Kenny Workman
@kenbwork
cto @latchbio, data infrastructure for biology
I've had many engineers ask me why its worth their time and effort to learn biology in response to this post. Why should they be excited? We are poised for a revolution in biotech that will be uniquely enabled by computers. Convince yourself by digging into the examples I link:…
If you are a technical person (engineer, quant, mathematician) interested in learning biology, I encourage you to hit textbooks and memorize the "things", eg. cytokines, surface proteins, cell types, pathways, in core fields like immunology. You will be averse to this because…
No one’s denying that patients have died after CAR-T treatment. But the key is relative risk and clinical context. CAR-T has treated 20,000+ patients, often with no other curative options. Even if non-relapse mortality is ~5%, that includes severe blood cancers with few…
Data driven biology is a playground for curious engineers. Probably the next frontier for systems software / cloud infra. Substrate for next wave of foundational contributions to computing (a la MapReduce + BigQuery). Hiring one engineer to join our team of 5. You will learn…
There is so much deep engineering work that is far upstream of drug discovery and in vivo systems. If you have a strong technical background you can have a very high impact by contributing to things like sequencing instruments, imaging, lab robotics and so on.
Imagine how things would reorganize around a whole transcriptome, epigenome + proteome spatial assay with intracellular resolution that can be prepped and read out in 10 minutes to your laptop from a $100 silicon wafer that fits in the palm of your hand These are fun things to…