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Brita Belli

@britabelli.bsky.social
164 followers 169 following 49 posts

Nerd translator. Senior Comms at Recursion. Previously at Yale. Author of The Autism Puzzle. Fiction writer & fitness lover. #techbio

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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 13/10/2025
Last week, we gathered at The Explorer's Club in NYC for the first AI Leadership Salon to have a necessary conversation – how are we using AI in ways that support a better future – and what’s next as AI systems move beyond our ability to truly manage them? #AI #TechBio @recursionpharma.bsky.social
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 29/09/2025
Had an incredible time at @recursionpharma.bsky.social's #TechBio Symposium in SLC last week learning about our latest tech breakthroughs and partnership programs & the Recursion approach to drug discovery. Especially loved connecting with my colleagues from across the country & across the pond!
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 17/09/2025
Read more: www.gov.uk/government/n...
gov.uk
US-UK pact will boost advances in drug discovery, create tens of thousands of jobs and transform lives
The first ever UK-US tech agreement will bring new healthcare breakthroughs, clean homegrown energy, and more investment into local communities and businesses in Britain and the United States.
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 17/09/2025
👉 Partnering on efforts to develop quantum computers and "open new avenues to use AI in targeted treatments which can aid drug discovery" in "a fraction of the time and cost it takes today." 🧵
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 17/09/2025
👉 Accelerating "world-leading AI research to help develop new drugs, faster life-saving treatments and improved cancer care." 🧵
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 17/09/2025
🎉 Excited to see that the just-announced $46 billion UK-US Tech Prosperity Deal is putting significant emphasis on AI drug discovery, including: 🧵
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 18/07/2025
It's not easy for a reporter to capture the way a company works from the inside - the people driving it, their motivations. It requires access, transparency, & really sharp storytelling skills. All of those came together in this @wired.com feature from Veronique Greenwood. wired.com/story/artifi...
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
▪️ We need to find common ground. It starts by recognizing that we won’t agree on every issue, he said. We just need to agree on a few critical issues and start from there. 👉 Watch the full conversation here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIBC...
youtube.com
An Evening with President Barack Obama
YouTube video by CTFORUM
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
▪️ There is still a great American story. It’s the story of Whitman, and Thoreau, and King, he said. We are unpretentious. There is no aristocracy. No one is below us and no one is above us. We take responsibility for ourselves and for one another. 🧵
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
▪️ We have to decide what we believe in and defend it. When he was President, people could be wealthy and progressive, he said, and weren't called upon to defend their positions. Now, universities, law firms, and businesses must be willing to push back even when it’s uncomfortable. 🧵
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
▪️ Social media has become a tool for sowing discord. It appeals to our basest instincts, and allows everyone to see what they can’t have. It drives feelings of alienation and anger that have been stoked further by those who benefit from that discord. What if, instead, it were a tool for good? 🧵
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
▪️ Facts matter. People in power around the world are deliberately sowing confusion, eroding our trust, so that we no longer no what to believe – or no longer believe anything. Agreeing on certain fundamental facts is critical to rebuilding the foundation where progress is possible. 🧵
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
“I’m still the hope guy.” Two nights ago I had the great privilege of taking my daughters to see @barackobama.bsky.social in conversation with historian Heather Cox Richardson at the Bushnell in Hartford. He offered a perspective that only he can on the moment we are in. 🧵
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
Researchers at MIT and @recursionpharma.bsky.social just released the first AI tool to solve protein binding affinity prediction at scale – a major hurdle in drug discovery – and it's completely open source. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRtr... #TechBio #openscience 🧪
youtube.com
New Open Source Model from MIT & Recursion Solves Major Hurdle in AI Drug Discovery
YouTube video by Recursion
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
5️⃣ The YODA (Yale University Open Data Access) Project: Companies like Johnson & Johnson partner with YODA to make anonymized clinical trial data available to external researchers – fostering secondary analysis & new discoveries from existing trial data. yoda.yale.edu #openscience #discovery
yoda.yale.edu
Home - The YODA Project
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
4️⃣ @recursionpharma.bsky.social's Open-Science Data & Tools: Recursion provides open source datasets to accelerate AI drug discovery research. RxRx1 (100,000+ cell images); RxRx3 (100 Tb dataset of 17,000+ genes & 2+ million cell images) & RxRx3-core (18Gb). Plus: foundation models. www.rxrx.ai 🧵
rxrx.ai
RXRX
Datasets released from Recursion's automated cellular imaging and deep learning platform, to enable new machine learning tools and discover new biology.
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
3️⃣ The Structural Genomics Consortium: A major global public-private open science effort which includes a number of pharma companies. They’ve determined 4k+ protein structures - placed in the public domain - & developed chemical probes for understudied protein families. www.thesgc.org 🧵
thesgc.org
Home | Structural Genomics Consortium
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
2️⃣ Boehringer Ingelheim’s opnME: BI’s open science portal provides free access to molecules to the scientific community (over 9,000 delivered so far) as well as funding and collaboration opportunities. www.opnme.com 🧵
opnme.com
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
1️⃣ Allen Institute’s Open Science Tools: Their open data portals includes the Allen Brain Map - neuroscience reference atlases, cell type data & modeling tools; & Allen Cell Explorer – cell biology resources, hiPSC lines, plasmids, imaging software & 3D models. alleninstitute.org/open-science... 🧵
alleninstitute.org
Open Science Tools
See the Allen Institute's publicly shared research that supports the science community and accelerates discovery in human health and disease.
