https://xitter.cf/t.co/wMcTrdvo52

🇬🇧/🇸🇬
Joined February 2014
@teojcryan.bsky.social retweeted
I've been thinking hard about modern biosecurity for five years. In the course of that thinking, I've learned a lot about what the field consensus is on a complete biodefense stack for the AI age. Today, as part of my work with @BlueDotImpact, @chrisstrahle_ and I have published an overview of this defense stack, alongside a starting list of ten projects we would like to support motivated founders to build. Funding will be available through the Seed Grants program. Please share this with the best founders you know. blog.bluedot.org/p/biosecuri…
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@teojcryan.bsky.social retweeted
Talks on biosecurity and AI: 00:00 Harmon Bhasin; Intro ​02:34 Adin Richards; Field Overview ​18:53 Geetha Jeyapragasan; Transmission ​ 34:13 Jaime Yassif; AIxBio ​ 50:53 Josh Chorlton; AI Clinical Surveillance ​ 01:04:06 Tessa Alexanian; Sequences of Concern
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@teojcryan.bsky.social retweeted
TwentyTwo is joining LatchBio! LatchBio researches and deploys AI agents across biology. We serve over 5,000 scientists across 150+ labs. As AI speeds up how biology gets done, it also changes the biosecurity risk landscape, and not many people are working on that side of it. By bringing our expertise and insight into LatchBio, we hope to not only help them build and scale agents responsibly, but also lead the field of biosecurity in understanding how AI is changing the risk landscape. Our goal is to accelerate science while keeping it safe. I've been impressed by the conviction and rigor at LatchBio, and I'm glad to be building out Latch Biosecurity with them. Building TwentyTwo with Evan Seeyave and Dianzhuo Wang this past year has meant a lot to me. We worked across biosecurity: building agentic know-your-customer (KYC) screening, using AI agents to sharpen biosurveillance methods enough to place fourth in round 1 of DARPA's Bioattribution Challenge (my blog post linked below), and uncovering how viruses are represented in protein language models (pLMs) – work that landed in an ICML workshop. I'm glad we get to keep building together! We're putting together a team to work on hard problems in biosecurity, from LLM refusal to biosurveillance (linked below). If that sounds interesting, please reach out.
We are excited to announce that LatchBio has acquired TwentyTwo, a YC S25 team building AI infrastructure for biosecurity. As AI makes biology easier to engineer, the safeguards around these models stop being an afterthought and become core infrastructure. Security has to improve as fast as capabilities to allow science to progress. Within our lifetimes, AI will put the ability to engineer a pandemic within reach of a single bad actor. What once took a nation-state and years of work is collapsing toward an undergraduate and a few weeks in the lab. That world is arriving faster than most AI labs are prepared for. However, in the right hands, these models will accelerate science at a pace never seen before. Scientists will use these models to cure diseases that families have fought for generations and catch outbreaks before they spread. We cannot wall them off from the tools that augment their work. The problem is that the line between the two is hard to draw. Studying SARS-CoV-2 or Ebola to prepare for the next pandemic is very similar to what a bad actor would do to cause one. TwentyTwo builds intelligence defense systems that distinguish this line and apply safeguards or grant capabilities accordingly. Harmon Bhasin, Evan Seeyave, and John Wang are exceptional researchers who care deeply about building the future of life sciences responsibly. The three of them will join Latch as Members of Technical Staff and lead Latch Biosecurity. I am grateful to be working with them. Expect many more announcements from them over the coming days. We are hiring biosecurity engineers. If this is the kind of work you want to do, reach out.
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@teojcryan.bsky.social retweeted
Evo 2 is out in Nature today, showing that genome language models can predict and design across the full complexity of life, from phages to eukaryotes. A few surprises from the project, including how ignoring trillions of nucleotides was key to getting a good model. 🧵
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@teojcryan.bsky.social retweeted
📢📢 UK researchers in Engineering Biology of all levels (students, technicians, postdocs, PIs, CTOs and CEOs) - what are your thoughts about using AI in your work? The UK government is looking to gather views to shape policy via a survey. If you have 10 min spare please do it.
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@teojcryan.bsky.social retweeted
Thrilled to share that I’ve joined the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (@ARIA_research) as one of its second cohort of Programme Directors. 1/3
Introducing our second cohort of Programme Directors – a group of world-class scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, with proven track records for building ventures, communities and technologies of societal and economic significance. 🚀 (1/3)
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A new publication reflects on "The Biological Weapons Convention at Fifty" with insights on its role in combating biological warfare from experts across the biosecurity & disarmament field. #1972BWC 🔗 Read the publication: disarmament.unoda.org/the-bi….
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Thank you to the #genomeinformatics24 organisers for the opportunity to attend and to present my poster on De Bruijn graph representations of metagenomes (doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.…). Had great chats about the future of metagenome assembly, DBgs, and k-mer/unitig indices
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@teojcryan.bsky.social retweeted
NTI | bio recently gathered international experts for an ambitious discussion that explored opportunities to enhance transparency and strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention. @NTI_WMD nti.org/news/nti-bio-champio…
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@teojcryan.bsky.social retweeted
It's happening again! The next Analysing Genomic Data course (#AMGD25) in bioinformatically brilliant Birmingham is available birmingham.ac.uk/postgraduat… @unibirm_CMH @UoBinfectionsch @IMIBirmingham 5 days, hands-on, 17th March 25, beginners welcome
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Thank you to the organisers for the opportunity to present some of my PhD work at @MIGGS_workshop!
Replying to @CamilleMrcht
Now, @teojcryan presents "Exploring de Bruijn Graphs as a Framework for Metagenomic Data Representation"
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Explore the key takeaways from the 2⃣0⃣2⃣3⃣ Biorisks, Biosecurity, and Biological Disarmament Conference in our new report! 📙 Dive into the insights shared by experts from around the globe on advancing biosecurity and strengthening disarmament 🔍 👇 unidir.org/publication/2023-…
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@teojcryan.bsky.social retweeted
I'm hiring! Looking for a motivated bioinformatician to help us advance approaches to screening synthetic DNA orders for sequences of concern by developing bioinformatic and ML approaches that are resilient to human adversaries: jobs.ac.uk/job/DIB267/resear…
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Presenting a poster on my efforts at characterising metagenomes with De Bruijn graphs. Drop by poster B008 (delightfully palindromic) at #Microbio24 if you're keen to chat more!
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@teojcryan.bsky.social retweeted
HERA has launched a new Global Consortium for Wastewater and Environmental Surveillance for Public Health (#GLOWACON) today! It will create a 🌍 sentinel system for the early detection, prevention, & real-time monitoring of epidemic threats and outbreaks. More info in the 🧵👇
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@teojcryan.bsky.social retweeted
APPLY NOW‼️ 📢The call for applications to the #Youth4Biosec Fellowship 2⃣0⃣2⃣4⃣ is now open More information on the programme, eligibility criteria & how to apply here 👉 disarmament.unoda.org/youth4… 🗓️Deadline - 5⃣ April
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@teojcryan.bsky.social retweeted
I have written an 'intermediate programming' course which is aimed at helping improve programming skills of bioinformatics/computational biology graduate students and postdocs. The notes are self-contained and are freely available: iprogramming.bacpop.org/
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