đŸ©ș doctor defected to tech đŸ‘šđŸŒâ€đŸ’» prev engineer @exolabs | medicine @uniofoxford | ML @imperialcollege

Joined August 2021
I just sequenced a human genome to 30× coverage entirely at home. As far as I know, this is the first time this has been done. I didn’t step foot in a lab once. Every step - from saliva collection, to running the sequencer - took place in a single room with a dining table + kitchenette. Six weeks ago, I had never done wet lab biology before. I used an Oxford Nanopore P2 Solo - the only commercially available sequencing device portable enough to do 30x human genome sequencing at home. Biggest takeaway - I could build something that combined software, hardware, and molecular biology far faster than I thought was possible. I can name >100 specific instances where AI helped me solve a technical problem that would previously have blocked me because I lacked access to a domain expert. For example: how do I save my sequencing run when my DNA extraction yield is 4x lower than I need it to be, and I have this limited set of reagents to hand? To make this work, I had to navigate multiple disciplines: - writing software to monitor sequencing runs and orchestrate remote GPU infra for basecalling - learning + executing 5 hour long molecular biology protocols - building a hardware device to quantify DNA concentration Apologies for the hyperbole, but I feel super lucky to be living in 2026. A few weeks ago I decided to sequence a human genome to 30x at home. Then I actually did it. And I did it really quickly.
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I lost my dog because we could not build her next mRNA cancer vaccine fast enough Today we are announcing a $4M seed led by @foundersfund to change that.
Curing dog cancer We are bringing personalized mRNA cancer vaccines to dogs and building the evidence to show how well they work. We have raised a $4M seed led by @foundersfund to make it happen This investment allows us to launch a clinical trial to validate the personalized cancer treatment protocol we developed for Rosie. If your dog has cancer or you know someone whose dog does, please tell them about Gamgee.
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My dog Rosie was given months to live. Chemo and immunotherapy failed I used chatgpt + computational genomics to design a personalised mRNA cancer vaccine for her tumour. Several of her tumours shrank Today we launch Gamgee (YC S26): personalised mRNA cancer vaccines for dogs
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New Huang lab publication at Nature. Our newly developed technique: transient Pore Analyte Looping (tPAL) now achieves “chop and measure” nanopore sequencing of peptide, in an amino acid by amino acid manner. nature.com/articles/s41586-0

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Seth Howes retweeted
Big news today. Science's PRIMA visual prosthesis, our retinal implant for macular degeneration, has received its CE mark, which means marketing approval in Europe. This is a huge milestone to begin to have a device like this commercially available to regular patients. 1/
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this is insanely cool. running a language model on the same microprocessor that powered the apple ii in 1975.
I built a 50k parameter language model to run on an 8-bit 6502 processor from 1975. It learnt to spell words and construct basic grammar! The model is build on a Mamba backbone (attention’s KV cache not fit in 32KB of memory) with a character-level tokenizer. The MOS-6502 doesn’t have a ‘multiply’ instruction - only 8-bit integer addition. I therefore used ternary weights to reduce matrix multiplication to a series of add/subtracts operations. Technical write-up here: mattbeton.com/blog/bitnet-65
 Source code: github.com/MattBeton/BitNet6

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Seth Howes retweeted
I built a 50k parameter language model to run on an 8-bit 6502 processor from 1975. It learnt to spell words and construct basic grammar! The model is build on a Mamba backbone (attention’s KV cache not fit in 32KB of memory) with a character-level tokenizer. The MOS-6502 doesn’t have a ‘multiply’ instruction - only 8-bit integer addition. I therefore used ternary weights to reduce matrix multiplication to a series of add/subtracts operations. Technical write-up here: mattbeton.com/blog/bitnet-65
 Source code: github.com/MattBeton/BitNet6

