Biotech Notes #3: Cradle, BCI Airpods, Skin Probiotics for Cancer
Biotech Notes #3: Cradle, BCI Airpods, Skin Probiotics for Cancer
Cradle
Cradle is a techbio using LLMs to reduce the cost and time, not only of predicting protein structure, but also of designing proteins with specific properties such as activity, codon usage, affinity, specificity, and penetration. For example, they’ve made T7 RNA polymerases that are 4.5º C more thermostable and can thus synthesize longer RNA chains for therapeautics — like those discussed last week!
If you’re an academic, you can use Cradle for free while customers from industry like Johnson & Johnson Innovation, Novozymes, and Twist Bioscience pay for every molecule they’re engineering. Cradle doesn’t take any IP and offers highest security of trade secrets, they just feed experimental data from their users back to their models to improve data efficiency and hallucinations.
BCI AirPods
For more than two decades, companies like Muse and Neurable have been building Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) consumer products like headbands and earphones that use non-invasive electroencephalogram (EEG) tech to read the user’s brainwaves and create experiences like enhanced meditation. However, the company that really brings BCI magic to billions might just be Apple.
In January of 2023, they submitted a patent for a piece of wearable hardware — most likely to be AirPods though the patent also opens the possibility for smartglasses, wire earphones, and a headset — that have not only EEG but also electromyography (EMG), electrooculography (EOG), galvanic skin response (GSR), a blood volume pulse (BVP), either on the tips or on the rest of the device that comes in contact with the user’s ears.
I struggle with my AirPods falling off, especially when I’m working out. Apple knew that in order to get the best brainwave readings possible, they’d need to #ThinkDifferent. The heart of their patent is placing different sensors, some actively reading and others just as a reference, across the tip and the body of the device. The brain (pun intended), is a processor to switch between these difference sensors, depending on ambient conditions and how the device is worn.
Personally, I’m excited for how musicians could be using brain data to create personalized songs, probably in real time with the help of generative AI, responding to the listener’s wishes. There’s a case to be made for Apple increasingly incorporating biosensors into their products, from touch ID to ECG (Apple Watch). Biotech beyond BCIs will either rebirth Apple, or inspire a true carbon-silicon symbiosis that a new great company brings to life. Not a coincidence:
“I think the biggest innovations in the 21st century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one” — Steve Jobs, excerpt from his biography written by Walter Isaacson.
Skin Probiotics for Cancer
I know no one will believe me if I said that I had this exact idea once at a hacakathon — “Skin microbiome tells immune cells to attack cancer in that area” was the one-liner. Of course it took me three years to even start to scratch the surface of this idea by reading a paper from a Stanford lab that actually built it.
Staphylococcus epidermidis (S. Epidermis) is one of the two most abundant bacteria specie in the human skin microbiome. In this project, different versions of a well-characterized antigen (OVA) were expressed in S. Epidermis, which showed them to antigen-presenting immune cells, which elicited tumor-specific CD4+ and CD8+ T cells that ultimately achieved potent antitumor activity in places as far as the lungs.
The different constructs include cytoplasmic, cell wall-attached, or secreted OVA that is either full-length, or a class I or class II MHC–restricted antigenic peptide. I would’ve liked to see a more detailed comparison between the efficacy of those that might explain the still unknown mechanisms by which S. Epidermis presents the antigens to immune cells.
I was very unpleasantly surprised that the specific type of antigen-presenting immune cells that interact with S. Epidermis isn’t known. For a future study, I’d like to know more of that, more about the potential interactions between this strain and others in the skin microbiome and, again, understand the whole detailed mechanism to know how this tech may be applied to different diseases across oncology, infections and autoimmunity. Maybe it’s true though: A cure for cancer could be a cream made out of GMO bacteria.
Nutrigenomics
Amidst the zillions of wellness gurus, nutrigenomics screams “You can design a personalized diet, based on your genes, that will improve your life like no other”. From a marketing perspective, it’s close to home since we all know food (as opposed to some weird drug) and everyone wants to be healthier, yet it adds an exclusive information component, the “it can’t be that easy”, which is genetics.
There have been several studies on how different genetic polymorphisms impact our ability to metabolize certain foods and vice-versa, how certain nutrients interact with transcription factors to regulate gene expression. The most famous example of the former is the MTHFR enzyme’s relationship to folate processing and the latter could be the α-tocoferol found in green tea that is said to decrease chronic inflammation.
After reading a few reviews, I see nutrigenomics as too complex to help the average patient. You’re trying to understand a gene’s function in the body, how nutrients interact with it, how high intake of some nutrients is beneficial or not, epigenetics, taste receptors, energy levels, metabolomics, considering that you can’t run end-to-end controlled experiments when it comes to humans ingesting food… all to find out that a mediterranean diet will work for you too and that you should try reducing your coffee intake if you want better sleep and mood.
That said, I disagree with papers alluding to how nutrigenomics could be used to solve for obesity as I’ve seen how solutions to that more often have to do with strong mindset shifts, surgeries, and GLPs. Instead, I align my thesis to the diffusion of innovations: address the top 0.1% first. Olympic-level athletes for whom the slightest 5% more cognitive and body energy, hormonal balance or sleep efficiency would mean the world AND who will laser-focusedly follow the recipe ;)
Hey, Sofia here — Biotech Notes is a new format I’m trying out to teach myself about things I’ve been curious about but don’t have enough time to write a whole article on. I’m also sharing these in Spanish (check out the Español tab on my Substack page) to evangelize our awesome biotech future to more awesome people around the world. Thanks for being part of the journey and sharing it with your friends :)