Jacob Kimmel

There was a point even just six or seven years ago where the companies that made these reagents were publishing

the very first million-cell data set just as a proof of concept, and only they could do it as the constructors of the technology.

And now two scientists in our labs can generate that in an afternoon.

Maybe to play with the analogy a bit, imagine that you think about New Limit as an LLM company.

If I'm going to put us in the shoes of Cursor, which, oh, so I wish.

Imagine we're trying to, in 2018, create Cursor Tab, but we're not trying to create a full LLM.

Right.

I don't know enough about the underlying mechanics to know if that would have been feasible, but it's a much more feasible problem than trying to create their most recent cursor agent or compete with modern cloud code, right?

I think that's roughly the equivalent where the problem we're breaking off is a subset of the more general virtual cell problem.

We're trying to predict what do groups of transcription factors do to the age of very specific types of cells?

We only work on a few cell types at New Limit because those are the only cell types where some of the only cell types today we believe we can get really effective delivery of medicines.

And so we think they're just more important because we can act on them today.

If we solve the problem of what TFs to use, we can make a medicine pretty quickly.

So in a way, we're carving out a region of this massive parameter space and saying, if we can learn the distribution of effects, even just in this small region, it's going to be really effective for us and we can make really amazing products unlike the world has ever seen.

And over time, we can expand to this more general corpus of predicting every possible gene perturbation in every possible cell type.

And so I think that's maybe the way the analogy maps on.

But it is true that we are vertically integrating here.

We're generating our own data in a way that's proprietary.

We think we have a much, much larger data set for this particular regime than the rest of the world combined.

And that enables us to build what we think are the best models.