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Anyone can now sequence their genome at home.
i have now sequenced my own DNA 5x at home and learned so much about myself i wrote out the protocol here so anyone can follow it and talk to their DNA: bradleywoolf.com/links-1/seq
 a lot of people helped with this, they are all mentioned below
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Seth Howes retweeted
Automated liquid handlers for biology are much older than I thought. A rough timeline: - The 96-well plate is invented in 1951 by a Hungarian physician, Gyula TakĂĄtsy, who physically drilled each well out of a plate of Lucite, a type of acrylic. - John Sever made the first "modern-looking" 96-well plate by punching it directly out of a sheet of plastic. - The first automated liquid-handling device was released in 1967 (!!!). It was called the Autotiter, and was developed by a man named Tom Astle. I found a few sentences on Astle's company: "Tomtec has succeeded since 1967 by working with its clients to help solve their liquid handling needs. From 1967 to 1981, the Company had essentially one employee, Tom Astle. From 1967 to 1971, the Company operated as Astec, Inc. In 1971 the Company's name was changed to Tomtec, and incorporated. Tom Astle has been the President and CEO since that time. In 1967, Tomtec developed the Autotiter. This automated what were then the manual microtiter techniques. The primary market was serology and virology. The original instruments were an essential element of Smith Kline's rubella vaccine program." (Photos of the original patent filing below.) - In 1986, Beckman gets into the microplate automation space. They release the Biomek 1000 and mark it as a "fast and accurate...robotic workstation" that sits on a scientist's bench, "takes over tedious manual tasks and integrates the work of four different instruments." I found these details in a Beckman ad, which was published in a 1987 issue of the "Journal of Automatic Chemistry." Photos below. The Beckman device looks fully modern; it could even connect to an IBM computer so scientists could program new methods on it. I couldn't find a launch price, but the device was similar to the Zymark Zymate, and that device cost about $35,000 when it released in the 1980s, which would be equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars today.
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Seth Howes retweeted
The pMHC binding with an antibody is so crazy to me. If the binding is general across patient MHCs, you can basically target cancer driver mutations with antibodies (which Revolution meds showed was effective towards pancreatic cancer). Step change, congrats to @nablabio team!
Today, we expand zero-shot drug design beyond binding to the design of multifunctional medicines, the intracellular proteome, and state-of-the-art atomic precision with our model, JAM-2. In a new report (below), we show: 1. The first drug-grade, fully computationally designed multispecific antibodies against five peptide-MHCs: Routine picomolar T-cell activation/cell-killing EC50s, >100-fold selectivity, and drug-like developability 2. The first fully generatively designed, drug-grade dual-variant KRAS G12 multispecifics: They recruit primary T-cells from human donors to kill G12V and G12C presenting cells at pM to single-digit-nM potency, completely sparing wild-type. 3. Atomic accuracy, from sequence alone: Angstrom-level agreement between Cryo-EM and JAM-2 de novo designs, requiring only target sequences (not structure) as input. 4. Unrivaled speed with an AI-native in-house wet lab: Designed, built, and tested five programs in one parallelized campaign, end-to-end in-house in ~6 weeks. 5. A higher validation bar for AI-generated drug candidates: In a field increasingly rife with hype and uneven standards of proof, we provide the highest quality public wet-lab validation of AI-designed antibodies to date. We share experimental methods in full, and invite folks to adopt and build on these standards. Truly individualized therapies will be the most important contribution of AI in drug design. These advances help accelerate this future.
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There’s a cafe in Shenzen’s biotech hub that gives you free coffee for a month if you publish in Nature or Science.
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I’m in Shenzen. It’s clear China has implemented a much more effective capitalist system than the US. And Chinese consumers are the main beneficiaries. Far more choice of cheaper, quality products: electric cars, smartphones etc. And these are not just copycat products. Even industrial design here feels like an evolution of what I’ve seen in the US. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next iPhone looks similar to a current model of phone made by Honor or Huawei. A more accurate description of the US economic system might be “capitalism with American characteristics”
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The first company I’ve seen that looks structurally capable of solving biological intelligence. It must be your sworn mandate to solve BOTH: 1) biological design. 2) biological safety. You cannot choose one. If you choose only “design,” you build capability you cannot responsibly deploy (or you get blocked from doing so). Either way the growth of your company is retarded. If you choose only “safety,” your organisation is by its very nature reactive: you wait for frontier models to arrive, built by others, then try to govern them. Radical Numerics is one of the first companies actually structured around the premise you have to solve both. I've followed the founder's work since they were at the Arc Institute, and was one of the first to download the Evo 2 weights (40b) from Hugging Face and run it locally. I also had the pleasure of meeting them in SF last month. My read: this is the highest-density team in generative genomics. They have the technical authority. They birthed the field. They understand how to model-scaling problem and have done interesting work on solving this for biological model architectures - just take a look at their work on hardware-aware training / low-level NVIDIA-specific optimisations. And crucially, they seem to understand that a biology model capable of writing biology cannot be safely diffused UNLESS safety is built into the core technical agenda. So the only viable path is: solve design + safety TOGETHER.
Together with my co-founders Michael @MichaelPoli6, Stefano @Massastrello and Armin @athmsx, I am excited to announce @RadicalNumerics is emerging from stealth with a $50M seed round to build general biological intelligence. We’re also sharing an early preview of our new model Omnii, the most powerful genome language model to date. Omnii preview link: radicalnumerics.ai/blog/radi
 At Radical Numerics, our mission is to master the code of life, and to drive the frontier of biological AI for both design and defense. This is our dual mandate, which comes from something our own team helped make possible. Our founding team trained Evo and Evo 2, the largest biological AI models (40B params) trained on DNA sequences. Trillions of tokens across all of life, from microbes to mammals. It’s fully open source, and created the field now known as generative genomics. Last year, scientists used Evo to generate the world’s first complete genome from scratch using AI. Turns out it was a bacteriophage—a type of virus. It functioned in the real world, and in this case it was harmless. But for us, it was a clear turning point. It showed that AI is no longer just analyzing biology. It is on the cusp of generating functional lifeforms. Eventually, AI will have the power to design and control life itself. That should make all of us incredibly excited, and incredibly uneasy. (Anyone can design DNA with a new function, and have it synthesized and delivered, like something from Amazon Prime). The same technology that will help us cure cancer is the very technology that might create the next global pandemic, or worse, allow the creation of bioweapons that can wipe out populations. We believe these forces are inseparable. If you work on the frontier of biology, you have to build technology to safeguard it from its misuse. Existing biosecurity tools are sorely losing the arms race, relying on outdated “have I seen this exact thing before?” style algorithms. We founded Radical Numerics to turn the tide. And we can’t do that by training on textbooks and natural language. We must understand the language of biology from the raw physical data itself, to reason across every molecule and modality, from DNA to proteins. The next frontier for AI goes far beyond chatbots or video generators to models that can understand and engineer life. Today, we’re previewing Omnii, which is already far surpassing Evo 2, and will continue improving as we scale and add new modalities (training now). 1. For human health, Omnii can read and write whole genomes (more on writing later). It’s state of the art (SOTA) on detecting causal variants for disease, and can rank Alzheimer's mutations zero-shot. We’re partnering with a diagnostics company to use Omnii for early cancer detection (pancreatic and multi-cancer). 2. For defense, Omnii is SOTA at detecting AI-generated pathogens. We benchmarked existing detection tools, and they simply can’t detect the AI-generated ones (“deepfake viruses”). We’re partnering with a US national lab to pilot Omnii for detecting the next pandemic, both natural and AI-generated. We have a data center full of Blackwells in construction now to build the most powerful biological AI models ever. This mission takes a new kind of AI lab that can actually scale on physical, biological data: new alignment research (mid/post training), scaling long context, building out mech interp teams to dissect what these models learn, new architectures and systems designs, all from the ground up. Our team is made up of AI researchers and scientists from top labs and institutions (e.g. Stanford, MIT, Google DeepMind), but more importantly, we all share the belief that this is the most important challenge of our lifetime. If you feel similarly, we are hiring. We aim to bring the brightest minds in AI and science together to save lives. Thanks to our partners on this journey, led by Emergence Capital @emergencecap, with Obvious Ventures @obviousvc, Triatomic @TriatomicCap , and Patrick Collison @patrickc. Our advisors include Eric Horvitz @erichorvitz, CSO of Microsoft, Chris Re @HazyResearch of Stanford, George Church @geochurch of Harvard, and Andrew Weber @AndyWeberNCB, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs. Fortune article: fortune.com/2026/06/15/exclu
 Jobs: radicalnumerics.ai/join-us
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perhaps Anthropic are overreacting by blocking fable usage for bio oh wait

