a podcast about the intersection of biology and computation. all episodes on https://www.owlposting.com/s/podcast! <br/><br/><a href="https://www.owlposting.com/s/podcast?utm_medium=podcast">www.owlposting.com</a>
Owl Posting
Claim This Podcastby Abhishaike Mahajan
5.0(9 reviews)
14 episodes
Updated Bi-weekly
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Podcast Overview
a podcast about the intersection of biology and computation. all episodes on https://www.owlposting.com/s/podcast! <br/><br/><a href="https://www.owlposting.com/s/podcast?utm_medium=podcast">www.owlposting.com</a>
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Publishing Since
7/20/2024
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Recent Episodes
April 20, 2026
The printing press for biological data (Sterling Hooten)
<p>Youtube: <a target="_blank" href="https://youtu.be/-rlJDGC2eC8">https://youtu.be/-rlJDGC2eC8</a>Apple Podcasts: <a target="_blank" href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/owl-posting/id1758545538?i=1000762410502">https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/owl-posting/id1758545538?i=1000762410502</a>Spotify: <a target="_blank" href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/1OtuQYwNhRhVSwHiHxPrmV?si=tD52iE5IR8i-3W6Q7Bhy8g">https://open.spotify.com/episode/1OtuQYwNhRhVSwHiHxPrmV?si=tD52iE5IR8i-3W6Q7Bhy8g</a>Substack/Transcript: <a target="_blank" href="https://www.owlposting.com/p/the-printing-press-for-biological">https://www.owlposting.com/p/the-printing-press-for-biological</a></p><p>After having written long-form essays over a weirdly diverse number of areas of the life-sciences, I am increasingly confident in my status as someone who knows a little about a lot of things. But every now and then, you meet someone who casually reveals to you an entire subfield who, up until your conversation with them, you’d never even thought of before. This happened to me when I met <a target="_blank" href="http://linkedin.com/in/sterlinghooten">Sterling</a> a few months back. We met in the elevator as we were both leaving an event, and by the time we’d reached the bottom floor, the conversation had become so interesting that we stood in the lobby for an hour as I pestered him with more and more questions.</p><p>Sterling runs a company called <a target="_blank" href="https://www.iku.bio/">Iku Bio</a>. Iku ostensibly does something quite simple: it helps biologics manufacturers figure out what to feed their cells. This is called media optimization, and it is done in an astonishingly old-fashioned way. An engineer runs a handful of experiments in a benchtop bioreactor the size of a Fiji water bottle, waits days for analytical results, and repeats, maybe three or four times before timelines force them to stop searching.</p><p>Sterling’s solution was to use <strong>printed circuit boards (PCBs)</strong>—the same green wafers inside your phone and your microwave—as the substrate for <strong>microfluidic bioreactors</strong>. Because PCBs are made via lithography, you get complexity for free. Because they’re already mass-manufactured at planetary scale, you inherit sixty years of cost optimization. And because they’re literally designed to carry electrical signals, you can embed sensors directly into the thing rather than cramming them in after the fact.</p><p>The result is a device that costs $8 per experimental lane versus $20,000 for the nearest comparable microfluidic system. And there are many, many ways for to improve from here on out.</p><p>This conversation covers the full stack: what cell culture media actually is and why it’s so much more than sugar water, why biologics manufacturing has more in common with semiconductor fabs than chemistry labs, how Sterling arrived at PCBs, and at the end of the talk, why he thinks a fair bit of lab automation is “philosophically a crime.”</p><p>Timestamps</p><p>* [00:00:48] Introduction</p><p>* [00:01:26] What is Iku Bio?</p><p>* [00:05:00] Media optimization as the biggest lever</p><p>* [00:06:23] What actually is media?</p><p>* [00:13:07] Fetal bovine serum and the move to synthetic media</p><p>* [00:15:10] Walk me through a media optimization workflow</p><p>* [00:18:49] Why biologics manufacturing is closer to semiconductors than chemistry</p><p>* [00:21:50] Matching the phase three batch and generics</p><p>* [00:24:12] The 200-dimensional search space</p><p>* [00:37:02] Printed circuit boards as a medium for microfluidics, and the utility of lithography</p><p>* [00:40:48] Anatomy of the Iku device</p><p>* [00:57:09] What sensors are on the device today?