Brita Belli

Last week, we gathered at The Explorer's Club
in NYC for the first AI Leadership Salon to have a necessary conversation – how are we using AI in ways that support a better future – and what’s next as AI systems move beyond our ability to truly manage them? #AI #TechBio @recursionpharma.bsky.social

Had an incredible time at
@recursionpharma.bsky.social's #TechBio Symposium in SLC last week learning about our latest tech breakthroughs and partnership programs & the Recursion approach to drug discovery. Especially loved connecting with my colleagues from across the country & across the pond!

US-UK pact will boost advances in drug discovery, create tens of thousands of jobs and transform lives The first ever UK-US tech agreement will bring new healthcare breakthroughs, clean homegrown energy, and more investment into local communities and businesses in Britain and the United States.

Read more: www.gov.uk/government/n...

👉 Partnering on efforts to develop quantum computers and "open new avenues to use AI in targeted treatments which can aid drug discovery" in "a fraction of the time and cost it takes today." 🧵

👉 Accelerating "world-leading AI research to help develop new drugs, faster life-saving treatments and improved cancer care." 🧵

🎉 Excited to see that the just-announced $46 billion UK-US Tech Prosperity Deal is putting significant emphasis on AI drug discovery, including: 🧵

It's not easy for a reporter to capture the way a company works from the inside - the people driving it, their motivations. It requires access, transparency, & really sharp storytelling skills. All of those came together in this @wired.com feature from Veronique Greenwood.
wired.com/story/artifi...

YouTube video by CTFORUM An Evening with President Barack Obama

▪️ We need to find common ground. It starts by recognizing that we won’t agree on every issue, he said. We just need to agree on a few critical issues and start from there.

👉 Watch the full conversation here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIBC...

▪️ There is still a great American story. It’s the story of Whitman, and Thoreau, and King, he said. We are unpretentious. There is no aristocracy. No one is below us and no one is above us. We take responsibility for ourselves and for one another. 🧵

▪️ We have to decide what we believe in and defend it. When he was President, people could be wealthy and progressive, he said, and weren't called upon to defend their positions. Now, universities, law firms, and businesses must be willing to push back even when it’s uncomfortable. 🧵

▪️ Social media has become a tool for sowing discord. It appeals to our basest instincts, and allows everyone to see what they can’t have. It drives feelings of alienation and anger that have been stoked further by those who benefit from that discord. What if, instead, it were a tool for good? 🧵

▪️ Facts matter. People in power around the world are deliberately sowing confusion, eroding our trust, so that we no longer no what to believe – or no longer believe anything. Agreeing on certain fundamental facts is critical to rebuilding the foundation where progress is possible. 🧵

“I’m still the hope guy.”

Two nights ago I had the great privilege of taking my daughters to see @barackobama.bsky.social in conversation with historian Heather Cox Richardson at the Bushnell in Hartford.

He offered a perspective that only he can on the moment we are in. 🧵

YouTube video by Recursion New Open Source Model from MIT & Recursion Solves Major Hurdle in AI Drug Discovery

Researchers at MIT and @recursionpharma.bsky.social just released the first AI tool to solve protein binding affinity prediction at scale – a major hurdle in drug discovery – and it's completely open source.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRtr... #TechBio #openscience 🧪

5️⃣ The YODA (Yale University Open Data Access) Project: Companies like Johnson & Johnson partner with YODA to make anonymized clinical trial data available to external researchers – fostering secondary analysis & new discoveries from existing trial data. yoda.yale.edu

#openscience #discovery

RXRX Datasets released from Recursion's automated cellular imaging and deep learning platform, to enable new machine learning tools and discover new biology.

4️⃣ @recursionpharma.bsky.social's Open-Science Data & Tools: Recursion provides open source datasets to accelerate AI drug discovery research. RxRx1 (100,000+ cell images); RxRx3 (100 Tb dataset of 17,000+ genes & 2+ million cell images) & RxRx3-core (18Gb). Plus: foundation models. www.rxrx.ai 🧵

3️⃣ The Structural Genomics Consortium: A major global public-private open science effort which includes a number of pharma companies. They’ve determined 4k+ protein structures - placed in the public domain - & developed chemical probes for understudied protein families. www.thesgc.org 🧵

2️⃣ Boehringer Ingelheim’s opnME: BI’s open science portal provides free access to molecules to the scientific community (over 9,000 delivered so far) as well as funding and collaboration opportunities. www.opnme.com 🧵

Open Science Tools See the Allen Institute's publicly shared research that supports the science community and accelerates discovery in human health and disease.

