Michael Chavez

Transgene silencing reverts an engineered cell therapy back into a regular old cell, destroying its therapeutic potential. I am stoked to share our CLIP method in @natBME that overcomes this effect, enabling any tool to be stably expressed in cell therapies! Thread below🧵(1/11)

London! I'll be in town for 2 months starting next week with @elamadej and @Aleborda21. Why? Big announcement soon 🤫 Who should we meet? Scientists, founders, angel investors, connectors -- let us know! Have a place for Oct but where should we stay in November? Tips welcome!

In this episode of Turpentine VC, @eriktorenberg sat down with @sethbannon, co-founder and general partner at @fiftyyears, a pre-seed and seed-focused VC firm. They discuss the challenges of commercializing academic research, the differences between biotech and tech bio companies, exploring recent advancements in bioengineering, genetic engineering, synthetic biology, and the significance of the "bio moment." They also cover the impact of AI and machine learning on biological research and examine alternative funding models transforming the scientific startup landscape. -- TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Intro (00:53) Seth Bannon's background and inspiration (03:38) Founding and mission of Fifty Years (03:51) Defining deep tech and investment thesis (04:34) Challenges in commercializing academic research (10:14) The Spinout Playbook (12:23) Sponsors: Rippling Spend | WorkOS (14:38) Empowering PhDs to become entrepreneurs (15:06) Building deep tech companies (20:41) Biomoment in technology (27:41) Rapid integration of large language models (28:06) Startups leading the charge in pharma innovation (28:46) The role of proprietary data in bioengineering (29:31) Understanding spatial context in cell biology (30:43) Getting into biology without formal training (33:22) The beginner's mind investment philosophy (34:14) The future of deep tech and network-driven VC (36:33) Sponsor: Squad (38:01) Tech bio vs biotech (45:54) Alternative funding models for science (49:41) Incentivizing failure in scientific research (53:50) Wrap

Much love for my friends @fiftyyears. Some of the few people I know whose energy can turn offhand jokes into making my mom mad.

The world needs 10x more scientist-founders. 5050 helps scientists and engineers become great founders and start indispensable companies. Applications open! Startups are the best way to make a real impact with research, but where do you get started? How do you know if entrepreneurship is for you? Whether you’re validating an idea or ready to build — 5050 is for you. You’ll learn what it takes to become a great founder, how to choose the right problem, technology, and market, and how to build a deep tech startup. “It’s a cheat code for starting a deep tech startup.” – @ChEMcShane, 5050 alum. • @ChEMcShane and Evan spun out of Stanford and co-founded Electroflow to tackle the lithium shortage. They’ve scaled their tech by 200x in 6 months. • @markwbudde joined 5050 as a postdoc at Caltech. Two years later, @plasmidsaurus enables scientists across all 50 states and most European countries to go much faster. • Niccolo joined as a Tesla engineer. Three months later, he co-founded Clippership and is building autonomous sailboats to decarbonize maritime shipping. • Chi and @tayshin0827 joined as postdocs at MIT. Within weeks, they spun out and are now working to enable in vivo cell reprogramming. At @fiftyyears, we’ve built deep tech companies ourselves. We’ve backed over 100 deep tech startups from the earliest stages and helped them raise over 4.6 billion dollars. We distilled everything we know about deep tech startups into 5050: a free program to help world-class scientists and engineers start indispensable companies. Phase I: Explore We’ll help you answer: How do I turn my breakthrough science into a business? What do I need to make a startup idea work? Am I ready to be a founder? You’ll learn if entrepreneurship is right for you, identify the idea to build, and pivot quickly if necessary. We’ll guide you through the early days of building in deep tech. At the end of Explore, those ready to build a startup will be invited to the next phase, Build. Phase II: Build You’ll join a cohort of fast-moving founders who will challenge you to ramp up. We’ll coach you to level up into a great founder and guide you through the early days of building in deep tech. Build will help you de-risk your technology, hit key milestones, raise a first round, and reach takeoff speed fast. Helping great scientists and engineers become great entrepreneurs is our jam. Apply / nominate! ➜ fiftyyears.com/5050