</p><p>* [01:01:36] How do you use the Iku device to perform media optimization?</p><p>* [01:14:44] Does media optimization survive scale-up?</p><p>* [01:24:32] $8/lane vs. $20,000/lane: the economic utility of Iku’s device</p><p>* [01:32:05] Why PCB microfluidics didn’t exist 10 years ago</p><p>* [01:39:24] Who is the customer?</p><p>* [01:43:14] What is the ultimate goal of Iku?</p><p>* [01:49:07] What does the validation evidence need to look like?</p><p>* [01:52:14] What would you do with $100M equity-free?</p><p>* [01:57:31] Lab automation is in a strange place right now</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to Owl Posting at <a href="https://www.owlposting.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.owlposting.com/subscribe</a>
March 2, 2026
Neurotechnology? For Cancer? (Ben Woodington & Elise Jenkins)
<p>Youtube:<a target="_blank" href="https://youtu.be/JAxkqb-nBWs">https://youtu.be/JAxkqb-nBWs</a></p><p>Spotify: <a target="_blank" href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/6BLZph2uGGUVphbNQ8NGPd?si=SVBSKJM8RdO4AhYzDa-ZfQ">https://open.spotify.com/episode/6BLZph2uGGUVphbNQ8NGPd?si=SVBSKJM8RdO4AhYzDa-ZfQ</a></p><p>Apple Podcast: <a target="_blank" href="https://apple.co/3OU5Zse">https://apple.co/3OU5Zse </a>Transcript: </p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://www.owlposting.com/i/189602943/transcript">https://www.owlposting.com/i/189602943/transcript</a></p><p></p><p>This is an episode with <a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-woodington/">Ben Woodington</a> and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/elise-jenkins-/">Elise Jenkins</a>, who are the cofounders of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.coherenceneuro.com/">Coherence Neuro</a>. <strong>The pitch for Coherence is as follows: a brain implant that treats cancer with electricity.</strong> When I first learned of the company in mid-2025, it was such an alien thesis that I instinctively wrote it off entirely. This surely isn’t clinically plausible at all, maybe it will be one day, but certainly not today.</p><p>Then, while I was in San Francisco, I met up with <a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicole-marino-2581b1120/">Nicole</a>, Coherence’s chief of staff. After that, I was far more convinced that there was something real here, especially after she told me that the electricity ←→ cancer thesis already has some merit: <a target="_blank" href="https://www.optunegio.com/">Optune</a>, an FDA-approved medical device developed by <a target="_blank" href="https://www.novocure.com/">Novocure</a>. This has been on the market for over a decade, and uses externally delivered alternating electric fields to treat glioblastoma. And it works! <strong>If Optune is consistently used, glioblastoma patients can live up to twice as long compared to chemotherapy alone.</strong> How does it work? Simple: the alternating electrical fields prevent fast-dividing cells from replicating by <a target="_blank" href="https://www.optunegiohcp.com/mechanism-of-action">interfering with the physical process of cell division</a> (specifically, mitotic spindle formation).</p><p>After this, Nicole connected me with Ben and Elise, the cofounders of the company. It was an incredible conversation. During it, I was informed that <a target="_blank" href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11800603/">cancer cells behave eerily similar to neurons</a>: hijacking neural pathways, attracting nerves into their microenvironment, and forming synaptic connections with surrounding tissue. Given this set of evidence, none of which felt particularly controversial, an easy logical leap is to ask the question: <strong>why can’t you throw neuromodulation at the tumor?</strong> Maybe not even just for treatment, but monitoring as well? Optune was a step in the right direction, yes, but surely it can be pushed even further.</p><p><strong>So Coherence was born, the only (neurotechnology x oncology) company in existence.</strong> Ben and Elise met during their PhD’s at Cambridge, spinning up the startup with the belief that a modality long assumed to be exclusively for neurological conditions like Parkinson’s, epilepsy, and chronic pain, may have a profound role to play in cancer. And perhaps even conditions outside of it.</p><p>And during my last trip to San Francisco for JPM 2026, I had the honor to sit down with Ben and Elise to talk about it all.