I design tools for bodies and places, and write about what they do to us.
Goa
Joined October 2009
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>be alfred nobel
>invent dynamite
>legend says a paper called you "the merchant of death"
>nobody has ever found that paper
>leave your fortune to whoever "conferred the greatest benefit to humankind"
>first prizes 1901
>125 years later nobody reads what the laureates actually wrote
greatestbenefit.org
parth suthar retweeted
Surprise 1: Anthropic acquired a one-person biotech
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.
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Surprise 2: that person is me
Surprise 3: I’m here to tell you all about it
Yes, this is what you think it is; after 6 yrs of increasingly loose anonymity: the Professor Oak reveal post
…and yes, it has gotten so boring around here that I’m literally doxxing myself to spice up the timeline
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Ok, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cody Tranbarger. I mostly tweet, but occasionally find time to dabble in drug dev & starting/building biotechs. My past lives span the VC, crossover, startup continuum; Prof Oak has been my way of keeping a digital foot in those worlds, despite having my physical feet planted elsewhere.
The past 18 mo, ‘elsewhere’ was Mithril Medicine, a co. I founded to develop bsAbs for LAMA2-CMD & other ECM-related genetic diseases.
Mithril was born out of hands-on building with @MikeNGladstone, @JasonPaulRhodes, @LifeSciVC, & team @atlasventure. Somehow, I made enough half-decent calls along the way (even a broken clock is right twice a day, eh?) to convince them Mithril/I warranted a small seed. While I can hardly rationalize such an outrageously cavalier bet, I’m grateful for it, & I'd partner with Atlas again in a heartbeat.
In typical AV fashion, Mithril’s primordial form was virtual, decentralized, & ultra-lean. This stage tends to be short-lived, but for Mithril, it worked surprisingly well, for surprisingly long, thanks in part to the rapid maturation of the AI tools I used liberally.
Eventually, Mithril became a bit of an experiment itself - to find the upper bound of how far it could scale as a single operator + a bunch of Claude (+ a stellar bench of part-time consultants).
In parallel, I started spending time with @nc_frey, @an1lam, & @CoefficientBio team; and promptly experienced, for the 1st time, AI at the frontier. Soon thereafter, Mithril stopped looking like an experiment, & started looking like a preview of an entirely new operating model.
From that spark came “Pipeline-in-a-Person.” The idea immediately resonated when we shared it here back in April; and it was central to the shared vision that led to Anthropic’s acquisition of Mithril, & my joining the team.
Why join Anthropic? Three reasons.
(1) For Mithril, the programs continue, with more resources & infrastructure behind them, and as much Claude as I can put to work.
(2) For me, the chance to start several more programs, & find out how many one person can actually run in parallel - an almost unprecedented luxury for a curious drug hunter.
(3) For our mission, a path to institutionalize & scale this new way of working, then put it in the hands of all of biopharma, all over the world - which, candidly, I find the most energizing.
Will AI x Bio cure diseases? Unequivocally yes, imo… but not by the route that gets the most airtime. Rather than timeline acceleration & compression, I see orchestration & parallelization as today's low-hanging fruit.
Most drug hunters see a handful of go/no-go calls in a career, & spend entirely too much of the rest trading emails (my inbox can attest).
Give them the bandwidth to run several programs at once, and the time to focus on scientific judgment, and I’m willing to bet they’ll make better calls. And at scale, better calls translate to more drugs, higher hit rates, broader patient impact, & likely, a disease or 10 or 100 cured. I couldn't be more excited to build toward that future @AnthropicAI.
Finally, a heartfelt thank you to BioTwitter/X. The end of anonymity is bittersweet, but if anyone’s earned a proper introduction, you all have.
It’s difficult to overstate how much this app has done for me: a decade of education, plenty of friends, many job opportunities, several mentors, a few investors, even a co-founder (fmr). It was the generosity of this community that inspired me to start posting 6 years ago, after just as many years lurking. I hope I’ve been able to pay it forward, in my own small way.
But, to be clear, Prof Oak isn’t going anywhere. Same beat, same themes, and now, a front-row seat to drug development at the frontier. Stay tuned for dispatches from the trenches; and remember...
Gotta Cure 'Em All
Epitalon is graded “Low research”. Our audit is harsher.
154 experiments, 72 sources, read to primary. Seven free-amino-acid controls across two papers — that is the specificity evidence base we could find for a compound sold on sequence specificity.
The 2025 Brunel study is cited as an independent replication. It makes no such claim, and its title ends “or ALT activity.” hTERT mRNA rose 12-fold in 21NT and 5-fold in BT474, but telomerase activity did not significantly increase in either line. What rose was ALT: ~10-fold C-circles in 21NT, 3-fold in BT474. The paper also carries a correction — for black-background figures, not data.
