TomorrowScale Podcast

On this episode, our guest is economist Paul Kohlhaas, co-founder and CEO of Molecule and co-author of the VitaDAO whitepaper. We’ll head to Berlin, Germany, where Paul and his team of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and enthusiasts who are designing new ways to advance medicines. In Molecule’s case, they’re using tools not from the lab, but from the web; specifically web3 blockchain tokenized assets called non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). 

The team at Molecule are leveraging these new methods to tokenize the intellectual property and then coordinate, collaborate, and even fund the conduct of scientific research and development by putting the entire process onto a blockchain. And since the intellectual property (IP) asset is digitized onto a distributed ledger, or tokenized on a blockchain, it is then very straightforward for them to be bought, sold, traded, and outlicensed on private and even public marketplaces. 

The decentralized ‘web3’ technologies that enable this functionality are incredibly new, but are by their nature designed and intended to private, efficient, and potentially more secure way to research, develop, and commercialize new medicines. Paul and the team at Molecule are working to democratize the process of new drug development down to the last little “i” in diligence. Is this the dawn of a brave new world? Listen to find out.

This is the TomorrowScale podcast. Hosted by Justin Briggs.

Molecule

VitaDAO

"IP-NFTs for Biomedical Research: A new Biomedical Funding Paradigm." -- Tyler Golato on Medium

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The TomorrowScale Podcast was created to showcase scientists and entrepreneurs who are building science-based businesses, and to hear stories from the benches and in the trenches of research & development. The views expressed by the host and guests are their own, and the content of this show should not be considered legal, tax, or investing advice. Thanks to our guests for sharing their time and knowledge with us. Thank you for listening. Please science responsibly.

On this episode, Ochre Bio co-founders join us to discuss turning discarded organs into a goldmine of biological insight with deep phenotypics that enables the company to pan for fine-grained gene expression across millions of individual cells from different locations across an organ, and connect those signals to specific disease processes within cells.

The need Ochre Bio is addressing initially is literally piling up, but is still difficult to access. Every year, tens of thousands of organs are recovered for human transplantation, but a huge number—thousands of livers, kidneys, and other organs—are evaluated as unfit for use due to quality control issues: damage and/or disease. Two scientific entrepreneurs with lofty ambitions saw an opportunity to utilize those discarded livers as tools to accelerate drug discovery and development, and decided to join forces and co-found Ochre Bio.

Jack O'Meara, PhD is CEO, and Quin Wills, MD, PhD, is CSO of Ochre Bio, and their team includes teams across three labs on two continents. The Ochre team's aim is to improve the quality and number of eligible transplant organs through the use of siRNA therapeutics administered *ex vivo*, discovered through deep phenotyping on data derived from over a thousand rejected transplant livers and counting. Next, they hope to quickly translate those same compounds into human clinical trials for a wide range of liver diseases in patients with high unmet needs.

This episode is a ton of fun, and it was a blast to speak with both Jack and Quin about the company, founding story, and challenges and tips for success for scaling and solving hard technical problems for startup teams across multiple locations.

This is the TomorrowScale podcast. Hosted by Justin Briggs.

Ochre Bio

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The TomorrowScale Podcast showcases scientists and entrepreneurs building scientific ventures, and to hear stories from the benches and in the trenches of research & development. The views expressed by the host and guests are their own, and the content of this show should not be considered legal, tax, or investing advice. Thanks to our guests for sharing their time and knowledge with us. Thank you for listening. Please science responsibly.

On this episode we'll meet Dr. Daniel Levner, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Emulate, a company commercializing technology to remake human biology from the ground up using small rubbery microfluidic chips.

Forged in a multi-year partnership between DARPA and Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Emulate develops organ chips for the lung, intestine, liver, kidney, and even the brain. Slotting in between cell culture dishes, organoids, and animal models, this burgeoning area is one in which startups must marry high design and fundamentally challenging biomedical engineering to recapitulate a human being on a chip reproducibly, at scale, and under budget. Their challenge, to simultaneously accelerate and improve outcomes while reducing costs in drug development, is immense. In response, Emulate's organ chips are elegantly engineered works of art that enable scientists to move beyond the dish and blur the lines between in vitro and in vivo.