</p><p>This conversation covers how <a target="_blank" href="https://www.coherenceneuro.com/product">Coherence’s first neurotech device (SOMA) works</a>, the molecular reasons behind why neuromodulation affects cancer at all, what the biomarker readouts look like, the obvious Michael Levin comparison, and a lot more. Coincidentally, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.owlposting.com/p/questions-to-ponder-when-evaluating">Ben helped me out a fair bit for my neurotechnology piece awhile back</a>, and that article may be helpful reading material for this episode.</p><p>Enjoy!</p><p>Timestamps:</p><p>00:00:00 Introduction</p><p>00:01:42 How is SOMA different from Novocure’s Optune?</p><p>00:08:57 Why does neuromodulation affect cancer at all?</p><p>00:13:28 How was cancer-nervous system crosstalk first discovered?</p><p>00:15:42 Anti-epileptics and beta blockers as accidental cancer drugs</p><p>00:17:38 What is molecularly happening when you block cancer-neuron crosstalk?</p><p>00:19:50 What is SOMA actually reading out as a biomarker?</p><p>00:20:44 What does it mean that cancer is “very electric”?</p><p>00:22:02 Can you derive universal biomarkers across patients?</p><p>00:23:09 How is the device placed?</p><p>00:24:45 How does the blocking stimulation regime work?</p><p>00:26:43 Is it fair to say this is closed loop?</p><p>00:29:05 Why not just spam the tumor with constant stimulation?</p><p>00:32:31 Why MRI safety is non-negotiable for oncology devices</p><p>00:33:35 Walk us through the patient journey from diagnosis to implantation</p><p>00:36:13 The Michael Levin question: can you reprogram cancer back to normal?</p><p>00:42:29 Efficacy, hospice settings, and the utility of the neuromodulation literature</p><p>00:45:52 Why start with glioblastoma instead of an easier cancer?</p><p>00:48:57 Regulatory strategy and the reimbursement threat</p><p>00:55:37 How well does mouse-to-human translation work for neuromodulation?</p><p>00:55:57 What do in silico models of neuromodulation look like?</p><p>00:58:09 Why didn’t this exist 10 years ago?</p><p>01:01:48 The founding story</p><p>01:06:38 Why build your own device instead of using off-the-shelf arrays?</p><p>01:08:35 Speaking with glioblastoma patients</p><p>01:12:04 What was it like to raise money for this?</p><p>01:13:56 Beyond cancer: TBI, lung disease, and the pan-disease argument</p><p>01:17:40 Hiring at Coherence + what is the hardest type of talent to find</p><p>01:23:17 What would you do with $100M equity-free?</p><p>01:27:15 Are you a neurotech company or a cancer company?</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to Owl Posting at <a href="https://www.owlposting.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.owlposting.com/subscribe</a>
December 17, 2025
What if we could grow human tissue by recapitulating embryogenesis? (Matthew Osman & Fabio Boniolo)
<p>This is an interview with Matthew Osman and Fabio Boniolo, the co-founders of Polyphron.</p><p></p><p>The thesis behind Polyphron is equal parts nauseating and exciting in how ambitious it is: growing ex-vivo tissue to use in organ repair.</p><p></p><p>And, truthfully, it felt so ambitious as to not be possible at all. When I had my first (of several) pre-podcast chats with Matt and Fabio to understand what they were doing, I expressed every ounce of skepticism I had about how this couldn’t possibly be viable. Everybody knows that complex tissue engineering is something akin to how fusion is viewed in physics; theoretically possible, but practically intractable in the near-term. What we can reliably grow outside of a human body are simple structures—bones, skin, cartilage—but anything beyond that is surely decades away.</p><p></p><p>But after the hours of conversation I’ve had with the team, I’ve began to rethink my position. As Eryney Marrogi lines out in his Core Memory article over Polyphron (<a target="_blank" href="https://www.corememory.com/p/exclusive-cracking-the-only-engineering">https://www.corememory.com/p/exclusive-cracking-the-only-engineering</a>), there is an engineering system that has reliably produced viable human tissue for eons: embryogenesis.</p><p></p><p>What if you could recapitulate this process? What if you could naturally get cells to arrange themselves into higher-order structures, by following the exact chemical guidelines that are laid out during embryo development? And, most excitedly, what if you didn’t need to understand any of these overwhelmingly complex development rules, but could outsource it all to a machine-learning system that understood what set of chemical perturbations are necessary at which timepoints?