Josh Pottel

Saw a few nice tweet reminders that we should be celebrating each other and offering some pats on the back, especially these days. So, where all the #compchem undergrads, MScs, PhDs, Postdocs at? #AcademicTwitter #ChemTwitter

@chemguy_eli Welcome home!

Great to be back in my hometown, and what better meal after a long plane ride than a smoked meat, fries and coleslaw from the Snowdon deli.

@AlexFGoldberg x.com/ibamboozie/sta…

need mcdavid and draisaitl to look at each other again real quick #letsgooilers

I did Zumba with my daughter at her daycare today. Here's what I learned about #entrepreneurship: Nothing. Not everything has to be about work. Especially as an entrepreneur, surround yourself with people you love, enjoy spending time with, and with whom you can be yourself.

We’re here at Parc Lafontaine setting up to run some laps and raise some money. Come by for some pizza, games, music, and to support the cause! x.com/jpottel/status… cc: @MolForecaster

@ndchiappini It’s not pretty… Hope they can make it a series on the road.

C'mon Canes....please....I'm beggin

Gently reminding my network about @MolForecaster's involvement in Pedal for Kids 2025, a fundraising campaign supporting The Montreal Children's Hospital Foundation. Thank you for your donations; we've raised ~$4,000! $15+ donations get a tax receipt. secure.fondationduchildren.com/site/TR/DIY/Pd…

Any donation is appreciated, but if you also look for significance in numbers, then: At $3 per km, that's a $36 donation At $6 per km, that's a $72 donation At $10 per km, that's a $120 donation They're all tax deductible, AFAIK. secure.fondationduchildren.com/site/TR/DIY/Pd… Thank you!

Leading up to Pedal for Kids, I'll be participating in a Jog-a-thon with the team. Of relevance to the this cause, I plan to run at least 12 km, one km for each of the specialties that treats William, the spokeschild of our cause: secure.fondationduchildren.com/site/TR/Events…

Hey everyone, I’m lacing up my sneakers and running with @MolForecaster for Pedal for Kids 2025, a fundraising campaign supporting the Montreal Children’s Hospital Foundation (MCHF). If you'd consider a donation, please read on. On behalf of the kiddos, thank you!

@olexandr @AriWagen @RowanSci Not with that attitude 🙃

@AriWagen @RowanSci Ligand strain can’t be negative by definition 😉

Though it has its flaws, docking is pretty magical—algorithms predict the binding sites of ligands and (attempt to) score them—all within minutes. Today, I'm excited to share that @RowanSci now supports protein–ligand docking ... and we use NNPs to detect strained poses 🧵

What makes a startup successful? 💫 How do you attract top career opportunities? I asked @JPottel, CEO of @MolForecaster. Here's what he said on the Thinking Tech podcast: youtube.com/watch?v=Xgyg7W…

@JoshRackers Sick news, Josh! Good luck!

Some news: I'm joining the founding team at Achira! We are building physics into AI to shape the future of drug discovery. If you're interested or just want to know more, hit me up! endpts.com/achira-raises-…

@angelosgeo Different disease biology can be capitulated in different animals/species/organisms. It's often about picking the right one, before jumping to humans. Visit the amazing folks at @ArcadiaScience (cc: @seemaychou and @PracheeAC) and they'll tell you all about it!

I’m not a drug developer, but this is not the first time I hear this from you: The animal models have their faults. No matter how amazing they look, you can spend ten years perfecting them and still get it wrong! Having enough evidence, reassurance and belief before you get into the clinic is important. And safety is #1! However, the goal should be to learn in patients because no pre-clinical animal model can replicate the complexity of human biology. At some point, you must make the call and move it into humans... Alnylam is an example of a company that moved very fast into the clinic. Sara Nochur, the former Head of Regulatory, was obsessed with safety and over-communicating with the FDA about every little thing. @JMaraganore, and the team, too. But they understood they had to move and learn faster! Now…The reluctance to push as fast on the programme may be rooted in a need for perfection from the CEO, the chief scientist or other team members. And I can appreciate your need for perfection... but it should be addressed. If it's you, the CEO (and probably a scientist at heart 😍), cultivating self-awareness is key. If it's some other team member, you have to help them see it and coach them! You may say, "Angelos, this is biotech, it's not tech! We can't move fast and break things here like Zuckerberg!". This is true, but one can also say, "Well, this is exactly why you should move fast. Because in biotech, capital is scarce, you have to learn faster, and patients can't wait". (By the way, from my experience, the smartest people are often the best at manipulating themselves and finding the most intellectually beautiful excuses for not changing a behaviour! 😍) Going faster doesn’t mean taking shortcuts on safety or blowing up the whole programme. Going faster is about becoming a better drug developer. There's a corporate culture element to this and you have to make it explicit: learning, making bold decisions, "failing" your way to success, "failing" in a safe and controlled way, "the patients can't wait". There's an emotional intelligence element: radical acceptance, cultivating confidence in the unknown, managing your fear and the fear of others, resilience. There's a spiritual element, too: accepting your limitations, being okay with being unable to have all the answers, forgiving yourself for your perfectionism, forgiving yourself for finding it hard to move forward although you know you have to... Loving you, Angelos. ps: @cngarabedian once told me, "Science and drug development are different things". I guess all the above is one aspect of this. pps: I know I went a little out of my lane with the animal models… you’re the experts! Tell me, does all this resonate? If not, do you have a contrarian view or something to add?

👏 Congratulations to 9Bio Thérapeutiques, a company from the adMare National Tx Accelerator, @MolForecaster , @Aramisbiotech , @CQDM_Canada , and @IVADO_Qc on announcing a collaborative project leveraging AI to develop new cancer therapies! 💪 👉 9bio.ca/news/9bio-ther… #AI #Cancer #Collaboration

I’m looking to hire a scientist who can help us grow @ArcadiaScience. If you think this might be you, please get in touch! jobs.lever.co/arcadiascience…

@olexandr There is a lot of noise out there that makes this opinion overtly true.

Wow… real AI in drug discovery shots fired 😎 chemistryworld.com/opinion/robots… “It sounds like someone trying to sell a new car model by pointing out that its windows roll up and down much more quickly” #compchem

@nathanbenaich @agupta Thanks for sharing this, what a great read. So much resonates.

for an excellent first-hand take into the challenge of building ai-first bio companies, please read @agupta’s essay “how unfair is the coin” in it he discusses: - why selling software to pharma isn’t really a market - why software-only in bio ultimately converges to “make a molecule and then we’ll talk” - why making molecules is still super hard and time consuming - the differences in value assessment between biotech and tech investors

@agupta @ycombinator @reverielabs Great read. I think there is even more complexity to your missing benchmark challenge: most coins you're going to flip next have little-to-no relation to previous coins so whether or not you can mint previous coins doesn't mean you can mint the next one you need.

With the start of my first batch as a visiting partner at @ycombinator, this felt like a good time to write my founder story about our journey at @reverielabs. It's a bit of a long one. ankitg.me/blog/2025/01/0…

Eating 4 saltines in a minute without water