Jacob Kimmel

There are many other modalities by which you can drug some of these genes.

And I would say, I don't have a formal way of explaining this, but if you were to write out a list of well-known targets that many, many folks would agree are the correct genes to go after and to try and inhibit or activate in order to treat a given set of diseases.

And the only reason we don't have medicines is that we can't figure out a trick in order to be able to drug them.

It's a fairly small list.

It would probably fit on a single page.

Whereas the number of possible indications that one could go after and the number of possible genes that one could intervene upon, especially when you consider their combinations, is astronomical.

I think, you know, the experiment you could run here is if you lock 10 really smart drug developers in a room and you tell them to write down some incredibly high conviction target disease pairs where they're sure if they modulate this biology, these patients are going to benefit.

And all they need is some molecular hook, as you put it, in order to do this.

It's a relatively short list.

What you're not going to get is anything approximating the panoply of human pathologies that develop.

And you can actually look for this.

There are some existence proofs you can look for out in the universe, which is to say, if the only problem was that we didn't have the ability to drug something using current therapeutics that we can put in humans, we should still be able to treat it in the best animal models of that disease because we can use things like transgenic systems.

you can go in and you can engineer the genome of that animal.

And so this gives you all sorts of superpowers that you don't have in patients, but allow you to, for instance, turn on arbitrarily complex groups of genes and arbitrarily specific or broad groups of cells in the organism at any time you want, at any dose you want in the animal.

And for the majority of pathologies, we just don't have many of those examples.

So there are multiple ways one might approach this problem.

The most common today, this is often what people are describing when they talk about a virtual cell.

This is sort of a very nebulous idea, sometimes numinous, if you'll let me describe it in that way as well.

But I think most concretely what most people are trying to do

is measure some number of molecules or some sort of perceived emissions like the morphology of a cell, and then perturb it many times, turn some genes on, turn some genes off, and measure how that molecular morphological state changes.