This is the TomorrowScale podcast. Hosted by Justin Briggs.

Emulate

Dr. Daniel Levner on LinkedIn

Emulate's just announced $82M Series E

"Reconstituting Organ-Level Lung Functions on a Chip" (Huh et al 2010)

Additional Emulate Publications

Axial's Joshua Elkington recently published a backgrounder on Emulate.

The TomorrowScale Podcast showcases scientists and entrepreneurs building scientific ventures, and to hear stories from the benches and in the trenches of research & development. The views expressed by the host and guests are their own, and the content of this show should not be considered legal, tax, or investing advice. Thanks to our guests for sharing their time and knowledge with us. Thank you for listening. Please science responsibly.

On this episode we'll meet Thomas Fleming, Oxford-trained engineer and co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Arctoris. Arctoris is a startup company developing a fully-autonomous drug discovery laboratory.

Founded in Oxford in 2016, Arctoris has staked their claim as the world’s first fully automated drug discovery platform. As the industry automates portions of the R&D pipeline, it will accelerate the development of novel medicines. Thomas and the team at Arctoris are working to accelerate that future.

This is the TomorrowScale podcast. Hosted by Justin Briggs.

Arctoris: https://arctoris.com

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The TomorrowScale Podcast was created to showcase scientists and entrepreneurs who are building science-based businesses, and to hear stories from the benches and in the trenches of research & development. The views expressed by the host and guests are their own, and the content of this show should not be considered legal, tax, or investing advice. Thanks to our guests for sharing their time and knowledge with us. Thank you for listening. Please science responsibly.

On this episode we'll take a walk, literally, with the founder and CEO of Rune Labs, Brian Pepin. Brian previously led electroceuticals development at GSK-backed Galvani, built a glucose-sensing contact lens at Verily, paid dues at Google X Labs, and built brain-computer interfaces at Berkeley. 

We discuss how Brian and his team at Rune Labs are trying to become the full-stack source, or the fabric, for neuroscience research. Their platform connects patient brain data to clinicians and researchers to help discover and develop novel diagnostics, devices, and even treatments for patients with various neurological disorder..

Note: When we caught up with our guest, he was on the move so forgive a bit of background and mic noise.

This is the TomorrowScale podcast. Hosted by Justin Briggs.

Rune Labs: https://runelabs.io

"Neurotech after the turning point" Rune Labs Blog

“Oscillotherapeutics - Toward real-time control of pathologic oscillations in the brain” (FrontiersIn Topic)

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The TomorrowScale Podcast was created to showcase scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs who are building science-based businesses, and to hear stories from the benches and in the trenches of research & development. The views expressed by the host and guests are their own, and the content of this show should not be considered legal, tax, or investing advice. Thanks to our guests for sharing their time and knowledge with us. Thank you for listening. Please science responsibly.

Strokes can have devastating consequences. Improving recovery outcomes will require new thinking. My grandmother's stroke years ago shook my family. I saw her in fits over the loss of precious skills—the simple joy of typing, gone. The road to recovery is difficult, but the future of rehabilitation is bright and very interactive.

On this episode we'll speak with Jon Krakauer, M.A., M.D., neurologist, director of the Brain Learning and Movement Lab and professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, and Chief Medical and Scientific Advisor to MindMaze, a company developing such telerehabilitation and digital therapeutics for neurologic conditions.

Dr. Krakauer is a scientist and entrepreneur at the forefront of virtual recovery research. He is the head of one of the most multidisciplinary laboratories you'll come across (the BLAM Lab at Johns Hopkins) in which his team conducts foundational neuroscience research. He and his team have developed digital medicines for stroke rehabilitation and other applications. And he is not afraid to challenge conventional approaches or thinking.

Researchers and entrepreneurs like Dr. Krakauer are building entire virtual worlds to help patients navigate recovery more interactively and effectively. A new wave of digital therapeutics leveraging software, devices, even robotics to deliver novel experiences to patients is coming online.

