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Thebroser commented on Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment   nytimes.com/2025/05/15/he... · Posted by u/jbredeche
_heimdall · 9 months ago
I know someone well who works in this space, personalized gene therapy as cancer treatment.

> until it finds the exact DNA letter that needs to be changed.

This pine is disingenuous (at best). There is no way of guaranteeing where the DNA is inserted. It is designed to only slot into a very specific portion of the DNA but they don't have a way to control that precisely, the accuracy is high but "exact DNA letter" is skipping over a few pretty important details.

To be clear I'm not saying it is ineffective or unsafe, only that the claim made is marketing speak and not actually true.

Thebroser · 9 months ago
The approach they used which is base editing doesn’t actually insert or remove DNA, it actually uses an enzyme to convert one base to another, which is much safer as this doesn’t require a double strand break in DNA: https://blog.addgene.org/single-base-editing-with-crispr
Thebroser commented on Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment   nytimes.com/2025/05/15/he... · Posted by u/jbredeche
cryptoegorophy · 9 months ago
How does it know how to gps around? From what I know everything down there is a chemical reaction with some minimal physical motion, but how do you program it to know where to change and what and how.
Thebroser · 9 months ago
Add gene has a great guide as to what goes on at the molecular level: https://www.addgene.org/guides/crispr/

Essentially you can design an rna molecular that contains a 20 nucleotide long sequence that can target your region of interest, with the caveat that there is a standard recognition sequence proximal to your sequence of interest (PAM sequence)

Thebroser commented on Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels   ytch.xyz... · Posted by u/hadisafa
klaussilveira · a year ago
I'll never understood why Netflix, Hulu and others haven't done something similar to this. It's a much more natural way of "finding out" what you want to see. Create a bunch of channels based on existing tags or categories, have thing playing on a schedule, and allow me to zap through.

Bonus points if you allow me to zap as efficiently as I was able to back when we had analog TVs and cable. I was the master zapper, zapping through hundreds of channels in seconds. Just buffer the adjacent channels and calculate the maximum input latency.

Thebroser · a year ago
I used to love this chrome extension back in the day, unsure if it still works but same idea:

https://ottoplay.tv/

Thebroser commented on Want to build a sequencer? 454.bio opens up their plans   omicsomics.blogspot.com/2... · Posted by u/mfld
potsandpans · 2 years ago
Kinda cool, I'm out of my depth here. What would be some interesting things to do with this once it was built?
Thebroser · 2 years ago
Home lab, or even be able to sequence your genome at home, privately and securely without risking giving your genetic information to companies like 23andme
Thebroser commented on Cancer-fighting CAR-T cells could be made inside body with viral injection   nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/pseudolus
Thebroser · 2 years ago
There’s also people pursuing mRNA delivery systems to do this. Might be cheaper than viruses and there’s precedent now with COVID vaccines. https://www.capstantx.com/
Thebroser commented on 'Biocomputer' combines lab-grown brain tissue with electronic hardware   nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/pseudolus
asgerhb · 2 years ago
The use of AI and voice recognition seems mostly designed to make the result seem more sensational than it actually is. Does any computation actually happen in the "organoid" part? How would you even train such a cell to perform a task?

From reading the article it seems to me that the answer is no. The actual contribution is feeding the organoid electric signals, and reading its reactions. (Probably the machine learning algorithm used would have had even better accuracy, if the input signal hadn't been fed through a layer of goo. It doesn't say whether this is the case.) The rest is speculation of future applications.

> To test Brainoware’s capabilities, the team used the technique to do voice recognition by training the system on 240 recordings of eight people speaking. The organoid generated a different pattern of neural activity in response to each voice. The AI learned to interpret these responses to identify the speaker, with an accuracy of 78%.

It "generated a different pattern," with no indication that this pattern was optimized to be useful in any way.

I think the key part of a (bio-)"computer" is the possibility of programming/training it, not just reading input from it.

Thebroser · 2 years ago
There are research groups that are trying to encode genetic neural networks into cells like the example I have attached, but the neuronal approach from the post does seem to be different here. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-33288-8
Thebroser commented on Woman's experimental bionic hand passes major test   gizmodo.com/bionic-mia-ha... · Posted by u/jordigg
roarcher · 2 years ago
This is pretty amazing, but I wonder--how does the body adapt to having a piece of hardware that extends through the skin? Does the body not see this as an open wound? It seems like being permanently impaled with a metal pole.
Thebroser · 2 years ago
Would probably assume some level of immunosuppressants might be necessary.
Thebroser commented on Open source implementation for LLaMA-based ChatGPT   github.com/nebuly-ai/nebu... · Posted by u/georgehill
davidy123 · 3 years ago
I am very far from an expert on this, but I think domain specific conversational AI would be much more useful than these large models. It's fun to ask an AI to compose a fresh 600bpm hip hop song about the relationship between materials science and the breeding habits of mosquitoes, but an open-source medical AI, application support AI, or many other applications would be much more practical, if they could be accurate enough. And especially if they could run "standalone." They could also consult with each other, as a network of specialized AI. Is work inching closer to more specific, more accurate applications? Or is this just a big gimmick/distraction phase around a maybe not so great idea of AI?
Thebroser · 3 years ago
There are definitely very solid attempts at least to make LLMs that encode biomedical knowledge such as BioGPT which is trained on Pubmed and other domain specific areas. Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.10341

u/Thebroser

KarmaCake day217May 14, 2019View Original