Sam Joseph

Setting up my first reaction in over 2 months

Infigratinib (formerly marketed as Truseltiq®), a pan-FGFR inhibitor, is being repurposed from cholangiocarcinoma to achondroplasia. In February 2026, BridgeBio reported positive topline results from the Ph. 3 PROPEL 3 trial in achondroplasia, with infigratinib meeting its primary endpoint. The company said it plans regulatory submissions in the second half of 2026. It’s a striking case study in target-based drug repurposing across two very different genetically defined diseases. Read more on Drug Hunter: drughunters.com/48InfYN

“The greatest teacher, failure is” -Master Yoda 💫 As right as Master Yoda is, we sometimes wish we had a lightsaber when troubleshooting gets frustrating 😅 Happy May 4th! May the force be with you (and your experiments) #StarWarsDay 💫⭐️

Happy to share the final version of this work is now out in @nchembio. Lots of additional exciting data! Congrats to all the authors! nature.com/articles/s4158…

It's only gum disease! Wrong! It is brain damage! 👇👇👇 Nonaka et al 2022 sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

I love how ACS journals are like “SI can be found 𝙍𝙄𝙂𝙃𝙏 𝙃𝙀𝙍𝙀 𝘼𝙏 𝙏𝙃𝙄𝙎 𝙇𝙄𝙉𝙆” and the link is to the page you’re currently on

For some reason my leftmost gel decided that it was going to turn into a churro post-run

📰 [#Media] – Drug Discovery World (Spring 2026) We’re pleased to share that Sheri Simmons, PhD, Acting Chief Scientific Officer at MaaT Pharma, is featured in @DDWJournal with a thought‑leadership article on microbiome‑based approaches to overcoming resistance to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs). 🔎 The article highlights growing clinical and translational evidence showing how gut microbiome composition can influence response to ICIs, and explores emerging strategies including antibiotics impact, dietary modulation, and early signals from faecal microbiota transfer (FMT) and microbiome-based therapies. 👉 Read more: ddw-online.com/ddw-spring-202… #Microbiome #Microbiotherapy #ImmunoOncology #CancerResearch #ICI #ThoughtLeadership

@NaOHBartfield x.com/mucinophile/st… You just need a couple of day long pipetting sessions and you’ll be here

really enjoying biology im not gonna lie guys

@lee1978lcfc That Juve kit is nice

Grandad cuddles 🫶👶 #memories

@Anterior658444 @rust_ruslan @yternalY I guess the main problem is the barrier is now lower. I think the big problem is as a reviewer, I am taking the authors at face value and reviewing through the lens of the science/question and whether the experiments/results make sense.

@rust_ruslan @yternalY I'm confused how this is different than what has always happened with cheating? We've always been able to fabricate the raw data to generate graphs of inaccurate date Making believable graphs with text-to-image is novel but it's not like this is worse than what's been possible

Can water intake prevent Alzheimer’s disease? No. This is fully AI-generated… but the data below could easily pass as real. The new ChatGPT image model is truly impressive, but I think it poses a real risk for scientific integrity in future. For example, I could just generate a dataset with a single prompt that appears to show something like water preventing Alzheimer’s disease. Ironically, we used to laugh at obvious “AI slop” (like those weird generated mice), but that’s changing pretty fast. If I were reviewing this fake figure today, I’m not sure I could reliably tell whether this figure is real or AI-generated? The bigger issue is that the usual signals we rely on e.g., how realistic or plausible something looks are no longer enough. I think we really need more comprehensive AI detection and, more importantly, stronger verification standards for scientific submissions going forward. We’ll probably also need better ways to digitize lab notebooks and ensure access to raw data, something closer to how code and version history are tracked...

Mucin stimulates the growth of Legionella pneumophila. Published Open Access and fee-free in Microbiology using a Publish and Read agreement: doi.org/10.1099/mic.0.… #PublishandRead #Mic

@CorinWagen @Sculpturatus Can’t wait!

@Sculpturatus yes! hopefully later this year (and not too late in the year). we already do warhead reactivity modeling etc

We've just released improvements to Rowan's analogue-docking workflow that lead to much better aligned poses. See below! Our new approach uses more robust substructure matching logic and adds a torsional Monte Carlo step, giving better retrieval of reported analogue pose sets:

@anthony_berndt @NaOHBartfield I think a lot of functional retention comes from the fact that catalytic sites aren’t often close to the N or C termini structurally, and if they are they’re sheltered / internal. Not to mention many substrates are just tiny in comparison to the protein itself.

One thing ive learned in doing biology in the past 6 months is that you can just fuse stuff to proteins. Nobody is stopping you. There's a tag for everything. Go nuts

@NaOHBartfield Proteins don’t want you to know this but many of their amino acids simply cannot resist attacking a tasty looking electrophile

@LCFC may have been relegated for the 2nd time in 2 seasons but at least my new friend Tim has been keeping me busy

Next season, we’ll be playing the 2015/16 Premier League Champions in a league fixture. The same season the Ravens played in the National League for the very first time. Football 🤯

Ten years after the fairytale, #lcfc are relegated to League One - a consequence of huge mismanagement, negligence & ruinous decisions. The cycle of football? Absolute rubbish. Completely self-inflicted. Leicester had it all and have totally blown it telegraph.co.uk/football/2026/…

Most bacteria remain uncultured and don’t grow in the lab.. to address this am excited to share EDEN - an enhanced domestication method to grow uncultured bacteria & new diversity. Using EDEN we isolate a new species active against MDR pathogens.. doi.org/10.1093/ismeco…

@NaOHBartfield Welcome to the dark side (chemical biology)

Excited to begin my postdoctoral appointment soon in the laboratory of Prof. David Liu at the Broad Institute! This is a big pivot from natural product synthesis, but I am eager to contribute everything I can to gene editing and protein design! Thanks everyone for your support!