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A thread about the unreasonable effectiveness of writing on the internet, or how I got 8.6 million dollars from a blog post
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Alex Telford
1.3K posts
Alex Telford
@Atelfo
Tweets about the biotech industry, science, progress, and innovation | founder @Convokebio
San Francisco, USA Katılım Ağustos 2016
403 Takip Edilen5.5K Takipçiler
Alex Telford retweetledi
Going Founder Mode On Cancer
centuryofbio.com/p/sid
Sid Sijbrandij is a generational founder. He founded and led GitLab, one of the largest remote companies in the world, from idea-stage startup to NASDAQ-listed software giant.
But in 2022, a six centimeter mass growing from his upper spine threatened to end all of that. He had cancer.
What happened next is nothing short of remarkable. Sid went founder mode on his care journey. In the years since, he's deployed cutting-edge genomics to profile his disease. Based on this data, he's developed a growing armamentarium of personalized therapies.
As a result, his disease is now undetectable.
A simplistic version of this story could be, “Wow! A brilliant billionaire seemingly cured his cancer. Good for him!”
But as I’ve gotten to know Sid, it’s become abundantly clear to me that there is more to the story than that.
In an in-depth profile for The Century of Biology, I explore Sid's journey and what this might mean for the future of cancer care.
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What will the ideal AI agent orchestrator look like?
- starcraft, age of empires, factorio
- list of chats, aka cursor
- CLI tabs
- linear
???
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There's no guarantee that Kendall square is going to remain a biotech hub. Every 20-30 years or so a new industry has replaced the previously dominant one; before biotech it was AI, before that it was minicomputers, hard candy, and soap
The Wall Street Journal@WSJ
A life-sciences job in Boston used to be a sure path to a high-paying career, but empty labs and unemployed grads now herald tougher times in the city on.wsj.com/44PnfEl
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Dave Ricks on @stripe's podcast is the best pharma exec interview I've listened to in a good while.
My notes on the conversation, Lilly's DTC strategy, and how they're using the capital influx from GLP-1s to build a new type of pharma business model: atelfo.github.io/2025/12/07/goi…
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Alex Telford retweetledi
Ask not why would you work in biology, but rather: why wouldn't you?
owlposting.com/p/ask-not-why-…
openai/gemini gave this essay an A- for evocative imagery. claude gave it a C- for being emotionally manipulative. both are probably right. i feel a little sick re-reading it
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@RuxandraTeslo @PatientPersists @robertwiblin You can still do that in other countries, but I'm thinking more from the org/team perspective and you seem to be coming more from the ecosystem perspective. In that case I agree that doing trials abroad means that knowledge in the exporting region will decay, like manufacturing
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@Atelfo @PatientPersists @robertwiblin that's how drugs used to be discovered back in the good old days of organic chemistry! I know the costs are higher now regardless but if we could get just a bit of that back....
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I'm looking to do a few interviews about big important ideas (not to do with AI in particular).
What's the non-fiction book / paper / article you've read that most changed your view of the world?
Or was just generally mind-blowing.
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@RuxandraTeslo @PatientPersists @robertwiblin Yes fair, probably many things with high RoI to find in this vein even any one improvement is small in effect e.g. align US phase 1 with AUS. It's plausible to me that the right answer ends up being do all trials in China!
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I don't think we've had a similar effort or even 1/1000 of the similar effort in pushing back against the accretion of stuff that makes clinical development (so more than trials) harder.
I wrote about this here but it's literally impossible to find references to study what the optimal GMP framework is
open.substack.com/pub/ruxandrabi…
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@RuxandraTeslo @PatientPersists @robertwiblin I just think even if we speed up IRBs, reduce site burden, improve recruitment we are still bottlenecked by trials
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@RuxandraTeslo @PatientPersists @robertwiblin Fully agree, top priority for now should be making it easier/faster to collect human data (whether or not that's phase 1, IIT, post- approval monitoring)
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@RuxandraTeslo @PatientPersists @robertwiblin I'm all for easier trials, but in some way more/faster clinical trials is the "faster horse" of biomedical abundance. The actual disruptive change seems more likely to come from 1) better data capture and monitoring outside of formal trials 2) strong translational models
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Ruxandra Teslo 🧬@RuxandraTeslo
The FDA is sitting on a goldmine of drug development data — 10,000+ page dossiers detailing how drugs are designed, made, tested, and approved. Big Pharma has these in-house. Startups? Locked out. It’s time to fix that. Read my proposal for @IFP on how. ifp.org/biotechs-lost-…
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Thinking about this paper again today as I try to get GPT-5 to clean up some overwrought code
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Alex Telford retweetledi
Very proud of this episode of IDEA Collider, with Alex Telford @Atelfo, co-founder of @Convokebio... Real, deep insights into how AI is currently delivering value to pharma/ biotech...
lnkd.in/e4tErw-W
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@patrickc Something similar I find interesting, pharma cos develop and launch new drugs (NMEs) at roughly the same rate -- despite big differences in therapy areas, technology platforms, culture. Maybe little matters operationally except some general industry/scientific progress factor
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These companies are ostensibly in totally different businesses and yet seem to exhibit the same growth dynamics. What's the explanation? (Pictured: ~$200B -> ~$3T.)
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Alex Telford retweetledi
🚀 Works in Progress Issue 20 is now live!