The 266-subject longevity study used Epithalamin, a bovine pineal extract, not synthetic AEDG. PubMed indexes it as a randomised trial. The abstract reports no blinding, no placebo, no p-values.
July 2026: the FDA advisory committee voted 7–5 with one abstention to recommend Epitalon for the 503A list for insomnia, over FDA staff objections on efficacy, immunogenicity and impurities. That is a compounding recommendation, not approval.
None of this says the molecule does nothing. It says the experiments that would settle it have not been run. We are running them.
4,032 Russian language documents, most not available in English: sovietrx.com
We're thrilled to announce the Superpower Peptide Library.
Every peptide, mapped to the body.
152 peptides, from approved drugs to compounds still in trials, sorted by where they act.
Each one has its own page, reviewed by a physician and fully cited, covering:
- the evidence and how strong it is
- its FDA status
- it's mechanism of action
- what studies in humans have found
Because not all peptides are equal.
Semaglutide is FDA-approved. BPC-157, maybe the most talked-about peptide for recovery and repair, is not. In a 2025 review of its research, 35 of 36 studies were in animals or the lab.
Know the science before you buy the hype.
Check it out here:
superpower.com/guides/peptid…
This is super cool. Refresh rate of doors of perception
1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness.
New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)
Discovering how nature works doesn’t mean you’re free to build the instrument that reads it.
I followed that problem from Raman’s diamonds to DNA sequencing patents, trying to answer one question: who owns the light?
@JahnaviPhalkey @PrakashLab @AdamMarblestone @mindnumbed @NikoMcCarty @sparshselim @5hroff
Article 👇
parth suthar retweeted
From labourers fighting for 8 hours of sleep, to now being at the mercy of your sleep score.
My cofounder @liminalbits wrote a small piece on the history of sleep. Go subscribe to our publication PHARMAKON. Link in the comments!
yeah prescriptions will turn into subscriptions
My bet that medicines will be some of the biggest consumer products of the next 20 years hinges on two questions:
1. Is the demand there?
Emphatically yes.
Tirzepatide, the molecule behind Mounjaro and Zepbound, already generates more in revenue than Netflix.
Equally striking: more than half of these prescriptions are self-pay. People are spending their own money on medicines that meaningfully improve their lives.
Even a product as good as tirzepatide leaves plenty of room for improvement. And weight loss and diabetes are just one part of the opportunity. Better sleep. Less pain. Fuller hair. Clearer skin. Better treatments for cancer and cardiovascular disease. The unmet needs are enormous.
The demand question is relatively easy—the harder question is below.
2. Will we be able to build these medicines?
My bet is yes. But this is where most of the uncertainty lies.
Three reasons I’m optimistic:
- Drug development is becoming like software. Increasingly, a lot of the research & analysis that is required at all steps of drug development can be done via LLMs. As a result, these steps can be composed within systems and automated. This allows small AI-native teams to do in days & weeks what required dozens of PhDs months to do. With billions going into AI × biology, I expect this trend to only accelerate.
- Our biological toolkit is expanding. CRISPR and base editing. siRNA and mRNA. Bi/tri-specific antibodies, antibody-drug conjugates and targeted protein degradation. CAR-T and emerging in vivo CAR-T approaches. We have more ways to intervene in biology. Better delivery technologies and half-life extension can help medicines reach the right tissues and work longer between doses. Together, these advances expand the range of medicines we can build.
- I have a positive regulatory bias. While regulation is always tough to predict, some of the recent steps from the FDA have been positive. FDA is developing clearer pathways for historical patient data and Bayesian methods in trials, while advancing validated alternatives to animal testing. These changes could reduce development time and cost. As unmet needs continue to grow, I expect more pressure on FDA to keep modernizing.
Twenty years is a long time for these improvements to compound.
Why I could be wrong:
- Biology takes time. Some steps in drug development are inherently incompressible. For example, establishing long-term safety and clinical benefit still requires observing people over time.
- Biology is hard to predict. Compelling mechanisms can still fail in large trials. Last month, Novartis’s long-awaited Lp(a)HORIZON trial showed that pelacarsen lowered Lp(a) but failed to demonstrate a statistically significant reduction in cardiovascular events. This contributed to a selloff that wiped roughly $30B off Novartis’s market value.
These constraints are real. But teams that combine scientific rigor with commercial discipline can bring great medicines to market.
Many of the biggest improvements we can still make to people’s lives are biological. Medicines can deliver them.
What’s a better consumer product than that?
parth suthar retweeted
러시아 🇷🇺 모스크바 근교 숲속 '테슬라 코일'의 정체
모스크바에서 북서쪽으로 40키로쯤 가면 이스트라(Истра)라는 작은 도시가 있음. 여기 숲속에 10층 건물만 한 쇳덩이 탑들이 서 있는데, 동네에선 '테슬라 코일(катушки Теслы)'이라고 부름. 인공 번개를 최대 9백만 볼트까지 만든다고 함.