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
🚀 5 open science initiatives that are driving new discoveries. A number of big pharma, academic research groups & #TechBio companies are providing open source tools, data, and software to drive new discoveries that can lead to new cures. 💥 Here are 5 efforts making an impact. 🧪🧵
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 02/06/2025
Public datasets fall short when it comes to reliably training AI models for drug discovery. In a new blog, I share how @recursionpharma.bsky.social is helping to fill the gap by providing open source versions of its massive, proprietary cellular screening datasets. www.recursion.com/news/acceler...
recursion.com
Accelerating AI Drug Discovery with Open Source Datasets
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
He says: “What can be more human than wanting to use all of our knowledge, all of our effort, all of our resources, to try to make the lives of our kids safer and better than our own lives? A huge part of that aspiration requires, & is indeed driven by, science.” www.theguardian.com/science/2025...
theguardian.com
Biologist whose innovation saved the life of British teenager wins $3m Breakthrough prize
Prof David Liu is among the winners of 2025’s ‘Oscars of science’, with honours also going to researchers for landmark work on multiple sclerosis, particle physics and ‘skinny jabs’
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
As one of many prominent researchers at Harvard – which has just had all of its federal research funding halted – Liu has been vocal about the disastrous impact of cutting research. 🧵
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
By 2019, they released prime editing in another Nature paper, “a less efficient but more powerful technique that in principle can repair nearly all disease-causing mutations.” Now, base editing & prime editing are being used in more than a dozen clinical trials. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵
nature.com
Search-and-replace genome editing without double-strand breaks or donor DNA
Nature - A new DNA-editing technique called prime editing offers improved versatility and efficiency with reduced byproducts compared with existing techniques, and shows potential for correcting...
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
But once his focus turned to fixing genes, he never looked back. His team first published on base editing – using CRISPR guide molecules to change single-letter mutations in the genetic code (which account for nearly 1/3 of genetic diseases) in Nature in 2016. www.nature.com/articles/nat.... 🧵
nature.com
Programmable editing of a target base in genomic DNA without double-stranded DNA cleavage - Nature
CRISPR/Cas9 DNA editing creates a double-stranded break in the target DNA, which can frequently generate random insertion or deletion of bases (indels); a new genome editing approach combining Cas9 wi...
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
As the story notes, Liu is a true inventor whose life has been marked by interests in building all sorts of things – a slow-flying plane, a device that lobbed toy mice at cats, and even a Blackjack simulator that got him banned from MGM Grand resorts. 🧵
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
Applying this base editing technology to white blood cells known as T-cells, researchers engineered a new type of T-cell that saved the life of a 13-year-old girl named Alyssa with leukemia, rendering her once aggressive cancer undetectable. www.bbc.com/news/health-... 🧵
bbc.com
Base editing: Revolutionary therapy clears girl's incurable cancer
New way of altering DNA is used to engineer an "exciting", experimental therapy for a 13-year-old girl.
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
Liu won for his work developing tools to edit genes – known as base editing and prime editing. With base editing, scientists can change single letters of the genetic code, while prime editing allows researchers to “rewrite whole stretches of DNA.” 🧵
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
Held April 12 in Santa Monica, this year's star-studded event featured host James Corden, award presentations from the likes of Christina Aguilera, MrBeast, Jodie Foster, and Jeremy Strong, and performances from Sia and Katy Perry. 🧵
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
🏆 Science deserves to be celebrated. A recent story by Ian Sample in @theguardian.com details the fascinating life of David R. Liu, a professor at the @broadinstitute.org of MIT & Harvard and one of the winners of the $3m Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences, known as the “Oscars of Science.” 🧪🧵
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 22/04/2025
I dove pretty deep into the autism-environmental toxin connection. There's compelling science behind it -- even more so now then when I wrote The Autism Puzzle -- and I'm glad to see it getting more public attention. #autism #ASD www.sevenstories.com/books/3571-t... 🧪
sevenstories.com
The Autism Puzzle
Paperback edition features a foreword by Caroline Cox, Research Director from the Center for Environmental Health, and a new preface updating the first edition.
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
New story from Erika Fry in @fortune.com on @recursionpharma.bsky.social's long climb to leading #AI drug discovery company. She looks at skepticism head on & details 3 ingredients needed to succeed: massive data, massive computing power & a serious appetite for risk. fortune.com/2025/04/03/r... 🧪
fortune.com
Will AI ever cure cancer? The multibillion-dollar race to bring the first AI-discovered drug to market
Recursion Pharmaceuticals—a relatively small company backed by the chip giant Nvidia—is betting that its massive supercomputer will give it the edge to dominate the sector.
