vishwaraj sontake (@v_sontake) profile picture

Scientist.

Joined August 2013
Photo by vishwaraj sontake (@v_sontake)Photo by vishwaraj sontake (@v_sontake)
vishwaraj sontake retweeted
ft. Jonathan Levinsohn, @BernhardDumoul1, @AminAbedini1990, @AndiBergeson, Eunji Ha, @KonstantinKltz, @KSusztak, Samuel Grindel, Aria Huang, Alex Hughes, @NancyZh60672287, @PaulTitchenell, @DrMingyaoLi, Laura Finn & Kotaro Sasaki @PennKidney @PennIDOM nature.com/articles/s41588-0…
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We updated our Susztaklabbiobank website susztaklab.com For almost two decades our laboratory has collected and profiled human kidney tissue, paired it with mouse and rat models and with the genetics of millions of people, and built one of the most complete maps of the human kidney that exists. This site is where we share it: genome-wide association results, expression, methylation, protein and open-chromatin maps, single-cell and single-nucleus atlases, spatial transcriptomes and animal-model resources, each in an interactive browser you can query today. Please send your suggestions how we could improve our site. Let's cure kidney disease together !
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Just found an NIH complete course on Pharmacology free online. What a wonderful course.
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Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead. You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want. Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well. So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it. If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
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vishwaraj sontake retweeted
In 2024, many were arguing that AGI and Singularity are impossible. But now we have Astra which some claim is "almost AGI". Hence my old prediction that we will see something like AGI by 2028 (@grok 5 will be one as well) still stands. And I think true AGI exceeding specialist human capability along with Tech Singularity is possible by the 40s. But here's the concerning part for me: All this is radically going to change the way humans live and human civilization progresses. There is going to be a lot of upheaval in the systems we are used to. Finance, economics, trade, tech, justice, politics, policing - all can become radically different by 2050s if this sort of "exceeding specialist humans" true AGI arrives. We are definitely not prepared. Our governments, public services, authorities, and society are largely organized around slow changing, organized, age-old systems. They are not ready for rapid changes and upheaval. Hence I predict that political power will react to stop the progress into such AGI. So by 2030s, I think we will have authoritarian control of tech companies before they can raise their own robot armies powered by AGI to take on the governments. IMO, this is the more likely scenario: Authorities (may be a worldwide govt/org) will take control of all hardware for AI and freeze AI development and progress. But authorities will do this using public and AI support. The authorities may time it with a market crash, blamed on AI calling it an "AI bubble burst", where public lose enormous amounts of money. The public will then be angered and fear-mongered about losing money, losing jobs, and AI destroying their environment and lives. To make them support authoritarian control of tech. So humans will sabotage progress to true AGI (exceeding specialist human capabilities) themselves. But not before forming factions and having a fight about it. I think we are entering an age of extreme geopolitical, political, and civil turbulence because of AI. How do you prepare? There's one time tested idea for those who can (I can't yet do it): Get rid of all material wealth, get rid of all tech, go to India, live in the mountains in an Ashram or start one yourself. Learn and preach spirituality. I urge the Indian govt to ease visas for such activities for select friendly nations. Elon Musk must be given a special pre-approved visa. For, I am sure, when the authoritarians take control in the US, SpaceX will be the first to be destroyed as it makes AI and robotics both.
Replying to @Nateswej1 @sama
I am not sure about consciousness, but AGI is absolutely possible. We will have extremely smart and powerful human like AGIs that will lead us to some form of Singularity. But will we allow it without sabotaging it ourselves seems more of a doubt to me.
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The aim of this review is to broadly introduce sports and exercise scientists to fat metabolism and the function of white, beige and brown adipose tissue in the context of exercise.
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Do you want to be the person bringing together the PayPal mafia of biotech? @GordianBio’s talent team has an opening for an early career striver who wants to do an unreasonably good job at attracting and concentrating talent towards systematically solving everything that breaks in aging bodies. Traits required: - High warmth + socially fearless - Spotter of steep trajectories - Cares about 2% improvements - Allergic to bureaucratic delays (Europeans will be considered in special circumstances) - Absurdly long battery life - Nonfunctional bar-lowering mechanism - Capital G Good What we do: Proprietary tech lets us make ground truth intervention data for hundreds of targets in living disease. This lets us validate more therapeutic targets than have ever been published, and launch drug programs knowing what works best. We’re applying this across age-related diseases, with our first drug headed towards clinical trials. If you are this person: ats.rippling.com/gordian-bio…
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Does scale limit what we can discover? In our new @NatureGenet study, led by @MorZada3 & @Anna_Kurilovich, we built a 427-sample single-cell atlas of multiple myeloma across 341 individuals, linked to genetics and detailed clinical data 🧵 (1/15) 🔗 nature.com/articles/s41588-0…
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This Independence Day 🇮🇳, I asked, "What will the next century of young Indians look like?" $0.01 Drone Deliveries. UAVs that never land. Groceries in under 10 minutes. Meet The 22nd Century Indian. A Documentary on a New India.