· Sulphur dioxide as sunscreen for the Earth
· Why science needs outsiders
· How UVC light could eliminate the common cold
· RIVERS ARE NOW BATTLEFIELDS
· Repeating France's gigantic nuclear buildout
Read it all at worksinprogress.co
Sept — 2025. Chinese dams threaten the water of two billion people. Rivers are now battlefields. @ConnorTabarrok writes on how dams became a weapon of geopolitics, and how solar power could fight back. worksinprogress.co/issue/rivers-a…
Modern germicidal light can make indoor air safe at scale in the same way we have with water, says @GavrielKlw. The common cold and winter flu might soon be behind us: worksinprogress.co/issue/the-deat…
Volcanoes cool the earth by emitting sulphur dioxide. We may be able to stop the worst climate change by copying them and carefully injecting small amounts of sulfur into the stratosphere. worksinprogress.co/issue/sunscree…
Antibodies are used to treat autoimmune diseases, cancers, infectious diseases, and snakebites. How can we make them even cheaper and more abundant, asks @Atelfo? worksinprogress.co/issue/how-to-m…
Science needs outsiders to progress. But every institution we have set up in recent decades has been designed to protect incumbents and keep trespassers out. We need to change that. worksinprogress.co/issue/why-scie…
Plus: Why 'systems thinking' is mumbo-jumbo, and how we can copy France's magnificent nuclearisation. Only in Issue 20 of Works in Progress. worksinprogress.co
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Alex Telford retweetledi
Amazing... I subscribed to this this morning, and who should I see there? Posted today, @Atelfo!
How to make an antibody
Antibody therapies are four of the world’s ten best selling drugs. If they were cheaper, they could prevent millions of deaths from rabies, malaria, and dengue.
worksinprogress.co/issue/how-to-m…
Sam Bowman@s8mb
🚀 Works in Progress Issue 20 is now live! · Sulphur dioxide as sunscreen for the Earth · Why science needs outsiders · How UVC light could eliminate the common cold · RIVERS ARE NOW BATTLEFIELDS · Repeating France's gigantic nuclear buildout Read it all at worksinprogress.co Sept — 2025. Chinese dams threaten the water of two billion people. Rivers are now battlefields. @ConnorTabarrok writes on how dams became a weapon of geopolitics, and how solar power could fight back. worksinprogress.co/issue/rivers-a… Modern germicidal light can make indoor air safe at scale in the same way we have with water, says @GavrielKlw. The common cold and winter flu might soon be behind us: worksinprogress.co/issue/the-deat… Volcanoes cool the earth by emitting sulphur dioxide. We may be able to stop the worst climate change by copying them and carefully injecting small amounts of sulfur into the stratosphere. worksinprogress.co/issue/sunscree… Antibodies are used to treat autoimmune diseases, cancers, infectious diseases, and snakebites. How can we make them even cheaper and more abundant, asks @Atelfo? worksinprogress.co/issue/how-to-m… Science needs outsiders to progress. But every institution we have set up in recent decades has been designed to protect incumbents and keep trespassers out. We need to change that. worksinprogress.co/issue/why-scie… Plus: Why 'systems thinking' is mumbo-jumbo, and how we can copy France's magnificent nuclearisation. Only in Issue 20 of Works in Progress. worksinprogress.co
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Monoclonal antibodies are still underrated as a drug technology and will likely be the next modality after small molecules to scale globally and make an impact on long-standing scourges like malaria and snakebite
Saloni@salonium
Great piece by @Atelfo Antibody treatment is over a century old, when Behring & Kitasato made an early 'vaccine' against diphtheria. Back then, they came from injecting animals with toxins. Today they're produced by cells in steel tanks and treat millions. How did we get here?
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Alex Telford retweetledi
Tech has produced several trillion-dollar companies. Biotech has produced none. If I were completely impartial to what disease I treat or what modality I use, could any of the existing company-building strategies create a trillion-dollar outcome? This essay is a set of musings on the mental models behind building successful biotechs, on what might get the industry off “hard mode,” and on why age-related diseases are probably pharma’s only real salvation - yet also the place where most of our existing lessons are of no use.
(link in comments)
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@Atelfo Congrats Alex — would love to give the product a test drive at some point!
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A thread about the unreasonable effectiveness of writing on the internet, or how I got 8.6 million dollars from a blog post
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Alex Telford retweetledi
Congrats on the launch of most recent @_DimensionCap co @Convokebio! @Atelfo @okaymaged and @VelagapudiVikas are an incredible team building an AI operating system for life science.
From data ingestion, to clinical insights, to program tracking, Convoke allows customers to build AI native workflows for their most important projects.
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Alex Telford retweetledi
I'm extremely excited to be partnering with Alex Telford (@Atelfo), Maged Korga Ahmed, @VelagapudiVikas, @merobiotech, and team as they build @Convokebio!
AI/ML tooling will undoubtedly supercharge biotech's ability to develop drug candidates more quickly and inexpensively than ever before. It will also create new bottlenecks.
@Convokebio is uniquely positioned to tackle a different part of the biotech value chain: decision-making.
From competitive intelligence to pipeline prioritization to clinical trial strategy, so much of successful drug development occurs outside of generative molecular design. Convoke aims to provide the underlying digital infrastructure to empower burgeoning biotechs and established pharma teams alike with next-generation capabilities for making these key decisions.
If you're an engineer, scientist, or operator compelled to work on high-value AI/ML use cases in drug development, reach out to me or @Atelfo!
If you're curious, but want to understand more about the information required to make these high-stakes decisions inside a biotech/pharma company, check out our recent whitepaper on Target Product Profiles:
research.dimensioncap.com/p/60c13f9c-0e5…
Convoke@Convokebio
We've raised $8.6m to build leading AI tools for the biopharma industry! Our seed financing was led by @kleinerperkins and @_DimensionCap , with participation from @ACME, @CommaCapital, @Liquid2V, @notboringco, @AudaciousHQ, @Lux_Capital, and leaders in AI and biotechnology
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