I just sequenced a human genome to 30× coverage entirely at home. As far as I know, this is the first time this has been done. I didn’t step foot in a lab once. Every step - from saliva collection, to running the sequencer - took place in a single room with a dining table + kitchenette. Six weeks ago, I had never done wet lab biology before. I used an Oxford Nanopore P2 Solo - the only commercially available sequencing device portable enough to do 30x human genome sequencing at home. Biggest takeaway - I could build something that combined software, hardware, and molecular biology far faster than I thought was possible. I can name >100 specific instances where AI helped me solve a technical problem that would previously have blocked me because I lacked access to a domain expert. For example: how do I save my sequencing run when my DNA extraction yield is 4x lower than I need it to be, and I have this limited set of reagents to hand? To make this work, I had to navigate multiple disciplines: - writing software to monitor sequencing runs and orchestrate remote GPU infra for basecalling - learning + executing 5 hour long molecular biology protocols - building a hardware device to quantify DNA concentration Apologies for the hyperbole, but I feel super lucky to be living in 2026. A few weeks ago I decided to sequence a human genome to 30x at home. Then I actually did it. And I did it really quickly.
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Seth Howes retweeted
Today, we are launching our research blog! We’ll use it for technical notes from our work building tools for enzyme and biomolecular design. Our first post is about The Unreasonable Redundancy of Nature's Protein Folds. TLDR: Please don't fold more sequences (1/n)
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yes.
My latest article is about how the longevity movement should not be about wellness tips and tricks and lifestyle improvements, but rather, true, biotech-enabled life extension and life improvement. We should be able to live exciting lives, without restriction. Forever.
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Checked out of my hotel room but no worries - I can keep sequencing. I’m eking out that final 5% data yield in the hotel lobby before my flight in 3 hours. This is truly sequencing anywhere. Maybe i should keep sequencing at 30,000 feet

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