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vishwaraj sontake retweeted
A nice python package for creating Publication-Ready Scientific Plots github.com/faridrashidi/cnsp… if you use R, take a look at rpkgs.datanovia.com/ggpubr/
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It’s a wonderful thing when something you build starts working. New story on Gordian’s blog on our disease-modifying osteoarthritis drug, and the story of how we were able to nominate it after seeing the effects of ~200 novel targets: blog.gordian.bio/p/how-gordi… Reversing joint degeneration would be amazing on its own, but honestly I’m more excited by the proof point that our method of systematically identifying therapeutics for age-related diseases is working. I left academia because I didn’t want our hopes for longevity to rest on a single hypothesis. A machine that can test all of them is exactly what I hoped for. Bad time to be an age-related disease!
We have the first proof that our causal validation machine works: it can search large portions of the druggable genome in high-fidelity disease models and find drugs that restore old, diseased tissue. It produced “Omen 13” for osteoarthritis, now in IND-enabling studies. How we found it: blog.gordian.bio/p/how-gordi… We got there by developing Mosaic Screening, which lets us test many interventions side by side in the same diseased tissue until we find the best way to treat the disease. This eliminates the trade-off between committing to a narrow set of hypotheses and using less predictive models. From there, Omen 13 emerged as our discovery process removed one risk after another. We chose a model of naturally occurring OA over one of surgically induced disease. We screened AAV constructs from the get-go, then validated them directly in human patient tissue and diverse spontaneous disease models. We then tested whether they delivered meaningful effects on both pain and disease, and benchmarked the result against the pipeline of clinical DMOAD candidates. Omen 13 is headed for the clinic, and the discovery engine is now working through cardiometabolic diseases. Read about it here: blog.gordian.bio/p/how-gordi…
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vishwaraj sontake retweeted
We have the first proof that our causal validation machine works: it can search large portions of the druggable genome in high-fidelity disease models and find drugs that restore old, diseased tissue. It produced “Omen 13” for osteoarthritis, now in IND-enabling studies. How we found it: blog.gordian.bio/p/how-gordi… We got there by developing Mosaic Screening, which lets us test many interventions side by side in the same diseased tissue until we find the best way to treat the disease. This eliminates the trade-off between committing to a narrow set of hypotheses and using less predictive models. From there, Omen 13 emerged as our discovery process removed one risk after another. We chose a model of naturally occurring OA over one of surgically induced disease. We screened AAV constructs from the get-go, then validated them directly in human patient tissue and diverse spontaneous disease models. We then tested whether they delivered meaningful effects on both pain and disease, and benchmarked the result against the pipeline of clinical DMOAD candidates. Omen 13 is headed for the clinic, and the discovery engine is now working through cardiometabolic diseases. Read about it here: blog.gordian.bio/p/how-gordi…
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Gaining therapeutic access to the human brain is one of the biggest unsolved problems in biomedical science. Today @nature, we uncover a massive influx of immune cells into the human brain during aging, revealing that the brain is more accessible than previously thought. 1/ nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
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There’s a lot of discussion around how far AI can take biology. It is making therapeutic possibilities abundant, but when do we get the medicines? The next step is a causal validation machine that distills those possibilities into the right paths to medicines. We’re building that machine, using Mosaic Screening to scale causal validation in vivo across the entire druggable genome, disease after disease, creating a comprehensive ground-truth map of possible targets. Revealing the entire landscape lets us map a safe path instead of wandering into the unknown wilderness. Here’s how we do it:
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Excited to share Pan-human Azimuth, an NIH @_hubmap reference for single-cell data biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… We invested deeply in human curation of training data, prioritized diversity+breadth+extensive QC, and uniformly labeled cells across 23 tissues in a single hierarchy (1/)
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The following review outlines the main cell sources and construction methods for lung #organoids and explains how organ-on-a-chip technology can add flow, stretch, and other physical cues to organoid models. 📕 bit.ly/4yhgUhQ
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Excited to share a bit about what I've been up to the past few months! As a molecular biologist I always struggled to stay in the flow state while designing experiments and analyzing data. Sequence visualization, annotation, wrangling pymol settings, variant mapping, WAY too much tortuous cloning . These are a lot of small pain points that accumulate into friction and context switching. What I wanted was a tool that would serve as a flow state manager. So we built DNAForge, a desktop molecular biology workbench to make the flow state more accessible!🧵
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One of the most important lessons emerging from large-scale CRISPR perturbation studies is that the effect of a perturbation is often highly conditional on cellular state. The same genetic perturbation can produce markedly different molecular phenotypes even within the same cell type; T cells in the figure. ◻️ Depending on factors such as signaling activity, cell-cycle stage, metabolic state, differentiation status, and environmental context. A perturbation does not act on a static system, it acts on a dynamic cell. This has important implications for how we interpret perturbation data. A CRISPR screen performed under one condition should not be viewed as revealing a context-independent function of a gene product. Instead, it reveals how that perturbation manifests within a particular cellular state.
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This review is a great weekend read on translational genomics. How do we move from genetic associations to novel biology and ultimately therapeutic hypotheses at multiple scales (from molecular changes, to cellular architectures, to organs, to disease?)
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Drs. Jonathan A. Brassard and James M. Wells review how developmental biology principles are being used to create next-generation #organoids with greater cellular complexity. Discover more via @CellStemCell: 🔖 bit.ly/3QJJszK
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