축전기 여러 개에 전기를 따로 모았다가 한 줄로 이어 한 번에 터뜨리는 장치임. 러시아에선 자기네 물리학자 이름을 앞에 붙여서 아르카디예프-마르크스 발생기라고 부름.
1970년대 소련 전기기술연구소(ВЭИ)가 지은 고전압 시험장으로, 비행기가 번개를 맞아도 버티는지, 송전 설비가 고전압을 견디는지 시험하던 곳임. 소련이 번개 무기를 만들려 했다는 소문도 따라다님…지금도 러시아 연방 핵센터 소속이라 출입 금지.
parth suthar retweeted
1. CRISPR came from basic research on bacteria.
2. Optogenetics started with a discovery in algae.
3. The GFP protein comes from jellyfish.
The biggest breakthroughs all trace to scientists follow their curiosity. This is one huge reason why we must keep funding basic research!
SETI 2.0 in the making
NASA's data is publicly accessible and while many excellent scientists work there they obviously don't have the time and resources (or incentives) to squeeze every last drop of data from legacy datasets.
There is a huge difference between what one postdoc spending 400 hours tweaking the department matlab script can find, especially when 200 of those hours are spent writing the paper and pushing it through review and extreme software skills are genuinely scarce.
Years ago I helped decode the Mars Viking GCMS raw data, which was uncharacteristically poorly documented. More recently I had a series of models replicate my results. To keep it interesting I initialized it without my results. Then once it had replicated my hard won work (in about 30 minutes) I instructed it to burn down the entire problem, pushing to the very limits of what the most sophisticated statistical methods can achieve. These are typically labor intensive and reserved for huge scientific collaborations like the LHC or LIGO. No-one is going to drop the equivalent of 100 postdoc years of effort on any legacy project. Then I had the model write it up and publish it.
Then I had another model do the same thing for the Mars THEMIS data, placing hard upper bounds on current vulcanism and hot springs. This instrument had a negative result about 25 years ago so never (afaik) even published a paper. It's still negative but at least people can read about it now.
Both analyses can be seen via projects.caseyhandmer.com
I hope teams at NASA are currently feeding all our hard won legacy data through state of the art models, but if not (or and) any private citizen could do it today for maybe $1 of tokens per project.
Jio owns the largest sub-GHz footprint for coverage in India
We announced an agreement to acquire a nationwide low-band spectrum license portfolio that will pave the way for @Starlink to become a major mobile carrier in the US.
With this new spectrum and our Gen2 constellation, Starlink Mobile can ensure Americans have access to high-speed mobile broadband no matter where they are → spacex.com/updates#starlink-…
Things happen when you chat sitting in a Pierre Jeanneret's chair.
Ben Affleck: "I’ve always been into computers. I can write pretty shitty Python scripts."
Interviewer: lol
Ben: "So obviously you convert the image into a tensor containing the batch, frame and RGB values of every pixel."
Interviewer: wtf
Ben: "Then run a convolutional neural network for edge detection and feature extraction."
Interviewer: jaw on floor
Ben: "It’s pretty simple."
he spent years filing down cracked heels and one day noticed the cracks were gone
guy was about 90 days into daily GHK-Cu shots when he spotted it
his log:
- years of deep cracks on his heels and the balls of his feet
- used to grind and file the thick skin down because it kept coming back
- around day 90 of subq GHK-Cu he noticed the cracks were basically gone
- feet smoother and less dry too
- in the comments he gives it as 2 mg subq daily
- also credits it with fading his stretch marks and bringing back hair at his forehead
- says his skin is beyond glowing
- someone guessed a B vitamin or omega 3 gap · he says he was already on fish oil and B-complex with a lot of animal protein
- says the only recent change was "addition of peptides" · plural, and he never names the rest
- 18 years of smoking pot · calls himself a past and sporadic alcoholic · works out religiously
- asks a glutathione stacker if oral is easier · says his subq shots are massive and give him welts
what it is:
- GHK · glycyl-histidyl-lysine · a copper-binding tripeptide found in human plasma, saliva and urine
- Loren Pickart isolated it from human plasma in 1973 · it made old liver tissue build proteins like young tissue
- Pickart's 2015 review puts plasma levels around 200 ng/mL at age 20 and around 80 by 60
- same review lists faster wound healing in the foot pads of dogs · that's animal work
- mostly sold as a topical skin and hair ingredient
- not an FDA-approved drug by any route
- FDA had injectable GHK-Cu in compounding category 2 · immunogenicity risk, limited data in humans
- that injectable nomination was withdrawn in April 2026 · only non-injectable GHK-Cu went back to category 1, on 14 May 2026
- FDA says it will take GHK-Cu to its compounding advisory committee before the end of February 2027
so either a copper peptide finally fixed skin he'd been filing for years
or whatever else changed in those 90 days got credited to the one compound he named
the interesting part is the confound he wrote himself: "addition of peptides", plural, and the rest of the stack never shows up
n=1. heels on a 90 day clock
WAIT. Wait wait wait. You’re telling me. YOURE TELLING ME!! That people use to have segmented sleep where they went to bed around 9, woke up naturally around 2, enjoyed the fucking quiet and maybe did a small chore and then went back to sleep for a while. AND WE ARE ALL UPSET WE CANT DO ONE BLOCK OF SLEEP!!
