Nucleat is a student run organization and facilitating sort of life sciences companye. The original idea was just, hey, we have all these different schools and students, and they're not really talking to each other. And beyond harvard, youkow in the boston area, beyond boston, all over the united states and now across the world. We see it as not just biotic founders, but biotyce leaders, founders, early employees, investors, business development and and helping people help each other.
There has been a massive expansion in data emanating from bio labs, and that means next-generation AI algorithms and machine learning models finally have the grist to transform the future trajectories of biology and health therapies. Yet, there’s a key translation challenge: how do you get computer scientists and biologists — two types of specialists with very different training — to collaborate with each other effectively?
Two groups, Bits in Bio and Nucleate, have independently spearheaded new ways of bringing all people interested in tech and biology together to share best practices and think through patterns of startup inception and growth. Today, we bring the founders and early champions of those two groups together for the first time in person to talk about their work.
Joining us first is Michael Retchin, a PhD student at Weill Cornell Medicine and the founder of Nucleate, a free and collaborative student-run organization that facilitates the formation of pioneering life science companies. Second, we have Nicholas Larus-Stone, the first software engineering hire at Octant.bio, a Lux-backed synthetic biology startup, as well as the founder of Bits in Bio. Finally, joining “Securities” host Danny Crichton is Lux biotech investor Shaq Vayda.
We talk about where tech + bio (versus “biotech”) is coming from, how the two community leaders launched and grew their respective organizations, the coming challenges in biology, and our speculative dreams for the future of what biology could look like in the years ahead.