</p><p></p><p>This does not exist today, but Polyphron has given early proof points that is possible. In their most recent finding, which we talk about on the podcast, their models have discovered a distinct set of chemical perturbations that force developing neurons to arrange themselves with a specific polarity: just shy of 90°, arranged like columns. This is obviously still a simple structure—still a difficult one to create, given that even an expert could not arrive to that level of polarity—but it represents proof that you can use computational methods to discover the chemical instructions that guide tissue self-assembly.</p><p></p><p>We discuss this recent polarity result, what the machine-learning problems at Polyphron looks like, and the genuinely insane economics of the whole endeavour. The last of which is especially exciting; it is rare you hear biotech founders talk about ‘expanding the Total Addressable Market’, and actually believe them. But here, it is a genuine possibility if the Polyphron approach ends up working.</p><p></p><p>Enjoy!</p><p></p><p>Youtube: <a target="_blank" href="https://youtu.be/3DWTF5mNcUU">https://youtu.be/3DWTF5mNcUU</a></p><p></p><p>Spotify: <a target="_blank" href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/3aZr5yTgwB4QzUV5ADN0y9?si=9aTLjRZDRHuSBvmckenO1Q">https://open.spotify.com/episode/3aZr5yTgwB4QzUV5ADN0y9?si=9aTLjRZDRHuSBvmckenO1Q</a></p><p></p><p>Apple Podcasts: <a target="_blank" href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-if-we-could-grow-human-tissue-by-recapitulating/id1758545538?i=1000741694661">https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-if-we-could-grow-human-tissue-by-recapitulating/id1758545538?i=1000741694661</a></p><p></p><p>Substack/Transcript: <a target="_blank" href="https://www.owlposting.com/p/what-if-we-could-grow-human-tissue">https://www.owlposting.com/p/what-if-we-could-grow-human-tissue</a></p><p>Timestamps:</p><p>(00:00:00) Clips and ad roll</p><p>(00:02:16) Introduction</p><p>(00:02:37) Why replace tissue rather than the whole organ?</p><p>(00:10:34) Why not do simple stem/progenitor cell injections?</p><p>(00:13:51) Can organs repair themselves naturally?</p><p>(00:18:21) What does “structure” actually mean in tissue engineering?</p><p>(00:21:04) Why are skin and bone the only FDA-approved tissues today?</p><p>(00:23:45) What exactly are tissue scaffolds?</p><p>(00:27:52) Why are organoids a “dead end” for this field?</p><p>(00:35:08) The argument for recapitulating developmental biology</p><p>(00:40:28) Walk us through the Polyphron experimental loop</p><p>(00:47:56) Can you simulate morphogenesis with only small molecules?</p><p>(00:49:49) How large is the set of possible tissue scaffolds?</p><p>(00:52:32) How reliable are developmental atlases?</p><p>(00:56:45) What is the machine learning model actually optimizing for?</p><p>(01:04:04) Polyphron’s first big tissue engineering result: polarity</p><p>(01:15:33) What comes after polarity?</p><p>(01:17:09) Why is vascularization the hardest problem of tissue engineering?</p><p>(01:20:33) Why can’t you just wash angiogenesis factors over the tissue?</p><p>(01:22:25) How does the graft integrate with the host’s blood supply?</p><p>(01:25:45) How do you validate tissue function before implantation?</p><p>(01:29:01) How do you design a clinical trial for a biological pacemaker?</p><p>(01:37:01) The argument for being a pan-tissue company</p><p>(01:41:57) What are the biggest scientific and economic risks?</p><p>(01:45:23) Who are Polyphron’s competitors?</p><p>(01:47:07) Expanding the TAM beyond transplant lists</p><p>(01:52:28) Autologous vs. Allogeneic approaches</p><p>(01:55:07) Is a 3-year timeline to the clinic realistic?</p><p>(01:56:28) Cross-species translation</p><p>(01:58:05) What would you do with $100M equity free?</p><p></p><p>*********</p><p></p><p>Note: Thank you to <a target="_blank" href="http://latch.bio">latch.bio</a> for sponsoring this episode!</p><p></p><p>LatchBio is building agentic scientific tooling that can analyze a wide range of scientific data, with an early focus on spatial biology. Check out their agent at <a target="_blank" href="http://agent.bio">agent.bio</a>! Clip on them in the episode.</p><p></p><p>If you’re at all interested in sponsoring future episodes, reach out!</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to Owl Posting at <a href="https://www.owlposting.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.owlposting.com/subscribe</a>
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