Ion Genomics Podcast

My guest this week, Johnny Yu, has seen firsthand how the new code-writing capabilities of LLMs has widened horizons for the use of AI in biology. Tahoe Bio, a company he cofounded, has built its own AI agents, which are helping it rethink how to use AI in drug discovery and development. We discuss two other recent agentic AI developments from recent weeks. A publication in Science from Jure Lesko...

In 2024, Sid Sijbrandij got the news that no cancer patient wants to hear: his tumor was back and his doctors told him they had nothing left to offer.  Sid, a tech entrepreneur who up until that point had been running his company, GitLab, went all in, doing as much testing and as many treatments as he could.  It seems to have worked. Moreover, Sid’s team thinks they’ve been able to figure out what...

“We right now are developing our technology to be able very soon to sequence roughly hundred-length proteins that are on each of those sensors within a 24-hour period. You can think about this as being essentially 10 billion letters per day: 100 million sensors times those 100-mers on each sensor and then sequencing letter by letter.” That’s the scale that Pumpkinseed CEO and Cofounder Jen Dionne...

What kind of market share can Illumina expect when it launches its own MRD kits and is it worth the risk of annoying customers that also offer those tests?  Why did liquid biopsy company stocks do so well in May? What were his headline takeaways from the recent American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting? Where is he going on summer vacation after a hectic several months? Tune in to hear...

“It's one extra step ahead of a single cell RNA-seq workflow where we can get all the information that we can get from standard Perturb-seq, but we also know the spatial location.” That’s how my guest this week, Arc Institute Senior Scientist Alexander Nevue, describes PerturbSpace, a new method he and his colleagues introduced in a preprint posted to BioRxiv May 18.  PerturbSpace is the latest me...

Craig Venter, the renegade scientist who tried to beat the publicly-funded Human Genome Project with a private company — and nearly succeeded — died last week at 79. My guest this week, Jamie Shreeve, shadowed Venter for two years as part of his research for The Genome War , a book about the saga that captured not only the best and the worst aspects of Venter, but of human nature itself.  Shreeve...

Do AI models in biology have to get bigger to get better? And what can you do with more training, more computing power, and more outputs?  Joining me this week to talk about MaxToki , a new AI-powered model that can predict how cells age, is Christina Theodoris, a physician scientist at the Gladstone Institutes who is using her models to study cardiovascular disease. She's a pioneer in this field,...

Earlier this week I spoke with 10x Genomics CEO and Cofounder Serge Saxonov at the AACR meeting, where 10x launched Atera, its new instrument for spatial biology. In addition to hitting product pricing and specs, we spoke about the challenges of starting a new company, our favorite model organisms, and why he thinks Atera will be 10x’s most consequential product launch yet.