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 26/03/2025
🧪 In 2012, they published their findings in Science. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... In 2020, they won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. #CRISPR-Cas9 was hailed as a transformative tool to introduce new genetic information and “rewrite the code of life.” www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuHD... #science
science.org
Long-Term Modulation of Electrical Synapses in the Mammalian Thalamus
Electrical synapses are common between inhibitory neurons in the mammalian thalamus and neocortex. Synaptic modulation, which allows flexibility of communication between neurons, has been studied extensively at chemical synapses, but modulation of ...
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 26/03/2025
🧪 Then they added the new RNA discovery from Emmanuelle’s lab – tracrRNA. This time, tracrRNA formed a duplex with CRISPR RNA & together guided the Cas9 protein to the DNA to be cut. Experiments confirmed that it worked. They had created a simple, programmable system for targeted genome editing. 🧵
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 26/03/2025
🧪 When they began collaborating, they knew that the Cas9 protein was cutting DNA, but they didn’t know how. They theorized that it could use these working copies of RNA – CRISPR RNA – to find and destroy viral DNA. Initially, it didn’t work. 🧵
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 26/03/2025
🧪 In 2011, she first met Dr. Jennifer Doudna at a CRISPR conference in Puerto Rico. In a related video, Doudna describes the “electrifying feeling” she had at this meeting. Together, they walked the cobblestone streets of Old San Juan, and Charpentier asked her about collaborating on a project. 🧵
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 26/03/2025
🧪 Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier was studying Streptococcus pyogenes, a dangerous bacteria & major cause of death worldwide. #CRISPR is the bacteria’s adaptive immune system & allows it to recognize and kill viruses. She made a surprising discovery: a 2nd small RNA, called trans-activating CRISPR RNA. 🧵
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 26/03/2025
🧪 I love stories of accidental scientific discovery. (Penicillin! The smallpox vaccine! Insulin!) So I was particularly excited to discover that one of the great scientific breakthroughs of our time – CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing – was the result of a similar kind of fortuitous accident. 🧵
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
Today at #NeurIPS I was introduced to game theory for literature, applying LLMs to Romeo & Juliet to crack the code on characters & assess how various decisions they might make will be received, i.e. “future payoff.” To bring mathematical structure to stories & maybe guide real-life decision making.
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Reposted by Brita Belli
Recursion @recursionpharma.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
On Mon., Dec. 9 at the @theaacr.bsky.social Special Conference in Cancer Research, CSO David Hallett will present the 1st monotherapy data readouts from the ELUCIDATE PH1/2 trial for REC-617, a potential best-in-class CDK7 inhibitor. On Tues., Dec. 10, 8:30-9am ET we're holding a live update call. 🧵
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
👀 What will be the biggest stories in #ML to emerge at @neuripsconf.bsky.social in Vancouver next week? In AI drug discovery: foundation models & agentic systems. I'll be w/ @valenceai.bsky.social & @recursionpharma.bsky.social - w/ over 12+ accepted papers - who can discuss our breakthroughs!
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Heads up that I made a #TechBio feed on @bsky.app -- just use the #TechBio hashtag to be included! bsky.app/profile/did:...
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
How a study on whether rats could drive turned into a study on whether rats experience joy in driving. Spoiler alert: they do. www.independent.co.uk/news/science...
independent.co.uk
Scientists taught rats to drive – now they love getting behind the wheel
Rats’ behaviour offers profound lesson on potential ‘key to a healthy brain’, scientist says
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
The Hack Week project that changed the way @recursionpharma.bsky.social images cells — from CellPaint to, now, brightfield microscopy. A fascinating deep dive from @owlposter.bsky.social #techbio
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
Is there an East Coast-West Coast #biotech culture divide? Interesting perspective from @dshaywitz.bsky.social on how Boston leans more biotech & SF leans more AI, building on insights from Chandana Haque, Dir of Altitude Labs @recursionpharma.bsky.social #techbio timmermanreport.com/2024/11/coas...
timmermanreport.com
Coastal Culture Clash Around AI in Biotech - TimmermanReport.com
“Does the crowd understand? Is it East versus West Or man against man? Can any nation stand alone?” Burning Heart, by Survivor – Rocky IV In national politics, the culture wars may pit the coasts agai...
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
I would love to be added!
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
I made a #TechBio feed: bsky.app/profile/did:...
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
The call is coming. Nov. 20, 7:30am ET, tune in live to hear what’s next for AI drug discovery after @recursionpharma.bsky.social & Exscientia officially combine to form one leading TechBio powerhouse. Join the livestream on YouTube here: m.youtube.com/channel/UCXZ... #techbio
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
Love coming back to Utah. Bring on the snow!
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Brita Belli @britabelli.bsky.social · 17/11/2024
In a new blog, I share the story of MolE — a foundation model for #chemistry just published in Nature. MolE was trained on ~842 million molecules in a self-supervised manner & fine-tuned on downstream ADMET tasks, ranking 1st in 10 of 22 tasks. communities.springernature.com/posts/introd...
communities.springernature.com
Introducing MolE: A New Model for Predicting Molecular Properties for AI Drug Design and Beyond
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