1️⃣ Allen Institute’s Open Science Tools: Their open data portals includes the Allen Brain Map - neuroscience reference atlases, cell type data & modeling tools; & Allen Cell Explorer – cell biology resources, hiPSC lines, plasmids, imaging software & 3D models. alleninstitute.org/open-science... 🧵

🚀 5 open science initiatives that are driving new discoveries.

A number of big pharma, academic research groups & #TechBio companies are providing open source tools, data, and software to drive new discoveries that can lead to new cures.

💥 Here are 5 efforts making an impact. 🧪🧵

Accelerating AI Drug Discovery with Open Source Datasets

Public datasets fall short when it comes to reliably training AI models for drug discovery. In a new blog, I share how @recursionpharma.bsky.social is helping to fill the gap by providing open source versions of its massive, proprietary cellular screening datasets. www.recursion.com/news/acceler...

Biologist whose innovation saved the life of British teenager wins $3m Breakthrough prize Prof David Liu is among the winners of 2025’s ‘Oscars of science’, with honours also going to researchers for landmark work on multiple sclerosis, particle physics and ‘skinny jabs’

He says: “What can be more human than wanting to use all of our knowledge, all of our effort, all of our resources, to try to make the lives of our kids safer and better than our own lives? A huge part of that aspiration requires, & is indeed driven by, science.” www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

As one of many prominent researchers at Harvard – which has just had all of its federal research funding halted – Liu has been vocal about the disastrous impact of cutting research. 🧵

Search-and-replace genome editing without double-strand breaks or donor DNA Nature - A new DNA-editing technique called prime editing offers improved versatility and efficiency with reduced byproducts compared with existing techniques, and shows potential for correcting...

By 2019, they released prime editing in another Nature paper, “a less efficient but more powerful technique that in principle can repair nearly all disease-causing mutations.” Now, base editing & prime editing are being used in more than a dozen clinical trials. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵

Programmable editing of a target base in genomic DNA without double-stranded DNA cleavage - Nature CRISPR/Cas9 DNA editing creates a double-stranded break in the target DNA, which can frequently generate random insertion or deletion of bases (indels); a new genome editing approach combining Cas9 wi...

But once his focus turned to fixing genes, he never looked back. His team first published on base editing – using CRISPR guide molecules to change single-letter mutations in the genetic code (which account for nearly 1/3 of genetic diseases) in Nature in 2016. www.nature.com/articles/nat.... 🧵

As the story notes, Liu is a true inventor whose life has been marked by interests in building all sorts of things – a slow-flying plane, a device that lobbed toy mice at cats, and even a Blackjack simulator that got him banned from MGM Grand resorts. 🧵

Base editing: Revolutionary therapy clears girl's incurable cancer New way of altering DNA is used to engineer an "exciting", experimental therapy for a 13-year-old girl.

Applying this base editing technology to white blood cells known as T-cells, researchers engineered a new type of T-cell that saved the life of a 13-year-old girl named Alyssa with leukemia, rendering her once aggressive cancer undetectable. www.bbc.com/news/health-... 🧵

Liu won for his work developing tools to edit genes – known as base editing and prime editing. With base editing, scientists can change single letters of the genetic code, while prime editing allows researchers to “rewrite whole stretches of DNA.” 🧵

Held April 12 in Santa Monica, this year's star-studded event featured host James Corden, award presentations from the likes of Christina Aguilera, MrBeast, Jodie Foster, and Jeremy Strong, and performances from Sia and Katy Perry. 🧵

🏆 Science deserves to be celebrated.
A recent story by Ian Sample in @theguardian.com details the fascinating life of David R. Liu, a professor at the @broadinstitute.org of MIT & Harvard and one of the winners of the $3m Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences, known as the “Oscars of Science.” 🧪🧵