My grandmother never fully regained the ability to type. The work of Dr. Krakauer, collaborators, and other scientists working on this new type of digital neuropharmacology could potentially engage more of the brain to drive better outcomes for patients in the future. 

Virtual recovery is here, and this medicine cabinet is in the cloud.

If you like this episode of the TomorrowScale Podcast, please subscribe, write us a review, follow us Twitter, support us on Anchor and Patreon, or send us an email.

These are stories from the cutting edge of science and medicine.

This is TomorrowScale. Hosted by Justin Briggs (@briggsly).

BLAM Lab (http://blam-lab.org/)

MindPod Dolphin (formerly 'I Am Dolphin', https://www.mindmaze.com/healthcare/digital-therapies-for-brain-repair/#mind-pod)

MindMaze (http://mindmaze.com)

MSquare Healthcare (https://msquarehealthcare.com/)

@BLAMLab on Twitter (https://twitter.com/blamlab)

@TomorrowScale on Twitter (https://twitter.com/tomorrowscale)

How do you make a molecule? We’ve talked before on the TomorrowScale podcast about the challenges facing chemists–the “synthesis barrier.” The creation of novel materials and the discovery of small molecule drugs is a labor-intensive, iterative process. Exploring new chemical space requires chemistry know-how, ingenuity, and brute force experimentation. It was thought that the chemical space is too vast, and the problem too multifactorial for machine learning to make much headway to unlock nature’s recipe book.

And then, suddenly, it wasn’t.

PostEra uses machine learning to power a Chemistry-as-a-Service offering that hopes to accelerate drug discovery.

On this episode we’ll meet Dr. Alpha Lee, Chief Scientific Officer, and Aaron Martin, CEO, two of three founders of PostEra. We discuss their work developing novel machine learning models that have demonstrated significant step-change improvements in the state of the art on chemistry-related and binding prediction data science tasks. 

Dr. Lee’s research, starting from his lab at the University of Cambridge, includes a model that “speaks chemistry” [1], a graph neural network model that handles uncertainty in low data environments [2], and another that leverages the statistics of random matrices to tease the signal from the noise [3].

What is the future of chemistry? Listen to find out.

This is the TomorrowScale Podcast. Hosted by Justin Briggs.

PostEra: https://postera.ai

PostEra COVID-19 Moonshot: https://postera.ai/covid

“Crowdsourcing drug discovery during a pandemic” letter in Nature Chemistry

[1] Molecular transformer (Schwaller et al 2019)

[2] Random matrix discriminant (RMD) (Lee et al 2019)

[3] Bayesian graph convolutional neural networks (GCNN) (Zhang and Lee 2019)

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The TomorrowScale Podcast was created to showcase scientists and entrepreneurs who are building science-based businesses, and to hear stories from the benches and in the trenches of research & development. The views expressed by the host and guests are their own, and the content of this show should not be considered legal, tax, or investing advice. Thanks to our guests for sharing their time and knowledge with us. Thank you for listening. Please science responsibly.

The development of brain-machine or brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) approaches an inflection point; not just the pace of BCI progress, but also the capabilities and willingness to explore the field of neurotechnology have accelerated dramatically in recent years.

1 ... 100 ... 3,072 ... 65,536 ...

On this episode of the TomorrowScale podcast, we speak with the scientist and entrepreneur leading a startup developing implantable connections between our brains and computers. Our guest is Dr. Matt Angle, CEO of Austin, TX based Paradromics. He and his team just announced the ARGO system: a brain computer interface consisting of an implantable microwire electrode array with over 10,000 channels per square centimeter. At 26 Gigabits per second they have demonstrated the largest ever electrical recording of cortical activity in preclinical studies. At 65,536 parallel electrode channels, Paradromics has opened the largest window into the senses and doorway into the brain to date.

In our conversation, we discuss the science of brain computer interface technology and look toward the potential clinical and consumer applications for melding humans and machines. Also, Matt candidly addresses the balance between the hype and hurdles that facing Paradromics and the neurotechnology field at large: Everything from the immense engineering and computation challenges, to the systemic issues holding back hard tech commercialization, a neurotechnology competitive playing field that now includes billionaire pet projects, and what it was like moving their company out of Silicon Valley.

