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Antonio Regalado Profile picture
Antonio Regalado
@antonioregalado
Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order - {Sydney Brenner}. I write about biotech @MIT @techreview
8 subscribers
Dec 16 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Claim: a stem-cell first

This company's IVF technology matures eggs in a culture of iPSC (induced stem cell)-derived ovarian cells.

A baby was born in their trial, marking "first ever human birth using using iPSC technology" company claims.

couple comment in 🧵 Main takeaway. Almost out of blue, this IVF tech could be on track become the first treatment using pluripotent stem cells -- i.e. stem cells with embryonic properties that can make anything.
Mar 5 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Doctors in Germany study man who received 217 (!! 🤪)) Covid-19 vaccinations. Image He got

1 J&J
5 Astra Zeneca
211 mRNA (Moderna and Biontech)

Here is the chart of his activities from the case report, published in Lancet Infectious diseases Image
Aug 23, 2023 • 16 tweets • 6 min read
Did covid-19 start in Wuhan? Not according to China's patent office.

The intellectual property organization is changing the text of patents on drugs and vaccines to remove references to covid-19's starting place.

Examples follow. 🧵 First, the (im)moral of the story. China alters the facts in technical documents for what are likely political reasons and U.S. corporations go along with it.
Jan 27, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Eric Lander will return next month to Broad Institute and faculty positions at MIT and Harvard. He was on two-year leave to serve as White House science adviser, but got booted from that post for bullying.

Todd Golub remains director of Broad.

intranet.broadinstitute.org/news/eric-land… This seems to settle the succession question at the Broad Institute, which was founded by Lander. Over the years, other contenders, like David Altschuler and Aviv Regev, departed for industry.
Dec 13, 2022 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
Documentary about the CRISPR babies saga is out.

Features unusual access to recorded calls with Jiankui He, the Chinese scientist involved + who this year got out of prison. Also a unique interview with his American PR rep, Ryan (no surname used).

I am in the movie, too. 1/x 2/ I travelled with this documentary team to China in Oct/Nov 2018 on the *theory* that if there were CRISPR babies, they would be found in China. (this was before the news broke).

Here is the crew filming with Harvard Prof. George Church in China.
Nov 6, 2022 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
An "single patient" IND for a CRISPR therapy for muscular dystrophy: the patient died.

What does it mean for genetic therapy? Lack of clear info makes this one tough to analyze... I looked around but couldn't easily locate either a clear description of the product, code name CRD-TMH-001, nor the dose.
Nov 1, 2022 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
Drama for non-profit news house @propublica after co-signing Covid-19 lab leak article with @VanityFair . that divined hidden meaning in Chinese lab safety documents. Were translations correct?

New kid news org @semafor has scoop on post-facto effort to check translation. "Three people with direct knowledge told Semafor that editors at the nonprofit news organization have been reaching out to Mandarin translators about whether the publication correctly quoted a communist party dispatch regarding safety in the Wuhan." -- @maxwelltani
Oct 19, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Pretty strong indictment of Boston University (in the news for carrying out engineering of SARS-CoV-2.)

Despite having the privilege of top security lab, university is in "full denial mode" about their responsibilities and blowing smoke at public.
1/2 2/2
 one's mind goes immediately to, if there were a lab accident/lab release at B.U., how would they handle?
Aug 25, 2022 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
NIH cancels @EcoHealthNYC program that passed U.S. (NIH) funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for genetic engineering of bat coronaviruses.

Reason: WIV/EcoHealth not willing/able to produce lab records. NIH in the dark. republicans-oversight.house.gov/wp-content/upl… Image The specifics of the research carried out at WIV w/ EcoHealth funding is central to questions about research safety and because it created the conditions for a possible "lab-leak" .
Aug 4, 2022 • 33 tweets • 10 min read
Our story on Renewal Bio, the Israeli startup launching into the fraught arena of manufacturing synthetic models of human embryos.

Using artificial embryos as "bioprinters"

-grow them 50 days?
-harvest gonads for fertility?

