Asimov Labs (formerly the MIT-Broad Foundry)

We are honored to be part of the program! twitter.com/DARPA/status/9…

Where does sunlight go? Hall of fame Sankey diagram from @ClamonsSam That's a lot of sunlight seemingly going to waste, but photons aren't the scarce resource for photosynthesizers; it's competition for water, nitrogen, phosphorus, etc. Great article

We're really grateful that @AsteraInstitute will support our work (for the next two years!) at @AsimovPress. It means more long-form articles, more reporting, and ... a new metascience column. If you want to write about "new institutions of science," please pitch us! DMs open.

The (approximate) chemical formula for E. coli is: C4:H7:O2:N1 A cell is 70% water by mass. The rest is mostly proteins and RNAs. In principle, this isn't so complicated; and yet a collection of molecules can sense, move, adapt, evolve, grow, divide. Work on biology.

Our first interactive article! This story includes a "simulator" that allows readers to play around with a genetic circuit by tuning its parameters. Come check it out.

It has finally arrived: The first book written, and sold, in DNA. Thanks @catalogtechinc and Imagene for making this happen! Pre-orders are still open. If you order a capsule, we also send you a physical book. And those are cool, too. Links here: press.asimov.com/books

Super cool! "First commercially-available book to be written in DNA and sold in both forms."

Over the years, people have asked: What does Asimov do? This is our brief response. At a high level, we think biology is an advanced form of molecular nanotechnology. Our goal is to create tools and software to more reliably engineer cells, thus bolstering humanity’s ability to design living systems and enabling biotechnologies with outsized societal benefit. Just because bioengineers can manipulate organisms, however, does not mean their well-laid plans come to fruition. Biological organisms are typically engineered, today, using iterative trial-and-error, rather than actual design. Our goal is to push biotechnology into a true engineering discipline, where experimental outcomes are predictable ahead of time. Everything we do centers around a concept that we call genetic design. We think of this as the process of intentionally modifying an organism's DNA using advanced techniques such as characterized parts, modeling, and multi-omics analysis. Genetic design is distinct from traditional genetic engineering in that it focuses on forward design driven by biophysical understanding and model-guided predictions. One of the ways we’re using genetic design is by engineering mammalian cells to make medicines. In other words, we’re making bio-tools, such as expression platforms and engineered cell lines, as well as software tools, including metabolic simulators, codon optimizers and signal peptide predictors, to help our customers engineer cells to make antibodies, AAV, and lentivirus. A large part of our work is focused on antibodies, a type of protein used to make many of the most popular medicines, including Humira (for rheumatoid arthritis) and Keytruda (for cancer). Many pharmaceutical companies make antibodies using Chinese Hamster Ovary cells, or CHO, but the problem is that this process is unpredictable and has to be tweaked for every new antibody. We routinely use our wet-lab and software tools to optimize and engineer these cells, thus coaxing them to make greater amounts of antibodies with fast timelines and good quality attributes. More recently, we also launched a product called LV Edge. LV stands for lentivirus, which is a type of virus that can be used to deliver genes into human cells for gene therapies. Lyfgenia, for example, was recently approved by the FDA and uses a lentiviral vector to add a hemoglobin gene to blood-making stem cells to treat sickle-cell disease. We engineered HEK293 (a type of immortalized human cell) to make large amounts of lentivirus, with the goal of making gene therapies available to more people. We’ve also written a longer blog about LV Edge, which you can read here. We have another product for AAV manufacturing, too, called AAV Edge. Our basic “tech stack” is the same, regardless of whether we’re working on antibodies or anything else. We have teams actively working on optimizing cells and production processes for individual molecules and other teams building computational models — based on biophysical insights or transformer-based AI models — to predict aspects of how an engineered cell will behave before we make it. Another team within Asimov Labs collects large amounts of data in our Boston laboratory to measure the function of myriad biological processes, and then works with computational biology teams to improve their models. We strive to make every experiment into a data point so that nothing goes to waste. Many of the models and tools we develop for various products are also bundled together and made available through Kernel, our browser-based software for genetic design. You can think of it as the “hub” or “vault” for all of the tools we’re building. So that’s the gist. We make wet-lab and computational tools to engineer cells in more predictable ways. While engineering those cells, we collect a large amount of data and build models to understand how they work. This research, in turn, bolsters Kernel and makes it easier for everyone to design biology. In the future, we aim to expand our product offerings to agriculture, foods, and materials; anywhere that engineered biology can make an impact. This and more at our website: asimov.com

