Q: Tell me a bit about yourself. My name is Rupsa Basu and I am a viral immunologist by passion and a backpacker at heart. My mantra of life is to dream, believe and achieve. As a seven years old kid, I started dreaming about becoming a scientist and developed an increased interest in reading science fiction and detective fiction stories. After reading the book “Selfish Gene” in elementary school, I got inspired with nature’s scientific secrets and slowly idolized…
Looking back, 2020 was quite the year. We designed 200 unique oncolytic viruses, and we confirmed 163 viruses are working (replication competent) in the lab. Among these, we engineered 42 glycoproteins, 29 promoters and 14 therapeutic genes. We generated more than 10 billion virus particles over the year, which we tested in 11 research cell lines and 8 patient derived cells. Building on our in vitro success, we also conducted 2 mouse studies. How did the year unfold chronologically?…
Q: Tell me a bit about yourself. My name is Taylor Flaat and I am from Panama City Beach, Florida, although I was actually born in Grand Forks, North Dakota. We moved from Grand Forks when I was just two years old and my family has been in Panama City ever since. I grew up an avid fisherman and baseball player, with my favorite food definitely being the homestyle cooking of my mom and grandma! I did my undergraduate degree…
It has been almost 7 months since the last update of our work on the COVID-19 vaccine candidate. In this post, we share the results and what we have learned. Because there are several other vaccines available that are highly effective against SARS-CoV-2, we decided to stop further research on our vaccine and to focus on developing cancer therapies. We will explain more about our decision in this post. First, a brief reminder on why we decided to make a…
We want to share exciting news: Lab results show that we have made our vaccine as designed. In our previous post, we disclosed a design of a potential vaccine for COVID-19 based on VSV. In a subsequent post, we have also shared quite a bit of scientific background on why we believe it should work. With this post, we want to share an update on our work in the lab. Before we do that a bit of background. The physical…
The third and last in a series of Questions and Answers with the co-founders of Humane Genomics. Q: Tell me a bit about yourself. I am a serial entrepreneur and one of the co-founders of Shapeways. I am a big tech and science nerd and have too many interests to keep up with. Some of the things I am passionate about, besides Humane Genomics, are: astrophysics, internet of things (Raspberry Pi’s), writing software in various different languages, brewing beer, cooking,…