notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #214

engineers coaxed those few devices out of a toolset built for chips, and each one takes years of process work to get up and running. Atomic Machines wants to go after a whole new swath of sci-fi products now that they've made it easier: gears the size of a grain of sand, robots that work inside the body, cooling built into AI chips, even a device that runs instant blood tests — Holden argues that her dream was possible, but needed a manufacturing technology that didn't exist yet.

upstartsmedia.com

Reviving Mammoths, Raising Billions, And Building Noah’s Ark 2.0, With Colossal’s Ben Lamm

"We are trying to do things in science where one little slice of it would win a Nobel Prize," he claims. Much of that work is in gene editing, where Colossal has gone from 20 gene edits to engineer a dire wolf to tests involving a thousand.

notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #212

The pharma industry spends enormous effort and money figuring out how to manufacture medicines and get them into people, repeatedly, over and over. If we can safely teach people's own cells to handle more of that manufacturing, we could give people more time living their lives, less time receiving infusions, and ultimately, longer, healthier lives.

notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #199

Most of us will spend 5% of our lives (!) sick from these viruses, they kill 1M people a year, cost $600B annually in productivity, and periodically threaten civilization through pandemics. But respiratory infections are technically challenging and they've been underfunded, so we haven't made much progress against them.

notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #197

The work is based on Japanese Nobel Laureate Shinya Yamanaka's eponymous Yakanama Factors, four genes that can rewind any adult cell all the way back to a stem-cell state. The problem is, a reset retina cell forgets it's a retina cell. So Life Bio uses three of the four factors (dropping c-Myc, the one most tied to cancer) and nudges the cells only partway back: younger, but still themselves.

notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #193

Daraxonrasib targets RAS, a cancer-driving protein found in roughly 25% of human cancers and more than 90% of pancreatic cancers, long considered "undruggable." This isn't a cure, but it is a crack, an early sign of the undruggable becoming druggable.