You know what… that’s it I’m crashing out.
Le Carré loading ...
“It seemed like the entire country was for sale; the KGB and the CIA had deeply penetrated the Indian government.” — Oleg Kalugin, quoted in Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II (2005)
In 1967, the American press named the payer behind the Asia Foundation and the Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom, and India learned how much of its intellectual life had been on the CIA’s books. The republic that read those headlines still had an American wheat pipeline it could not do without and a plutonium-powered listening pack lost on a mountain that feeds the Ganga.
The soil was sovereign. The hardware was not.
By A Shaw
thedossier.in/india-for-sale…
nine years of stimulants and he still just laid there
guy asked for guanfacine instead of atomoxetine
r/NooTopics · FederalGovernmentUS · 9 Aug 2026
title says Intuniv · body says guanfacine 4 mg
his log:
- nine years on venlafaxine · Vyvanse, Ritalin, Concerta, dexamp rotating through
- stim arrived and he laid there · avoiding responsibilities and discomfort
- atomoxetine had a bad reputation in what he had heard
- asked for 4 mg guanfacine · left the other meds in place
- within months: masters program · more active than the year before · sleeping on time
- task initiation, his worst symptom, pretty much gone
- desk still becomes a mess · he cleans it after two days now · the pile used to sit because facing it overwhelmed him
- he reads that as unrecognized anxiety · calls guanfacine a game changer for that case
- post never says extended-release Intuniv vs immediate-release · silent on blood pressure, pulse, sedation
what it is:
- Intuniv · extended-release guanfacine · DailyMed label revised June 2025
- central alpha-2A agonist · about 15 to 20x affinity vs alpha-2B or 2C
- label: not a CNS stimulant · mechanism in ADHD not known
- same section: those central receptors cut sympathetic outflow · peripheral resistance and heart rate drop
- efficacy writeup on the label: ages 6 to 17 · alone and added to stimulants
- marketing start 2 Sep 2009 · Shire notice 9 Nov 2009 on EurekAlert gives the same FDA date and age range
- label header still says initial U.S. approval 1986 · that is the older immediate-release blood-pressure tablet
so either an alpha-2 add-on unstuck task initiation the stim stack never touched
or nine years of laying there finally got a story with a new pill in it
the interesting part is the confound: other medications stayed on, and the label's efficacy ages stop at 17
n=1. adult post · kids' label · 4 mg with no ER/IR tell
amino metabolite from the gym shelf claimed to kill his depression in one hour
guy ran agmatine sulfate for 9+ months
1 g morning · 1 g early evening
Not just an OP but also an OG worth checking out: sirsadalot · r/Nootropics (later founded NooTopics).
his log:
- hour 1 after first gram: stopped dwelling on negative thoughts · stopped lashing out · no longer wanted to die
- claims he could finally redirect thought patterns
- months in: less clingy / fear-driven · more goal-oriented · dropped daily masturbation addiction without ED
- claims learning and retention improved
- alcohol: every drink instantly felt like he skipped the dose · stopped drinking
- cites L-citrulline / L-arginine as possible blockers of the antidepressant effect
- zero claimed physical sides beyond NMDA-antagonist potentiation of other substances
- sometimes feels too relaxed · wonders if missing the old sadness range costs creativity
- not ready to stop to test that · plans to keep going until goals land
what it is:
- agmatine · arginine metabolite · sold as a gym / nitric-oxide adjacent powder
- NMDA / imidazoline / polyamine signaling lane in the literature · not an approved antidepressant
- the "what it is" is OP framing · not a clinical claim from us
- wrong-shelf mood drug energy: bodybuilding powder with an hour-1 mental flip in this log
so either a cheap amino metabolite hit a real NMDA mood switch in under an hour
or hour-1 miracle language is doing the heavy lifting over a nine-month clock
the interesting part is the kill switches he named: alcohol · maybe arginine cousins · and the creativity worry he will not test
n=1. grocery powder · hour-1 cure claim · nine months without coming off
