Aaron

Nitroduck designs new colors, flavors, and disease resistance into fruits and veggies. We integrate CRISPR into breeding through pollen, making any crop gene-editable. Breeding a new specialty crop variety takes 8 - 16 years: breeders hope for random gene combinations and mutations, then spend years picking out the good ones. Meanwhile, consumer tastes, the climate trends, and pathogens change way faster. Now, accessible genome sequencing and AI can tell breeders what to aim for instead of what to hope for, and CRISPR can turn random mutations into chosen ones. The catch is that CRISPR only works on about 15% of crops. It has to go into a single stem cell that’s then regrown into a whole plant, a process that has to be worked out for each variety, which is cost-prohibitive. We skip the stem cell and put CRISPR into a pollen grain. The grain pollinates a flower, and out comes an edited seed - seamlessly tapping into how breeders already work. Matúš, Miro, and I are plant synthetic biologists who made duckweed, the smallest and fastest-growing plant on Earth, genetically engineerable. For doing so we won the Grand Prize at iGEM, the “Olympics of biotech.” During our studies, we engineered 4x more plants than the average plant scientist does in a whole career. Now we’re building Nitroduck, The Crop Design Company, which will make pesticides obsolete by 2042.

i hate journalist halloween what do you mean you’re the taylor farms shredded iceberg lettuce recalled due to cyclospora

Launching RNAFoundry.com – we manufacture personalized cancer vaccines.

Why might the frontier labs be interested in biotech?

🚨BREAKING🚨 A DRONE HAS FLOWN INTO LAMBEAU FIELD FROM OUTSIDE THE STADIUM DURING TONIGHT’S #PACKERS-#PANTHERS GAME. Both teams have ordered the players to the sideline for safety. The referees have stopped play and will not allow the game to continue until the drone situation is taken care of.

Another incredible quarter from the @KymeraTx team: KT-579 - first in human data for the first ever IRF5 directed investigational medicine showing: - complete degradation of IRF5 - placebo-like safety - deep inhibition of inflammatory cytokines, interferon signaling and B-cell markers - onto a Lupus Ph1b study now KT-621 - completed last patient last visit in Broaden2, our global Ph2b AD study, with data before year end. - more details on our call.. Thanks to our amazing team, patients and partners!

Last night in Malibu, California.

Americans are flying to Shanghai for a lung cancer pill that the FDA approved 15 months ago. Max Doppelt did it for his mother. Her lung cancer had spread to her brain. The drug most likely to help her, sunvozertinib, had been sold in China since 2023 but was unavailable in the US. So he flew over and came home with 26 boxes. Nineteen months later, she is alive and still working. He says at least 30 Americans have made the same trip. In the trial behind the US approval, the pill shrank tumors in 46 out of every 100 patients whose cancer had worsened after chemotherapy. The holdup is business, not medicine. Dizal, the Shanghai company that makes it, had no US sales network, according to US oncologists in May. AstraZeneca licensed the drug in July for $600 million and says US sales will start this quarter. An @FDA approval helps American patients only when a company actually sells the drug here.

What’s stopping you from buying this Detroit home for only $1,999,000?

About 15% of ~40,000 people who developed cancer have pathogenic (disease-causing) genome variants (PVs) when their DNA was sequenced. That's a big proportion of cancer that would set up prevention or very early detection which is completely missed today @AACR @CD_AACR aacrjournals.org/cancerdisco…

This is insane. THREE different Hurricane forecast cones are now simultaneously aiming at the North American continent.

“Fires break out” “Fight between pilots” The BBC, ladies and gentlemen.

AGENT WARS We asked 5 top AI models to design, engineer and 3D print a bridge to with the goal of holding the most possible weight. 🇺🇸 Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 (High) 🇨🇳 Kimi: Kimi K3 (High) 🇺🇸 Meta: Muse Spark 1.3 (High) 🇺🇸 OpenAI: GPT 6 Astra (High) 🇺🇸 SpaceXAI: Grok 4.7 (High) Each bridge had specific parameters. It had to span 2 feet, use a maximum 500 grams of filament, and it had to be under 18 hours of printing time. We specified what type of weight and where we would place it on the bridge. The Score: • Claude Opus 5.5 held an estimated 130 lbs! It took 9 hours and 11 minutes to print 17 parts and used 441 grams of filament. • Meta Muse Spark 1.3 held 26.5 lbs. It took 13 hours and 12 minutes to print 49 parts and used 478 grams of filament. • OpenAI GPT-6 Astra held an estimated 17.5 lbs. It took 15 hours and 44 minutes to print 29 parts and used 442 grams of filament. • SpaceXAI Grok 4.7 did not finish. On assembly it could not stand up by itself. It took 12 hours and 22 minutes to print 29 parts and used 460 grams of filament. • Kimi K3 did not finish. It wasn’t engineered correctly so the bridge could not even be assembled. It took 11 hours and 19 minutes to print 35 parts and used 446 grams of filament. That means our champion for this episode is Claude Opus 5.5. Not only did it hold the most weight (by FAR) it also took the least time to print, used the least amount of parts and used the least amount of filament. This was episode 02 of Agent Wars, stay tuned for episode 03.

A Flock of Altruists - Hit The Breaks Except For Me

NEW: Reed Jobs, a prominent biotech investor (and son of another Jobs you may have heard of), calls for a doubling of the NIH budget to $100 billion. Via @statnews statnews.com/2026/09/21/nih-…

In a new collaborative study publish in @ScienceMagazine today, researchers at 23andMe and @DanaFarber used data from more than 3.3 million 23andMe consenting research participants to characterize a rare inherited EGFR variant that significantly elevates lung cancer risk, while also exploring its relationship to smoking, polygenic risk, ancestry and geography. We found that the EGFR T790M genetic variant is carried by about 1 in 15,000 people in the United States, and is associated with a 25-fold increased risk of lung cancer. Among people who never smoked, carriers had a 60 fold higher odds of developing lung cancer than non-carriers. Illustration credit: @oliveruberti Learn more about the study and work here: 23andme.org/blog/articles/eg…