Ian Lim retweeted
Surprise 1: Anthropic acquired a one-person biotech
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Surprise 2: that person is me
Surprise 3: I’m here to tell you all about it
Yes, this is what you think it is; after 6 yrs of increasingly loose anonymity: the Professor Oak reveal post
…and yes, it has gotten so boring around here that I’m literally doxxing myself to spice up the timeline
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Ok, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cody Tranbarger. I mostly tweet, but occasionally find time to dabble in drug dev & starting/building biotechs. My past lives span the VC, crossover, startup continuum; Prof Oak has been my way of keeping a digital foot in those worlds, despite having my physical feet planted elsewhere.
The past 18 mo, ‘elsewhere’ was Mithril Medicine, a co. I founded to develop bsAbs for LAMA2-CMD & other ECM-related genetic diseases.
Mithril was born out of hands-on building with @MikeNGladstone, @JasonPaulRhodes, @LifeSciVC, & team @atlasventure. Somehow, I made enough half-decent calls along the way (even a broken clock is right twice a day, eh?) to convince them Mithril/I warranted a small seed. While I can hardly rationalize such an outrageously cavalier bet, I’m grateful for it, & I'd partner with Atlas again in a heartbeat.
In typical AV fashion, Mithril’s primordial form was virtual, decentralized, & ultra-lean. This stage tends to be short-lived, but for Mithril, it worked surprisingly well, for surprisingly long, thanks in part to the rapid maturation of the AI tools I used liberally.
Eventually, Mithril became a bit of an experiment itself - to find the upper bound of how far it could scale as a single operator + a bunch of Claude (+ a stellar bench of part-time consultants).
In parallel, I started spending time with @nc_frey, @an1lam, & @CoefficientBio team; and promptly experienced, for the 1st time, AI at the frontier. Soon thereafter, Mithril stopped looking like an experiment, & started looking like a preview of an entirely new operating model.
From that spark came “Pipeline-in-a-Person.” The idea immediately resonated when we shared it here back in April; and it was central to the shared vision that led to Anthropic’s acquisition of Mithril, & my joining the team.
Why join Anthropic? Three reasons.
(1) For Mithril, the programs continue, with more resources & infrastructure behind them, and as much Claude as I can put to work.
(2) For me, the chance to start several more programs, & find out how many one person can actually run in parallel - an almost unprecedented luxury for a curious drug hunter.
(3) For our mission, a path to institutionalize & scale this new way of working, then put it in the hands of all of biopharma, all over the world - which, candidly, I find the most energizing.
Will AI x Bio cure diseases? Unequivocally yes, imo… but not by the route that gets the most airtime. Rather than timeline acceleration & compression, I see orchestration & parallelization as today's low-hanging fruit.
Most drug hunters see a handful of go/no-go calls in a career, & spend entirely too much of the rest trading emails (my inbox can attest).
Give them the bandwidth to run several programs at once, and the time to focus on scientific judgment, and I’m willing to bet they’ll make better calls. And at scale, better calls translate to more drugs, higher hit rates, broader patient impact, & likely, a disease or 10 or 100 cured. I couldn't be more excited to build toward that future @AnthropicAI.
Finally, a heartfelt thank you to BioTwitter/X. The end of anonymity is bittersweet, but if anyone’s earned a proper introduction, you all have.
It’s difficult to overstate how much this app has done for me: a decade of education, plenty of friends, many job opportunities, several mentors, a few investors, even a co-founder (fmr). It was the generosity of this community that inspired me to start posting 6 years ago, after just as many years lurking. I hope I’ve been able to pay it forward, in my own small way.
But, to be clear, Prof Oak isn’t going anywhere. Same beat, same themes, and now, a front-row seat to drug development at the frontier. Stay tuned for dispatches from the trenches; and remember...
Gotta Cure 'Em All
Ian Lim retweeted
Over the past few months, Anthropic scientists have engaged in deep research partnerships with six organizations developing new medicines. We've also begun drug discovery efforts of our own.
In doing so, we’ve learned much more about how Claude can support the many stages of drug development.
In this blog post, we share some early results from these efforts, and describe how this work fits in with our wider ambitions in the life sciences.