🧵

technologyreview.com/2022/08/04/105… 2/ This company is based on remarkable results from the lab of stem-cell whiz Jacob Hanna of Weizmann Institute in Rehovot Israel, published Monday in the journal Cell.
cell.com/cell/fulltext/…
Apr 29, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Half hour interview with Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan carried out by Eric Topol. medscape.com/viewarticle/97… It's sort of agonizing..
Apr 27, 2022 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Discussion of a recent Wapo editorial concerning the earliest sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 in China, based on recovered messages from a commercial scientists in China. The earliest date has never been clear to me. The Wapo editorial states "On Jan. 5, after a 40-hour shift in the lab, professor Yong-Zhen Zhang of Fudan University in Shanghai sequenced the genome based on a sample from Wuhan."
Mar 5, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Following huge IPO, synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks has seen stock decline ~ 67%. It now has a market cap of ~ $5 to 6 billion. That's around its valuation in last venture rounds before going public (considering company now has about $1.7 billion in cash). 🧵 This thread went on to discuss share sales by Viking Global---but a tweeter says I have misread the document (share conversion instead of share sale). Thread deleted until i figure it out!
Jan 27, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Listening to Knight Foundation session on misinformation and Covid-19. Covid origins reporter Jane Qui with interesting remarks about overt and covert campaigns by China and US governments.

overt is like China foreign minister saying that covid comes from Ft. Detrick

covert is US gov official feeding their lab leak suspicions to reporters, who report suspicions and convert them into a form of evidence
Jan 20, 2022 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
"cellular rejuvenation programming"

This was the little analyzed new technical coinage in the Altos Labs news and press release yesterday.

I expect they thought about it.

A thread 🧵 The phrase is in their P.R.---it's even in their press release URL.

This is the term they picked to describe their technology and approach, probably after much thought

prnewswire.com/news-releases/…
Jan 19, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Altos Labs came out of stealth today with $3 billion in funding.

Mission: unravel deep biology of cellular rejuvenation programming

Funders: They don't disclose ((only ARCH))

Full list of the scientists that joined is here.
altoslabs.com Here is the PR release: prnewswire.com/news-releases/…
Jan 14, 2022 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
The first annual letter from Noubar Afeyan, head of Flagship Pioneering, one of the main biotech venture companies in Boston (and notably, creator of Moderna).

Noubar is an unusual character so I will give some highlights from letter.🧵

flagshippioneering.com/stories/2022-a… Also, as a biotech journalist focused on emerging stuff, i am interested in how VCs categorize technologies and the framings they use.
Jan 12, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Looks like House Republicans released the text of the famously blacked out emails between Fauci and virology leader on virus origins from very early 2020.
1/2 2/3 the blacked out regions primarily their strong suspicions of a lab origin--mostly in connection to the presence of a "furin" site in the genome.
republicans-oversight.house.gov/wp-content/upl…
Jan 11, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Bill Gates gets question of where SARS-CoV-2 comes from and responds.🚀

Both Q and A are a bit veiled--but this is about the lab leak hypothesis.

I understand Gates answer -- *speculation will continue* -- to mean he isn't sure where it came from and further Qs are merited
1/2 2/2 This is an interesting answer from Gates and arguably state-of-the-art. It echoes corona master Ralph Baric in May 2020, when he wrote “speculation about accidental laboratory escape will likely persist." That was a (very) subtle💣shell.
Jan 7, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
~From mRNA covid vaccines to gene editing rare diseases, it's the rise of "programmable" medicine, and the venture fund a16z has another $1.5 bn to spend on it. it happens that the the tech of mRNA vaccine (RNA in a lipid) also maybe *the* future tech for gene editing disease. because scientists can load the CRISPR editing machinery as RNA in the lipid, instead of the virus spike protein.
Jan 1, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Seems as if the in vitro and clinical results for remdesivir are as good as/similar for paxlovid. So why is the latter being hailed as breakthrough whereas former is not even recommended by WHO ?

Anyone know?🧵 with some links yeah paxlovid is a pill and remdesivir is an IV drip, meaning the latter is harder to deliver.

But even so, seems like remdesivir is very far from panacea. some people claim its useless?