal teams supporting our UK and Australian operations, and make sure paperwork is never the bottleneck between our new medicines and the clinic.
Chief of Staff to the Chief Science Officer: Our CSO needs a partner who can take experimental planning and coordination off his plate so that he can spend more time thinking hard about our thorniest problems. You will turn complex scientific hypotheses into clear executable plans, coordinate with scientists to see each experiment through, and analyze the data to help plan the next round of iteration. You’ll need a strong scientific background, a sharp eye for detail, and boundless energy to keep ambitious scientific work moving. To apply, email dhruv [at] popvax [dot] com with a human-written explanation of why you’re the best person for the job.
If none of these are a good fit, take a look popvax.com/jobs or email us at work [at] popvax [dot] com.
On August 31, the first two participants were injected with @PopVaxIndia’s first fridge-stable RNA vaccine candidate in a Phase I clinical trial in Australia. We built this vaccine at our RNA Foundry in Hyderabad – from computational design to GMP manufacturing. Here's how:
Soham Sankaran retweeted
4 weeks is also the speed we should strive for to respond to new outbreaks, especially as AI lowers barriers to engineering viruses. This is why @sohamsankaran & I are working on @PopVaxIndia's Immune Engine to make rapid therapeutics a reality.
More here
chronicles.popvax.com/p/apoc…
Soham Sankaran retweeted
Congratulations to @cspramesh on his successful election to the Presidentship of the International Union for Cancer Control. He takes office in 2028 and serves on the Board as President-elect. Pramesh is Director of Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai, and Professor and Head of Thoracic Surgery at Tata Memorial Centre. He is also Convener of the National Cancer Grid, a network of over 400 cancer centres, research institutions and patient advocacy groups. He already sits on the boards of UICC and ASCO. Pramesh is accessible and proactively helpful in his official role as well ass outside. A well-deserved recognition, which comes with many tough demands: Which he will surely meet
Soham Sankaran retweeted
I am very, very, very bullish on commercial space in India. It will take a decade, but it's the only country with a real chance of competing alongside the U.S. and China. corememory.com/p/a-new-india…
Incredible work from Kieran and colleagues!
Avengers assemble: 1 year BakerLab + NVIDIA GenAIR = 🔥 rfd4-proteina.org
Presenting RFD4-Proteina, our latest protein design model, significantly better and faster than everything we compared against, both in silico and in the lab! 1/30


























