The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 17 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Hillenmeyer: Academia's credit-based incentives drive competition and misalignment versus industry
“The currency in industry is, is money or financial, and the currency in academia is credit. And it just leads to interesting incentives. There's a lot of competition. People aren't kind of rowing the same direction all the time. You're trying to take credit ma…”
Hillenmeyer: Genomic data scale enables quant-style search focusing
“As we're getting more genomes and more data it's kind of like the quant effect on wall street effect on wall street. We can start to really see which genomes are going to be useful and which ones are not and focus the search.”
Hillenmeyer: Female investor representation in biotech is strong and growing
“I actually see a lot of women investors on the biotech side. I think less on the tech side, but I think the numbers are great and growing.”
Hillenmeyer: The antibacterial drug market is broken
“The antibacterial problem is different. Sadly, the market there is just It's broken. Companies know this, the government knows this.”
Hillenmeyer: Drug-resistant bacteria will hit as a massive wave
“The problem is this growing drug resistance in bacteria, they're just swapping these drug resistance genes left and right. It's really scary, and it, it'll, it'll be a massive wave that'll hit us. We just don't quite know when, and investors don't know when th…”
Hillenmeyer: About three-quarters of historical antibiotics come from natural sources
“About three-quarters of all antibiotics over history, were found from natural sources.”
Hillenmeyer: Fungi and humans are surprisingly closely related evolutionary relatives
“Compared to bacteria. There's the tree of life. There's bacteria, viruses way over here. Fungi and humans are actually pretty closely related, surprisingly.”
Hillenmeyer: Fungi share about 6,000 genes with humans
“So humans have about 20,000 genes we know now from the Human Genome Project. Fungi have about 6000 that are the same in humans, are very similar.”
Hillenmeyer: Only 0.1% of estimated fungal species have been sequenced
“So scientists estimate there's about five million species of fungi on the planet, and only 5000 have been sequenced.”
Hillenmeyer: Big pharma paid bonuses to employees for vacation dirt samples
“People at big pharma companies in past decades would be paid little bonuses to bring back dirt from their vacations to do this kind of grind and find search.”
Hillenmeyer: Lipitor originated from fungal compounds
“That's a blockbuster hundred billion dollar cholesterol drug Lipitor originally found in a fungus because cholesterol is essential.”
Hillenmeyer: Fungi mutated their own pathways to survive producing statins
“So this fungus that evolved the statin originally had to protect itself by mutating its own cholesterol, and we can see that in the DNA sequence, so we call it a toxin-antitoxin pair.”
Hillenmeyer: 99.9% of wild fungi cannot be cultured in laboratories
“So most of these fungi won't grow well in laboratories. That's part of why only the .1% has really been worked on. The 99.9% don't really grow well in the lab.”
Hillenmeyer: Roughly 10 fungal genes typically encode a drug compound
“It's usually about 10 genes encodes one drug.”
Hexagon Bio rediscovered statins and existing drugs using its platform
“So we, for example, rediscovered the statins and some of these existing drugs.”
Hillenmeyer: Hexagon Bio discovered fungal compounds targeting cardiovascular pathways
“So we've seen we rediscovered the statins themselves, as I mentioned, we've seen other drugs evolving in that same kind of cholesterol pathway. And we also see other totally unrelated chemicals in unrelated pathways that could also have an effect on cardiovasc…”