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carlsborg commented on Ireland is making basic income for artists program permanent   artnews.com/art-news/news... · Posted by u/rbanffy
carlsborg · 2 months ago
People should vote on art and if you hit a threshold, you get the income.
carlsborg commented on Show HN: I recreated Windows XP as my portfolio   mitchivin.com/... · Posted by u/mitchivin
carlsborg · 3 months ago
Arguably the most familiar desktop user interface on the planet. I often wonder why complex web apps do not use this searchable start menu format.
carlsborg commented on NASA's Webb Space Telescope Observes 3I/ATLAS1   science.nasa.gov/blogs/3i... · Posted by u/carlsborg
carlsborg · 4 months ago
They released a paper. Preprint linked in page.
carlsborg commented on One universal antiviral to rule them all?   cuimc.columbia.edu/news/o... · Posted by u/breve
Geee · 4 months ago
It was already invented [0], but the patents were bought by a small company in New Zealand (some kind of big pharma shell company?) who isn't seriously developing it and now appears to be defunct.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRACO

carlsborg · 4 months ago
Both are broad spectrum antivirals, but completely different mechanism.

DRACO "is a chimeric protein with one domain that binds to viral double stranded RNA (dsRNA) and a second domain that induces apoptosis when two or more DRACOs crosslink on the same dsRNA." (Ridder et al 2011). This article is about packaging mRNA for a set of 10 interferon-stimulated genes that express multiple proteins that target various stages of viral replication.

carlsborg commented on One universal antiviral to rule them all?   cuimc.columbia.edu/news/o... · Posted by u/breve
carlsborg · 4 months ago
Paper appears to be paywalled. It is however an update to this preprint which is available on Biorxiv: "Broad-spectrum RNA antiviral inspired by ISG15-/- deficiency" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.24.600468v1

My summary for programmers:

When you get a viral infection, immune cells make a signalling protein called a IFN-1 (Type I Interferon) cytokine, and this flips a boolean flag to True on a bunch of genes (interferon-stimulated genes or ISGs) that produce a bunch of proteins (hundreds) that control the infection. ISG15 is one of them and its role appears to be to downregulate and to limit the inflammation.

The paper title refers to a ISG15 deficiency, meaning if you are dificient in ISG15 that inflamation limitation goes away. But the paper is actually about how in people that naturally have a ISG15 deficiency, there is an always-on low level expression of some of these pro-inflamation genes. So they take that as a safe level.

The did RNA sequencing on experimental ISG15 deficient cells and from heatlhy individuals, identified the mutations, narrowed down to 10 genes (antiviral ones not inhibitors) that in combination significantly inhibited viral replication. They stuck the RNA for such genes in lipid nanoparticles such that they enter host cells, whose ribosomes happily read the RNA like a turing head reads a tape in base 20 and produce proteins encoded by these genes, similar to how the mRNA vaccine works.

So why not dose with the IFN-I directly? Three referenced papers show its "poorly tolerated with significant side effects" and all those downregulators that get expressed limit the inflammation response.

Disclaimer: IANAB (not a biologist) corrections might be due..

carlsborg commented on Launch HN: BlankBio (YC S25) – Making RNA Programmable    · Posted by u/antichronology
antichronology · 4 months ago
This is a really interesting direction. There is this big field of Cell Free (cfRNA) cancer detection. We talked to a few people in the field and think that embedding sequences for this direction could be really valuable. One challenge here is that it's hard to set up evaluation tasks since the public data is scarce
carlsborg · 4 months ago
Maybe we can crowd source data. My platform, currently in beta, has ai assistants for compute infrastructure and biology and will soon let people to do self serve research on their own omics data using models like yours. So there could be a monetization path too if enough people start looking their own cell data (which they might once they fully understand the risks of engineered pathogens, and certainly will when the risks materialize and start hitting home). Email in bio if you want to brainstorm.
carlsborg commented on Launch HN: BlankBio (YC S25) – Making RNA Programmable    · Posted by u/antichronology
carlsborg · 4 months ago
Cool. Could we train a "potential oncoprotein" classifier on Orthrus embeddings? IMO self serve diagnosis and detection is a far larger market than synthesis.
carlsborg commented on Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations   anthropic.com/research/en... · Posted by u/virgildotcodes
carlsborg · 4 months ago
Opus is already severely crippled: asking it "whats your usage policy for biology" triggers a usage violation.

u/carlsborg

KarmaCake day1736April 24, 2014
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