A transpacific biotech startup combines Asian investors and some seriously trendy science out of MIT
Synthetic biologist Timothy Lu has been doing some mind blowing scientific work at MIT. A few months ago he and some of his colleagues wrote up their work designing and creating mammalian genetic circuits that could be used to spawn, say, a whole new breed of T cells that could be engineered to go on the attack against cancer cells — with built-in triggers to a set of biomarkers.
This fascination with synthetic biology — along with some close ties to the leaders in this emerging field — has spurred Lu to partner with his brother Jeffrey on creating a transpacific biotech dubbed Engine Biosciences that plans to integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning with hands-on lab work in drug development to create a whole new kind of drug development platform, one they say can test a dizzying array of genetic interactions in parallel in search of those needles in the data intense haystack that can point to multiple drug programs.
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