I've noticed that biotech cos built around a computational discovery platform have a different philosophy on company building and how to use software to gain sustainable advantage vs. 'traditional' biotech or pharma. I reflect on this in a new blog post: atelfo.github.io/2024/09/17/a-n…

What if I told you that I co-founded a startup in 1987 that obtained world-wide rights to GLP1 as a metabolic Rx, collaborated with Pfizer to show key activities, & abandoned it in 1990 when Pfizer lost interest? I tell the previously untold tale in an open access paper now up

For all its flaws, I would argue the biotech industry is still *the* single best place to work today with a tech background 1- Intellectually, you get to work on some of the hardest problems of our time and they won’t be solved anytime soon. 2- The field is undergoing a

Why are Western pharmaCos licensing so many Chinese drugs lately? Is China going to do all our drug discovery in the future? My thoughts in a new post. This post has languished in drafts for a while, but the Merck+Hansoh deal motivated me to finish it up atelfo.github.io/2024/12/20/wil…

Many people talk about the 'Golden Age of Antibiotics' but I hadn't seen it visualized properly. How abundant was antibiotic development during that time period? How many types of antibiotics were developed? So I visualized it myself!

Roundup #1 (announcements, links, and jobs) owlposting.com/p/roundup-1-an… some announcements, links, and jobs, just like the title promises. will try to stick to this more regularly

Extremely clever new NGS tech from Roche 🧬 If it's hard to discriminate between nucleic acids accurately with a nanopore, why not synthesize a new polymer off a DNA template that is easier to sequence? It's an intuitively simple idea, but took *a ton* of creative nucleic acid

How is biopharma R&D like Texas hold ‘em poker? My new PlengeGen blog discusses a critical inflection point in early clinical drug development and the investment required to deliver the necessary proof-of-concept data. plengegen.com/blog/cvcp/

Drugs currently in clinical trials will likely not be impacted by AI owlposting.com/p/drugs-curren… first 'argument' post ive made in awhile. two months in the making and 4 rewrites and my own opinion being changed in the process of writing it all down thesis: due to [a lot of

Endometriosis is an incredibly interesting disease 5k words, 23 minutes reading time covering one of the strangest conditions ive ever heard about link: owlposting.com/p/endometriosi… very grateful to Shilpa Pothapragada for initial inspiration for this piece + reviewing it!!

why don’t we have more medicines? inventing medicines has grown less efficient, limited by our knowledge of biological targets for the 1st time, AI & genomics have the potential to make this knowledge abundant – one of the largest potential impacts of the intelligence age.