The coronavirus global health crisis has driven companies to look for creative ways to get work done. While IT companies had little trouble resorting to zoom, slack and other collaboration tools, there is very little we as wet lab researchers could do, other than re-apply for grants and keep polishing our research papers. However, researchers […]
All posts by Mahboob Imtiyaz
Types of Covid Vaccines and How Soon Can You Get Inoculated
Pharmaceutical companies around the world are rushing to manufacture and distribute a viable vaccine. There are five main approaches being taken to develop a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2/COVID19, with several biotechnology companies, academic organisations and pharmaceutical companies employing different technologies in the race to bring their vaccine candidate to clinical trials. The World Health Organization hopes that a vaccine […]
Abbott’s Corona Virus Test Cannot Stop a Pandemic
Donald Trump’s recent announcement for the lack of COVID19 diagnosis across United States in the form of Abbott’s ID NOW™ platform, will not help the country fight or even slow the current pandemic. Touted to help front line workers and remote clinics to detect infected individuals in as little as five minutes using their nasal […]
[email protected]’s 1 Exaflop Computing Does Not Match Against Conventional Supercomputers
Conceptualized almost two decades ago the [email protected] program to crowdsource the gigantic task of solving the chaos of molecular interactions has hit a major milestone. Thanks to awareness of the ongoing corona virus pandemic, thousands of new users have signed up to put their computers to work pushing the collective computing speed to a spectacular “exaflop” of […]
Andreessen Horowitz Launches BioFund III
Andreessen Horowitz’s led a16z fund has announced a new $750M bio fund: Bio Fund III focusing on engineering and biology based companies involved in R&D. Driven by Vineeta Agarwala, Jorge Conde, Vijay Pande, and Julie Yoo, the fund is redefining what bio means. Now under BioFund III all Tech, biotech, and healthcare systems are being merging and treated […]
Blockchain Reality Sets in on DNA Sequencing Startups
With the falling value of cryptocurrency, startups which promised to utilize the power of blockchain have fast disappeared. No longer are many of the companies giving importance to the use of blockchain or in even some cases completely removed the reference to crypto from their websites. Wearing off of the global crypto-flu has suddenly made […]
Illumina Launches its Cheapest Full Sequencer for No One
Illumina announced the release of its sub $20,000 desktop sequencer aimed at diagnostic labs at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference last week. The iSeq 100 designed with an new 2-Dye preparation technology that speeds up preparation time. While the cost and speed of sample preparation are a major upgrades, these upgrades are not a huge […]
Humans Found to Hold Immunity to CRISPR-Cas9
CRISPR-Cas9, the 21st Century’s most promising genetic modification tool has shown to be unusable in humans, thanks to adaptive immunity already present in human beings. In a pre-print paper published by researchers at Stanford University, more than 65 percent of human subjects had antibodies that would fight Cas9 proteins propagation in human beings. More specifically 79% […]