Excited to share @nablabio is partnering with 3 of the world’s largest pharma cos to use integrated AI and wet-lab tech to design antibodies against challenging disease targets. Thrilled to also add @radicalvcfund who led our $26M Series A to the family! bit.ly/4dDk4lP

Today we announce the close of a $26M Series A financing, led by @radicalvcfund with participation from all existing investors, and pharmaceutical collaborations with @AstraZeneca, @bmsnews, and @TakedaPharma. Thanks to @endpts for breaking our news. endpts.com/exclusive-astr…

latch is focusing efforts on building a world class platform to distribute and analyze protein + genetic sequencing kit data progress in engineering biology is bottlenecked by tools blog.latch.bio/p/a-bioinforma…

Kits are a key part of the increased pace of biological discovery. Protocols that 10 years ago took a team of scientists months of work can now be ordered online and done in a few hours! But there is a massive problem plaguing these kits and ruining the beautiful abstraction:

Shouldn’t aging be part of drug discovery for diseases of aging? gordian.bio/blog/introduci… Gordian exists to move therapeutic testing from plastic wells and young mice into a living environment with all the complexity present in patients with age-related disease. We’re now sharing results showing how pooled in vivo screening can make highly accurate physiological predictions and find novel treatments for diseases of aging 🧵1/15

Introducing SF Deep Tech Week When people think of SF they think of software startups. But SFBA is also the deep tech capital of the world. Time to show off with events on bio, industrials, defense, energy, climate, space, quantum. Oh, and parties.

Spring Quarter is a season of renewal and growth, both in nature and within our lab :) Welcoming new lab members! We are also looking for new postdocs interested in engineering synthetic cells for biomedical applications. #synbio #UCDavisBME #BME

Check out this new preprint/white paper from our friends at Entwine bio together with @vram142 and @ZaroLab. We and others have long been interested in sequence-to-function modeling in RNA, especially as it comes to splicing. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

ML models like Evo + AlphaFold are emerging to engineer molecules. It is sometimes unclear how to use these tools to build drugs. We trace a realistic design, build and test loop of virus capsids on LatchBio.

I'm excited to share our work "Structural insights reveal interplay between LAG-3 homodimerization, ligand binding, and function" that's now out in PNAS! 1/3 Link to paper: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn… Link to press release: news.stanford.edu/2024/03/11/pro…

We’re excited to host a webinar with Elsie Biotechnologies, industry leader and GSK’s partner in oligonucleotide drug discovery, on how to engineer oligonucleotide therapies at unprecedented scale. Register to join us on March 21st to learn more: latch.bio/customer-scien…

wow!! thank you @ACIR_org & lauren hitchings for the wonderful writeup and visual summary of our work!!

Really excited about a new position for our first dedicated ChemML/AI person at Octant. Our HT-Chem platform is really humming, and we are very excited to bring generative approaches in the loop to drive subsequent iterations on the platform. Posting: octant.bio/jobs?gh_jid=50…

Excited to share "Multiplexed Effector Guide Arrays" (MEGA) tech, led by Victor Tieu @victortieu & collaboration with Dr. Crystal Mackall, in Cell @CellCellPress. A leap in T cell transcriptome & metabolic engineering for cancer therapy. Congrats to team! authors.elsevier.com/a/1ie1VL7PXqPm4

My time at 50Y and with 5050 was transformative. From pushing our academic research into products, hiring an amazing team, and storytelling - I cannot recommend this enough if you want to learn about how to take the first steps out of academia and into becoming a founder.

I am late to my own party, but I wanted to write a short 🧵 to put this talk in context. First of all, the @TEDTalks team was amazing; there is so much that goes into these seemingly short talks. It was an amazing experience and I made some new friends. ted.com/talks/hani_goo…