Octant

Octant’s very own L. Naomi Handly gave a talk earlier this week on scalable synthetic biology for drug discovery! Check out the accompanying interview she gave (linked below) for a peek into Naomi’s view on the field.

In the fourth and final part of our series on Octant’s multiplexing capabilities, we cover the power of Deep Mutational Scans (DMS) to map function onto protein structure. Read our blog post below to learn how we use DMS to supercharge each stage of drug discovery by peering into the behavioral intricacies of thousands of protein variants at a time. https://lnkd.in/gV5PHyCK

In the third installment of our series on Octant’s applications of multiplexing, we dive into a new type of direct-to-biology drug discovery we’ve pioneered using multiplexing to rapidly develop better cell activity reporters. Click below to learn about how we design, build, test, and learn from hundreds of optimizations at a time to gain novel insights into what’s happening in cells! https://lnkd.in/g9cNHh5e

Octonauts Alice, Diane, and Michelle had a great time at #BIO2024 last week, where Michelle participated on a panel discussing cross-border privacy challenges of Real World Data!

We’re in Miami this week for the Goldman Sachs Global Healthcare Conference, where our CEO Sri Kosuri will be presenting on Octant’s purpose-built platform for targeting protein misfolding diseases, including progress on our autosomal dominant Retinitis Pigmentosa program.

Great morning with my fellow Octant Octonauts at the Bay Area Visionwalk! It was a little surreal trying to explain to my 5 year old one why some of our fellow walkers required mobility cane's and why he couldn't pet all of the seeing eye dogs. And yet that conversation pales in comparison to the one many of the parents there had to have - that their child would be slowly losing their vision, and there is no known cure. Grateful for the opportunity to at least put in some good, solid effort to bring hope to patients in need.

Excited to connect with biotech adventurers at the 2024 Stanford Drug Discovery Symposium! Robert Plenge and Diane Dickel will share the results of our Bristol Myers Squibb collaboration on deep mutational scans of TYK2, an important target for the treatment of autoimmune phenotypes.  For more, see https://lnkd.in/g4B_ar9K. #SDDS2024

Gloves stay on in lab, but they come off for our board game club on Wednesdays! Happy National Board Game Day!

Happy Saint Patrick's Day! 🍀 Our new base cell line is even repping GFP to celebrate!

This week we're thrilled to welcome back Jonathan Lee, an original 2019 Octant Apprentice. Completing his degree at Keck Medical School, some of Johnny’s accomplishments include using machine learning to characterize tumor microenvironments and predict bone density from spinal CTs. As an apprentice, Johnny built our sequencing platform, OCTOPUS, and helped engineer novel multiplexed reporters to classify the mechanisms of action of GPCR drugs. Now he’s teaming up with Matthew Albert, MD, PhD to advance our Retinitis Pigmentosa and Fabry Disease programs to clinical development. For more details on our programs, see here! https://lnkd.in/gJbwH3Hn