This is the TomorrowScale podcast. Hosted by Justin Briggs.

Paradromics: https://paradromics.com

ARGO Announcement: https://paradromics.com/news/paradromics-unveils-the-largest-ever-electrical-recordings-in-cortex/

"The Argo: A 65,536 channel recording system for high density neural recording in vivo" (Sahasrabuddhe 2020, bioArxiv preprint): https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.17.209403v1

Some of the labs mentioned on the show: 1, 2, 3, 

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The TomorrowScale Podcast was created to showcase scientists and entrepreneurs who are building science-based businesses, and to hear stories from the benches and in the trenches of research & development. The views expressed by the host and guests are their own, and the content of this show should not be considered legal, tax, or investing advice. Thanks to our guests for sharing their time and knowledge with us. Thank you for listening. Please science responsibly.

How do you build biology? Simple: DNA to RNA to proteins, right? Not so fast. 

Each one of your trillions of cells are themselves little factories, constantly producing various peptides and proteins that your body needs from building blocks of amino acids encoded by our genes. Multiple industries use various forms of biological manufacturing wherein they've harnessed cells of some kind: yeast, E coli, animal, and human cell lines to manufacture proteins for us. But there are downsides to traditional cell culture methods; those same cells that protect also constrain. And some scientists want to leave the cell behind entirely.

On this episode, we'll speak about the potential of cell-free manufacturing "bits to biology" with Tierra Biosciences CEO Zachary Sun, PhD, who co-founded Tierra with leading synthetic biologists in Harvard's George Church and CalTech's Richard Murray. Their vision is to "break free of the cell and fundamentally change how scientists approach discovery." Launched just last month, Sol by Tierra is a cell-free manufacturing system that serves as a biological synthesis-as-a-service layer for R&D scientists. And it could play a key role enabling an on-demand biological future, where the protein of interest is just a click away.

This is the TomorrowScale Podcast. Hosted by Justin Briggs.

Tierra Biosciences: https://tierrabiosciences.com

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The TomorrowScale Podcast was created to showcase scientists and entrepreneurs who are building science-based businesses, and to hear stories from the benches and in the trenches of research & development. The views expressed by the host and guests are their own, and the content of this show should not be considered legal, tax, or investing advice. Thanks to our guests for sharing their time and knowledge with us. Thank you for listening. Please science responsibly.

On this episode Oklo co-founders Jacob DeWitte and Caroline Cochran join us to discuss what it took to get their startup to this point in development of the first advanced nuclear fission power plant; how a chance meeting with Sam Altman (OpenAI, YCombinator) changed their path; and how to think big, by starting small, even in nuclear.

This year, Oklo became the first company to submit a combined construction and operating license application to the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or NRC) for what is called an "advanced fission power plant." (Update 6/15/20: Oklo's application has been accepted and docketed for review by the NRC.)

Their design, the Aurora "powerhouse" centers around the concept not of a traditional reactor, but of a small, modular fission battery hundreds of times smaller than traditional reactors. Listen as Jake and Caroline take us through the fascinating founding story of Oklo and their big vision for the small future of clean energy. This is the TomorrowScale podcast, hosted by Justin Briggs.

Oklo Inc: https://oklo.com/

Aurora Powerhouse Press Release: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191202005499/en/Oklo-Announces-Aurora-Advanced-Fission-Clean-Energy

Aurora's NRC Application Accepted for Docketing: https://www.ans.org/news/article-269/auroras-docketing-marks-dawn-for-advanced-reactor-licensing/

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The TomorrowScale Podcast was created to showcase scientists and entrepreneurs who are building science-based businesses, and to hear their stories from the benches and in the trenches of research & development. The views expressed by the host and guests are their own, and the content of this show should not be considered legal, tax, or investing advice. Thanks to our guests for sharing their time and knowledge with us. Thank you for listening. Please science responsibly.