anthropic.com/research/early…
Ian Lim retweeted
A collection of achievements from @neuralink:
- Unveils brain threads thinner than a human hair and a robot that sews them into the brain
- A monkey named Pager plays Pong with his mind
- FDA clears Neuralink for its first human trial
- Noland Arbaugh, paralyzed from the shoulders down, becomes the first human implanted and goes home the next day
- Noland plays chess and Civilization VI with his thoughts
- Noland hits 8 bits per second of cursor control, a world record for a brain-computer interface
- Second patient Alex plays Counter-Strike 2 and designs parts in CAD software on his second day with the implant
- Blindsight, its device to restore vision, earns FDA Breakthrough Device status
- Brad Smith, who has ALS and can't speak, edits and narrates a YouTube video in his own AI-cloned voice
- Speech restoration earns FDA Breakthrough Device status
- Trials expand to Canada, the UK, and the UAE
- 21 people enrolled worldwide, with zero serious device-related adverse events
- A man who couldn't move his limbs for four years feeds himself with a thought-controlled robotic arm
- First surgery that threads the implant through the brain's protective membrane without cutting it
- Patients steer powered wheelchairs with their minds
- A patient with ALS tells his wife "I love you" through the implant
- A patient sets a new record of 11.32 bits per second, faster than most people with a mouse, per Neuralink
Andrew Huberman on @neuralink, and the next frontier for brain-computer interfaces:
"Getting people who are in locked-in syndrome to speak, or getting people who have a spinal injury to walk, which Neuralink and others are trying to develop technologies to do. That's heroic.
@elonmusk obviously understands what he's trying to achieve with Neuralink, and he's extremely savvy with respect to what can be done now, where we need to go.
I think the coolest problem that's also the biggest problem is how we can noninvasively write to the nervous system in sleep and waking states.
Who can develop, it will probably be ultrasound, a non-invasive way of selectively activating or quieting brain areas with high amounts of temporal precision.
That, to me, seems like the most important thing to resolve right now, and it's totally doable."
Insane arc from lightspeed to Stanford hoops. Love to see it
Ian Lim retweeted
bring back having phases
become obsessed with tennis for 6 months. learn everything about espresso. randomly decide you’re a runner. buy a camera. start cooking.
you don’t need to do everything forever. sometimes it’s fun to just be really into something
Ian Lim retweeted
We got hoop highlights edited by opus in devin now 😭😭
Unreal times
fun time playing basketball for the first time yesterday!
thank you so much for the invite and hospitality @mattbergland
looking forward to running it back!
edited with opus 5.5 in Devin @cognition
7 years post CTRL-LABS acquisition and we finally have the general consumer neural wristband
Glad to see all of the research and resources actually make it to market!
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LFG @CarlSchoeller so bullish
Today we’re launching Parallax, the AI energy company with a $117m fundraise led by Founders Fund, Eclipse, Lux, Diffusion, Greylock and General Catalyst. (1/5)
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Ian Lim retweeted
In 12 weeks, we built a research facility that is run entirely by AI.
AI designs, executes, and observes experiments end-to-end across biology, chemistry, and materials science.
We’re introducing SciUniverse: a benchmark that measures AI’s ability to do real-world scientific research.
bullish BCIs
next 5 years are going to be insane
Through the VOICE trial, Terry is using his Neuralink implant to help fine-tune a brain-to-voice interface for himself and others who can’t speak. He trained the algorithm first by miming speech as best he could, then by simply thinking the words and hearing them come out in his own natural voice.
Powered by Grok Voice from @spacexai
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Ian Lim retweeted
New paper! In subliminal learning, LLMs transmit traits (e.g. loving cats) though seemingly unrelated data (e.g. numbers). We proactively detect these effects as readable prompts. To do so, we use the surprising ability of models to verbalize learned soft prompts.🧵
Wonder if instinct would ever charge companies to set up/maintain their own instinct agent + keep it free for consumers
“Hey 4 Charles we saw you received thousands of inquiries in the last week. Want us to get handle that?”
Insane network effects to create your own demand 🙃
Your Instinct can now handle phone calls.
Introducing Instinct Concierge – a white glove service meant to handle high-touch cases, such as making phone calls, high-end service booking, and more. You’ll be able to book the restaurant that doesn’t take online reservations, get on your dentist’s cancellation list, or have that cable bill sorted out.
We’re slowly rolling this out to our early access group today and will be expanding access soon.
Ian Lim retweeted
There’s a crazy plan to turn the vacant SF Centre Mall into a downtown basketball Mecca. NBA coach Phil Handy (on staff with LeBron/76ers) is involved. The plan includes a prep academy, a Top Golf-like floor, and retail. @jillianiles and I have the deets:
sfstandard.com/2026/09/13/sa…
AI for bio / life sciences is the next frontier
Not seeing enough people talk about the significance of this…AlphaGenome is a huge infra unlock for genetics research
Scale up BFS —> focus $$ and time on most promising directions
We’re launching AlphaGenome Atlas: an AI-powered searchable database mapping the predicted impact of all 9 billion possible single-letter DNA changes.
Here’s how it could help researchers better understand our biology 🧵
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Ian Lim retweeted
Voice is now available in your existing Codex threads. Talk through a PR with the agent that wrote it, debate the architecture, or work out what comes next. You can jump into voice whenever something needs a back-and-forth, then let the agent keep working once you’ve figured it out together.