Hacker News: Thebroser

New comment by Thebroser in "Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment"

Thebroser — Fri, 16 May 2025 00:22:51 +0000

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

New comment by Thebroser in "Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment"

Thebroser — Fri, 16 May 2025 00:20:44 +0000

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)

Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of AI

Thebroser — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 15:31:26 +0000

Article URL: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/10/30/executive-order-on-the-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-development-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41698344

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by Thebroser in "Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels"

Thebroser — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 21:44:52 +0000

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

https://ottoplay.tv/

New comment by Thebroser in "Want to build a sequencer? 454.bio opens up their plans"

Thebroser — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 02:21:03 +0000

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

New comment by Thebroser in "Cancer-fighting CAR-T cells could be made inside body with viral injection"

Thebroser — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 19:09:21 +0000

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/

New comment by Thebroser in "'Biocomputer' combines lab-grown brain tissue with electronic hardware"

Thebroser — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 17:05:43 +0000

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

New comment by Thebroser in "Woman's experimental bionic hand passes major test"

Thebroser — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 19:21:18 +0000

Would probably assume some level of immunosuppressants might be necessary.

New comment by Thebroser in "Open source implementation for LLaMA-based ChatGPT"

Thebroser — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 16:00:59 +0000

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

A universal deep-learning model for zinc finger design

Thebroser — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 03:41:46 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-022-01624-4

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34542180

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by Thebroser in "Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?"

Thebroser — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 15:40:29 +0000

Spatial Transcriptomics. Being able to see gene expression at a resolution of a handful of cells in a cross section of tissue is revolutionizing disease research. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-020-01033-y

Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge

Thebroser — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 15:27:01 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.13138

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34246619

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

PhD students face cash crisis with wages that don’t cover living costs

Thebroser — Mon, 23 May 2022 15:30:04 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01392-w

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31480290

Points: 236

# Comments: 233

New comment by Thebroser in "Nanobots Can Swim Around a Wound and Kill Bacteria"

Thebroser — Fri, 13 May 2022 19:37:44 +0000

I am always fascinated by the ignorance that is blatantly displayed on HN when it comes to biotech advancements. Not even some actual criticism of the tech, or even the faint understanding that this sort of thing is exploratory research. Wonder why this sort of skepticism is never applied to cutting edge AI research whose ethical ramifications are much more severe and which is already being utilized by bad actors to facilitate genocide [1].

[1] https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/widm.1...

New comment by Thebroser in "Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy"

Thebroser — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 13:07:14 +0000

“Animal research has shown that natural cochlear hair cell regeneration and resultant hearing restoration is very real” - Although exciting, we also need to remember that translatability rates from animal models to humans is notoriously low, usually in the single digits for most therapeutic areas. This is some cool tech, but just wanted to point it out that success in animal models =/= we will eventually get to see the realized treatment.

New comment by Thebroser in "Launch HN: Micro Meat (YC S21) – Technology for scaling cultivated meat"

Thebroser — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 15:38:01 +0000

Thanks a ton for your reply! I wish you all the best, tons of cool innovation to be done here.

New comment by Thebroser in "Launch HN: Micro Meat (YC S21) – Technology for scaling cultivated meat"

Thebroser — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 15:15:54 +0000

Hey! Bioengineering background here, how do you all embed the cells within the scaffold? Is your approach similar to other bioprinting approaches (initial cells seeded via extrusion, inkjet, or laser assisted deposition)? At first I would think this could be done with some sort of printable collagen scaffold but I'm curious for what your approach would be. In addition, as someone that is involved in therapeutics, I'm not too well versed in this space but was curious hearing from your perspective: How close would you say we are to being able to use FBS free media to culture meat at scale?

New comment by Thebroser in "Ask HN: Open-Source Medical School"

Thebroser — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 17:09:01 +0000

If you pick up an intro college level bio book that might be enough to start out with. My university publishes this so it would be a nice free start -> https://openstax.org/details/books/biology-2e

After that, you could maybe get interested into a anatomy/physiology or systems physiology textbook.

For more specialized content maybe NCBI StatPearls -> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK430685/

Note that due to the ever changing landscape of biology, only way to truly ever "be an expert" is to actively participate in the life sciences and keep up with contemporary research articles.

New comment by Thebroser in "Ask HN: How to raise funds for rare disease research?"

Thebroser — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 17:50:48 +0000

The thing about these developmental conditions is that in theory there a lot of different treatment modalities that can be pursued at the embryonic level that could address these conditions (viral or non viral gene therapy, CRISPR based base deletions/insertions of the correct allele, etc.). However, once embryonic development has occurred and these conditions have manifested, it would be very difficult to alleviate them. Note that this is very different from something like sickle cell anemia. As a metaphor, think of the human body as a brick house. Using state of the art biotech to treat sickle cell anemia would be like trying to replace a leaky pipe hidden under concrete in the house. Yes it may be difficult but it is doable as it’s a fairy isolated issue. Trying to fix developmental diseases like KS would be like trying to replace every inch of the mortar in the brick house. It would be painstakingly difficult to do it right without the whole house collapsing. In summary, the tech you are referencing is basically limited to pre-developmental organisms, it needs decades or centuries to go before we may feasibly perform large scale genetic engineering that can undo post-developmental physiology.

Next, we have to understand that there are serious ethical considerations on treatments that target embryos. Biology is still very much a black box field. It is near impossible trying to factor in all the parameters in this problem space, especially when you are altering genes at a highly regulated stage of human development. Millions of model organisms like mice and non human primates are used to test therapies, but would we be willing to do the same to human embryos at such a large scale? I would hardly imagine an IRB approving research like this in my lifetime in the U.S.

New comment by Thebroser in "Biohackers take aim at big pharma’s stranglehold on insulin"

Thebroser — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 21:04:52 +0000

Yes! The Open Insulin foundation not only has volunteers with a biomedical background, we have volunteers from many other backgrounds including lawyers that help us try and challenge existing patents. Again, others have said that manpower might be better invested in openly challenging the monopoly that U.S. companies have on some of these patents in court or by appealing to our congressmen. However, I believe that there’s no reason not to do both in parallel. My scientific training can only take me so far and i’ll happily help a project like this if it can open up a new source of affordable insulin in this country, but believe me, I know that at the root this is a legislative issue.