In 30 minutes, we're wrapping up our final Issue for 2024. In the last 12 months, we launched this magazine, built a team of 6, printed our first book, and published more than 100,000 words about biotech and scientific progress. Thank you for following our journey!

Today we're launching our third biopharma product line, AAV Edge, to empower gene therapy developers. A big part of why Asimov exists is to enable biotechnologies with outsized societal benefit – and AAV gene therapies are a prime example. /1

Cells are dense, crowded places; a bit like molecular burritos. When we engineer an organism, coaxing it to make proteins or molecules, we are imposing a molecular burden upon it. Our latest blog is all about these molecular "loads," and how to ease them, in engineered cells.🔻

Really proud of this piece, and really curious to hear what people think.

Today we launch ISSUE 03 of Asimov Press. 🧬🧫 Our featured essay is on the Origins of the Lab Mouse. 🐭 It explains how mice made their way from Victorian 'fancy' shows and a farm in Massachusetts to become a biomedical mainstay. By @Atelfo.

Our first book about scientific progress, Origins, is now available. We learned a lot about printing—and starting a magazine—while creating this book. So we decided to write an essay about it! Buy the book, support our work, and learn more. 🔻 press.asimov.com/resources/less…

The @AsimovPress books are finally here! The first 500 copies were delivered to our hotel in San Jose. Feels surreal to see our hard work in print. The books are beautiful. Be the first to buy a copy at @SynBioBeta this Tuesday. Or just come by and say 'hello'. :)

This story has it all: - Self-modifying AI - Quantum mechanical protein design - Automated genome editing - Bacteria that extrude carbon nanotubes - Next-gen chip fabrication What more could you ask for? An incredible sci-fi short by @RichardMCNgo for @AsimovPress

The F.D.A. has approved dozens of cell therapies, nearly half of which are engineered. They work by taking a person's cells, engineering them to express a new gene, and then placing those "re-wired" cells back into the body to attack cancer cells or treat sickle-cell disease. Engineered cell therapies are typically made by packaging the transgene (such as a CAR, for CAR-T therapies) into a lentivirus, and then using that virus to deliver it into the patient's cells. But there's a problem: It's costly and complicated to make lentivirus at scale. A typical CAR-T therapy costs a patient anywhere from $375,000 and $1,000,000 for a single infusion, and manufacturing is a headache. We recently released our LV Edge system. It's a suite of engineered cell lines and computational tools to streamline and lower the costs of lentivirus manufacturing. LV Edge does away with the need for plasmid transfections to make lentivirus, and still routinely achieves titers of 1E8 TU/mL and higher. We think it's an important step toward making cell therapies cheaper and more widely available. In our latest blog, we explain the science behind our latest tools. Read it by clicking the link below.

Fast Biology 🚀 Cells are crowded, frenzied places. Sugar molecules cruise at 250 mph. ATP synthase whips around 134 times per second. But these numbers seem made up. How do we know they're real? My first editor's column for @AsimovPress. asimov.press/p/fast-biology

~1/2 of FDA-approved cell therapies are engineered. The cells carry added transgenes that 'rewire' them to attack cancer or treat another disease. Most engineered cell therapies, including CAR-T, are made using lentiviruses. Our latest blog explains how it works & how to scale🔻

🚀 Today we launched the LV Edge Packaging System, our first offering in the cell therapy space and a leap forward for lentiviral production Cut costs, reduce risks, and achieve titers of 1E8 TU/mL and higher with cell lines and software tools to optimize transgene expression

Learn more here: asimov.com/LV