Olivia Prior 🌸

Anyone here got any tips on how to do a good book review? Or any book reviewers you recommend I read for reference material?

Every time you get a cancer biopsy, the lab makes a tissue slide that costs about $5. It shows the shape of your cells under a microscope, and every cancer patient already has one on file. There’s a much fancier version of that test called multiplex immunofluorescence (basically a protein-level map showing which immune cells are near your tumor and what they’re doing). It costs thousands of dollars per sample, takes specialized equipment most hospitals don’t have, and barely scales. But it’s the kind of data oncologists need to figure out whether immunotherapy will actually work for you. Right now, only about 20 to 40% of cancer patients respond to immunotherapy, and one of the biggest reasons is that doctors can’t easily tell whether a tumor is “hot” (immune cells actively fighting it) or “cold” (immune system ignoring it). Microsoft, Providence Health, and the University of Washington trained an AI to analyze the $5 slide and predict what the expensive test would show across 21 different protein markers. They called it GigaTIME, trained it on 40 million cells in which both the cheap slide and the expensive test coexisted, and then turned it loose on 14,256 real cancer patients across 51 hospitals in 7 US states. The results landed in Cell, one of the most selective journals in biology. The model generated about 300,000 virtual protein maps covering 24 cancer types and 306 subtypes. It found 1,234 real, verified connections between immune cell behavior, genetic mutations, tumor staging, and patient survival that were previously invisible at this scale. When they tested it against a completely separate database of 10,200 cancer patients, the results matched up almost perfectly (0.88 out of 1.0 agreement). Nature Methods named spatial proteomics (mapping where specific proteins sit inside your tissue) its Method of the Year in 2024, and specifically cited GigaTIME in a March 2026 update as a model that “democratizes” this kind of analysis. The full model is open-source on Hugging Face. Any cancer research lab with archived biopsy slides, and most of them have thousands, can now run virtual immune profiling without buying a single piece of new equipment.

ICYMI an essay competition specifically for active researchers: 1st prize $30K, 2nd $10K, 3rd $5K. Public submissions only: astera.org/essay-competit… 🧵

Very cool thread to learn more about MRI!

"We don’t need to wait for permission to fix this. The future of science is not going to be rescued by journals or legacy institutions. We need to reclaim science’s role in serving society."

Today I learned someone is working on building an alternative to scientific journals, and I think the world might be a little better for it. substack.com/home/post/p-16… from @seemaychou

El mes de junio es un viernes largo

@dickiebush youtube.com/watch?v=MBRqu0…

What is 1 YouTube video you think every person on Earth should watch?

@sashachapin Reminds me of this, from CS Lewis I think

an llm-powered word mood ring 🎨💫: hand crafting the warmth and energy of words in a sentence guided by the color pad

🇮🇹 Extensive @VHIO delegation this year at @ESAC_cancerAI's #AIforOncology. 👨🏻‍🏫 With @RaqPerezLopez's great presentation and @mariabalaguerm and @carlosmacarrop presenting posters. 🫂 Happy to see this great #AI meeting point growing year after year! See you in 2026!

📢Desde @AccedeABecas ofrecemos simulacros de entrevistas para las becas Fulbright y LaCaixa de estudios de posgrado. ¡Apúntate aquí hasta el 2 de mayo! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI….

@michael_nielsen Writing your dissertation in 15 minutes a day by Joan Bolker. One of the most underrated books ever in my opinion. Many insights about writing in general, carrying out research, and even relationships at work.

There's a striking implied question here: which book tells you the most beyond its explicit purpose? Not a book, but Hamlet has to be up there. Jane Austen is pretty good too!

@JuanCGabaldon Enhorabuena crack!!!!

Yesterday I defended my PhD thesis on T. cruzi infection pathogenesis. I was lucky enough to do it surrounded by my family, my friends and, in general, a bunch of people who have always made me feel so loved and supported. For that I’m extremely grateful.

La Sagrada Familia siempre me recuerda la suerte que tengo de estar viva para ver cómo se construye

Reflexiones de la media maratón theanega.github.io/2025/02/24/ref…

Our paper on TotalSegmentator for MRI images was published in Radiology. paper: pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/ra… code: github.com/wasserth/Total… dataset: zenodo.org/records/147107… online tool: totalsegmentator.com

AI provides a universal framework that leverages data and compute at scale to uncover higher-order patterns Today, @arcinstitute in collaboration with @nvidia releases Evo 2—a fully open source biological foundation model trained on genomes spanning the entire tree of life 🧵

@fragrussu 🕵️‍♂️Finally, our PhD student Athanasios Grigoriou has presented the histological validation of his new diffusion technique (Histo-µSim). 🧫Check his poster on histology-based cellular-level water diffusion simulation and the derived study on microstructure characterization.

@fragrussu 🕵️‍♀️Our PhD student Anna Voronova has given a talk on applications of her blood flow simulator (SpinFlowSim) to study microvascular mapping in cancer 🩸Synthetic blood flow-derived MR signal simulation allows tackleing microstructure characterization