Cristian Ponce

The story of how humanity automated the scientific method will be one of our most important and impactful. Few are aware that this story has begun, but more are realizing. Couldn’t be more grateful to play a small (hopefully larger with time) role in this story at Tetsuwan.

i will be in europe for a long time during june! please reach out to me if you are free during one of the following dates and desire to Hang Out Paris: 10-14 June Liverpool: 16 and 18 June Edinburgh: 22nd June

Today, I'm excited to share that I've started a company and closed an oversubscribed seed round.  Space has a labor shortage, and a growing surplus of science that we can’t afford not to do. Our astronauts’ time costs $130,000 an hour, and almost all of it goes to keeping them alive. The science happens in the margins. The bottleneck in orbit is not rockets, but labor. General Astronautics will build and scale orbital manufacturing factories, starting with industrial robotics. This is the unlock to new pharmaceuticals, new materials, and new planets. More on my thesis for humanity: generalastro.com If this excites you, we are hiring. Come find us: careers.generalastro.com

Every time I visit Boston I realize that I forgot how much I love visiting Boston

Anthropic Says Life Sciences Is Its Biggest Bet After Code. Eric Kauderer-Abrams started @AnthropicAI 's life sciences division ten months ago. He took on the stage at @SynBioBeta with Marc Tessier-Lavigne from @Xaira_Thera , and what caught my attention was how plainly Eric stated the following: "The greatest opportunity to have a beneficial, scaled impact with everything that's happening in frontier AI is in the life sciences." After coding, it's their biggest investment area. They've been training Claude on bioinformatics, chemistry, molecule design, structural biology, clinical regulatory. Their models went from mediocre in life sciences to roughly PhD level across most domains in under a year. That's a steep curve. But what I found more telling than the benchmarks was the infrastructure they're building around it. Wet labs for basic research so their own scientists hit the walls firsthand. An acquisition of Coefficient Bio (acquired by Anthropic) to teach @claudeai how to think like a biotech program manager, not just a bench scientist. The gap between "Claude can answer a biology question" and "Claude can help you run a drug program" is enormous, and they're clearly aware of it. Marc mentioned that 90% of drugs fail in the clinic. Two-thirds of those failures aren't bad science, but patient matching. You have a good target, a good drug, and you can't find who will respond. That's the problem both of them kept circling back to, and it's where causal AI models trained on real perturbation data might actually move the needle. Marc said nobody's pushing a button for a development candidate anytime soon. But Anthropic went from $1B to $30B in revenue in sixteen months. That kind of resource behind this kind of focus is new. It's fun to think of what R&D can look like in the next few months! #SynBioBeta2026 #SyntheticBiology #Biotech #AIxBio

SOON

@owl_posting @CorinWagen “semi regular finance x bio articles with your OwlPosting subscription. would you like that, mr. gardner?”

@CorinWagen the blog might become a finance x bio blog honestly. just so many cool things here

Curious cases of financial engineering in biotech 7k words, 32 minutes reading time link: owlposting.com/p/curious-case… the inflation-adjusted cost of developing a new drug roughly doubles every nine years. this is obviously horrible, but at least its had one interesting consequence: financiers, faced with an industry this structurally broken, have had room to exercise a kind of radical creativity the essay is about that creativity, which i'll loosely call 'financial engineering'. i walk through five examples, a case study for each, and why they're worth thinking about. at the end, i ask what the aggregate effect of all this creativity is, and whether it's worrying for what biotech decides to value in the upcoming years

I’ve seen enough, put this guy in the hall of fame for accessible writing on pharma economics, right next to Jack Scannell & Richard Murphey

If this were true, why not DM @LH, or post to ask about cheap liquid handling solutions? Screenshotting a misrepresentative part of a conversation in which you do not engage with his argument in a genuine way to repost does not seem like the most optimal path to truth on this question.

@c_m_ponce @LH I know better than trying to win arguments on X. If y’all want to understand how we do reliability just come visit. I’m selfish and just want to know what this super affordable liquid handler is x.com/michellearning…

No seriously I want to be proven wrong 😭 Tell me what this cheaper-than-robotic-arm liquid handler is, it would break my understanding of hardware economics: generalized + commoditized = cheaper Don’t just drop “you’re 100% wrong” and vanish, show me the magic 😤

@michellearning @LH At no point are you actually engaging with his argument, as he points out in this thread

@michellearning @LH You bring up the point on cost, but his actual argument is around reproducibility, reliability, and specificity vs generalizability of instruments. Screenshotting that part instead of engaging with the argument does make it seem like you are trying to dunk on him:

Real estate is also a big consideration worth taking. The real price is sticker price + the (very) expensive real estate it takes up. This is one of the reasons why automation workcells look the way they do (very dense). You should see what @koeng101 + @_benray have managed to do!!

@koeng101 I’m trying to build a lab at scale not trying to scour for deals on the used market

@bornspectator42 I appreciate @michellearning being willing to engage!! Congrats to her and the Medra team on their recent work.

Interesting back & forth 👇 but everyone was respectful & so ofcourse low engagement 🙄. I gotta say I'm with @c_m_ponce a bit more on this since a lab is usually not that dynamic an environment but I'm just a user & don't really care which approach works as long as it does!

Could not agree more. This type of company needs bench scientists and automation engineers shaping product direction, as we are trying to streamline their work

@michellearning @c_m_ponce small tip: hire some lab technicians and bio peeps

Out of curiosity, what is the distinction you make between Medra's work and lab automation?

@cenamdx @michellearning Basically, allowing automation to handle a diverse set of tasks isn’t a problem that is solved by making hardware capable of more, it is solved by making it easier for researchers to set up new experiments on that hardware.

@cenamdx @michellearning …it is painful to program new experiments on them (and experiments are very variable!), limiting what we can use automation for. With regard to this, OwlPosting has a great line, “most protocols can be automated, but aren’t worth automated.”: owlposting.com/p/heuristics-f…

@michellearning Many (automation engineers) have come before us with hopes and dreams of automating the lab. They have lots to teach us, and there are many mistakes that can be avoided- I have found dialogue w them to be incredibly helpful!

@c_m_ponce Really? I find spending time building it more effective 😛

@michellearning It helps to know what (and what not) to build! Not that there is a single correct answer, but there certainly is a biggest bottleneck to our application of automation in the lab, and solving it is a problem with a depth that can be humbling.