Delighted to share our latest work, published in Cancer Cell, led by the outstanding @YETHANLI. In this study, we identify a previously unrecognized immature subset of cord blood NK cells that persists throughout manufacturing, drives trogocytosis, and limits CAR NK cell efficacy. We also show that cord blood units enriched for this subset are associated with inferior clinical outcomes, while removing these cells significantly enhances CAR NK cell function and antitumor activity. These findings provide a practical path towards more consistent and more potent off-the-shelf CAR NK therapies through improved donor selection and product engineering. Many congratulations to Ethan and all of the co-authors and collaborators who made this work possible! sciencedirect.com/science/ar… #CancerCell #NKcells #CARNK #CellTherapy #Immunotherapy @UTMDAnderson

Well experimental validation will be much faster with the help of AI so I don't know why that's an argument against it. Again, I'm quoting Carl June: "Our goal was to show how LLMs could be used in scientific discovery to efficiently find new targets". But I agree that it's not the best example of AI innovation/discovery. How about these? disco-design.github.io/ biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… genbio-ai.github.io/VCHarnes…

Meanwhile, Carl June: “To our knowledge, this study represents one of the first uses of large language models in the field of cell and gene therapy, including CAR T cell therapy,” said June, the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy at Penn. “Our goal was to show how LLMs could be used in scientific discovery to efficiently find new targets and build new therapies.” That's not "Silicon Valley". That's Carl June. And that's just the most recent example I thought of. You cannot say these things in 2026 because whatever your expertise, it just isn't true. pennmedicine.org/news/ai-fra…

“Once the platform works, biology becomes programmable.” Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, says AI drug discovery won’t progress gradually. It will look more like AlphaFold, years of quiet infrastructure work, then a sudden leap where the system can scale across entire disease areas.

Academia is cruel because it selects for people obsessively interested in a narrow topic, but what’s actually rewarded is the ability to pivot fluidly to whatever’s new and fundable.

Kudos to @JoshuaKushner & Thrive Capital for leading this $2 billion raise for Isomorphic led by @demishassabis! Arguably, Isomorphic will become the most impactful company in history for human health & life and a key to my bold claim that we will treat most diseases in a decade!

The next frontier in protein design will not be defined by structure alone, but by the capacity to engineer motion as a first-class principle of function. This is because dynamics is where the real biology lives. Foundational work by Karplus, Levitt & Warshel made clear that chemistry cannot be understood without motion, mechanism, and scale. Gō, Brooks & others showed that proteins possess characteristic collective motions - low-frequency normal modes that capture how whole molecules bend, breathe, and fluctuate. Frauenfelder then sharpened the picture further: proteins are not static objects occupying a single minimum, but dynamic ensembles traversing rugged energy landscapes. And yet the modern AI revolution in protein science has been, above all, a revolution in structure. In our new paper in Matter, @_Bo_Ni and I ask a different question: not what structure will this sequence adopt? but what sequence will realize a prescribed pattern of motion? VibeGen inverts the conventional design paradigm. Rather than treating dynamics as a consequence to be analyzed after the fact, it makes dynamics the design objective from the outset. Using a language diffusion model with two cooperating agents - a designer that proposes sequences and a predictor that critiques them against the target motion profile - the system converges on de novo proteins with tailored vibrational behavior. One of the most intriguing results is a form of functional degeneracy - distinct sequences and distinct folds can satisfy the same target dynamical specification. For a given functional pattern of motion, evolution may have sampled only a small region of the physically realizable design space. The space of viable molecular mechanics may be far larger than the repertoire biology happened to discover. We have made "vibe" into a cultural metaphor - something intuitive, affective, subjective. But at the molecular scale, vibe is not metaphor: It is physics. For a protein, the vibe is the pattern of motion itself; the fluctuations, resonances, and collective displacements that determine what the molecule can do.

Unfortunately, most equity investors are not willing to underwrite @demishassabis’s vision of turning “sickcare” into healthcare: prevention and cures. Indeed, the market caps of two of the most important patent holders, $CRSP and $NTLA, are only ~$5B and ~$1.5B, respectively.

Processing hundreds of tumor samples per week now to train the largest cancer foundation models. AI will cure cancer.

The most beautiful molecular recorder 😍 GEMINI is a self-assembling protein system that records cellular events as physical layers, readable via imaging. Achieves down to 15 min resolution and works nicely in vivo! From @DingchangLin's lab in @Nature

Two young Harvard professors are coming for the supplements industry. @omarabudayyeh and @jgooten run a joint lab at @harvardmed, have co-founded 4 biotechs, and raised over $300M to develop genetic medicines and diagnostics. But what surprised me most: they think like consumer tech founders, not academics. They start with what people actually want and work backwards from there. And best of all? They’re totally longevity-pilled. Consumers want to feel younger and healthier, and big pharma is waking up to it. In this week’s episode of the Free Radicals podcast, we discuss the biology of aging, the future of longevity therapeutics, and how Harvard can bring legitimacy to the supplements industry. One of my favorite episodes yet. Be sure to follow me, @EricDai_BioE and @FreeRadicalsBio to stay up to date on the latest news in longevity biotech!

My plan for the next 6-12 months is to get as good as possible at biology. I’m going to be deep diving into everything because there’s a massive TSUNAMI of wealth & health coming.

New Limit's employees have plenty of "biological research and clinical training." In fact, they are top notch... newlimit.com/team

Being a doctor is no longer core An autist equipped with a frontier LLM and some mid lab capabilities can outperform you

Brian is heavily invested in this area. We discussed this on my podcast. He started @newlimit to extend human healthspan using epigenetic reprogramming and committed $100M of his own money.

no one is focused on allo

@DrORourke2 Fair point - specialized T cells are definitely a hurdle for certain cancers . Still, the Nature paper makes a strong case for skipping manufacturing altogether in many other cancers, potentially making the allo/auto debate irrelevant there.

Everyone is focused on allogeneic as the fix for CAR-T access. But a Nature paper this month made a stronger case for something else entirely: skip the manufacturing step altogether. In vivo CAR-T is coming. And it could make the autologous vs. allogeneic debate irrelevant. nature.com/articles/s41586-0…