The sensational film Good Will Hunting, about a self-taught mathematical and physics genius on parole from South Boston who works as a janitor at MIT, wasn’t based on a true story—but that doesn’t mean the story never happened. It did, just with a few key differences—the most important being that the brilliant young Bostonian isn’t focused on theoretical math; he’s focused on biology and medicine. That man is Mike Previte, PhD, who is CTO and co-founder of Element Biosciences, where he’s developing tools to study complex biochemical systems.
In this episode of Behind the Breakthroughs, Previte discusses fundamental biomedical tools like DNA and RNA sequencing, which he worked on while at Illumina, as well as microscopy, which are incredibly useful—but they fall short of giving us a full picture of a living cell, tissue, or organism. Previte believes that if precision medicine is ever to become predictive of how cells, tissues, and organisms—such as ourselves—behave and react to mutations, the environment, and drugs, we're going to need to study things in the context of time, as well as space. That’s why Previte and Element Biosciences have built tools like AVITI 24—a 5D multiomics system for spatial, single-cell multiomics and high-quality affordable sequencing.
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Hosted by Jonathan D. Grinstein
Produced by Bill Levine
Audio mixed and mastered by David Mosely
Music provided by penguinmusic
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