Yesterday's dreams, today's challenges

On the end of the home lab and the beginning of Aion Biosciences

Last October, I wrote a post about doing biology from a home lab. Since then, a few things have changed. I've done some professional training programs, abandoned the home lab in favor of a new space and raised funding for a company to pursue our work.

I am most excited by the latter, as it's enabled me to transcend from a shoestring budget and to get other people involved. More on this below.

The deviation from the prior narrative arc started with a joke. I’d spent thousands of dollars buying lab equipment to set-up in my living room and had no idea how to use any of it. A friend aptly pointed out, “Ben, it’s like you heard Beethoven play, liked the music and jumped straight to buying a piano.”

He was right, and so next I began to learn the difference between

Bio and Engineering

I initially approached biology like I would any problem I was used to solving in programming or business. Aggregate, abstract, iterate. This entails reviewing the landscape, picking and pulling best practices from a variety of different solutions, occasionally developing my own strategies for solving a problem, and then testing that solution in the wild.

I had two problems translating this usual flow to biology:

1) Feedback loops in biology are very slow.

2) Biology is complex, not linear.

In programming, feedback loops are fast. You write code and run it. At best, you get a clear error thrown at line X, pointing you directly to the issue. At worst, you're dealing with a sneaky memory leak or a logical error that doesn't scream for attention. These trickier bugs can be harder to track down, but they're still linked to a causal chain. It might take some detective work, but you can readily walk down that chain, following the breadcrumbs until you uncover the break. Very rarely is there a maddening edge case that only shows up when the stars align.

Biology is not like this. You do a thing in your cell culture, and then you wait. Not for seconds or minutes, but for hours, days, or sometimes even weeks to see if that thing worked. And when it doesn't work? Your fail states are as clear as mud. Maybe all your cells die. Or perhaps their replication slows down. You're dealing with hundreds of different proteins partying inside these cells at any given moment, so if you're diving into RNAseq or proteomic data to find the break-point, it takes a substantial amount of time and often requires a whole different skillset just to figure out what went sideways. It's less like following a causal chain and more like unraveling a biological mystery novel where every protein is a suspect and your cells are unreliable narrators.

Compound these challenges with having essentially no experience in wet lab bio and I was in rough shape headed into winter last year trying to get started using all the new equipment I'd just bought. For this reason, I decided to start looking for

Training in wet-lab

When I started learning to program, I did a bootcamp. It cost $1,200 and took a few weeks but I found this to be well worth the cost in order to elucidate a large portion of the key unknowns up front.

There are not nearly as many bootcamps like this for biology, but I managed to find a few. At the suggestion of Dr. Michael Levin I initially applied for a stem cell and regenerative medicine course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. I did not get in because of demand and the fact that I have no credentials, but despite this would still recommend this as an outlet to anyone who has at least done a bachelor's in a related field and looking for more bio experience. I've since met a number of other's who've done continued education here and recommend it highly.

The opportunity that ended up working out was with Ichor Life Sciences, a contracted research organization in upstate New York. I was invited up for 2 weeks and this was a perfect opportunity to learn basic wet-lab, and some of the more advanced nuances related to working with stem cells.

From there, I needed to get on-ramped to electrophysiology. I reached out to a number of the labs doing work related to what I was interested in. One I was very excited about said they'd be more than happy to have me for up to a month, but that I would need to get cleared by 'Academic Personnel' first. Thus began a 3+ month bureaucratic process that I failed to get through. First thing they asked for was my academic CV, which I didn't have, but I proceeded to make one anyways that spelt out my brief stint in a university BME program, a single peer reviewed paper I've published, 3 talks I've given and a paragraph of life context.

I was told I was not a fit for a visiting scientist title and so I was passed to HR to see if I could be onboarded as an unpaid contractor. Same story, I was unqualified and not worth the liability for them to take on. Fair enough. It was suggested next I apply as a volunteer. I did, and after watching the ~2 hours of mandatory training videos in the web portal, I was approved and ready to roll!

When I reached back out to schedule my visit, I was then told I would not be able to volunteer for more than 12 hours per week. Only slightly discouraged, I reached out to the PI I intended to visit in a *wink* *wink* sort of way asking if the 12 hour per week maximum would need to be adhered to during my stay or if I could hang tight and soak up as much as I could to maximize my time. Not wanting to rock the boat, they communicated to me that if I still wanted to come out that we would have to play within those constraints.¹ I decided not to go.

As this back and forth was playing out, I got introduced to a lab space in Saint Louis that missed my radar the first time I went looking here.

BioStl is a large non-profit dedicated to advancing the biotech ecosystem in Saint Louis. It is funded mostly by the region’s universities, hospitals and private donors. They built out a beautiful space in the innovation district here that is provided as a value add to their investment arm's portfolio companies.

We came to an arrangement where I would be able to work on site and have access to their shared equipment despite not being a portco since they had space to spare.

This was a game changer. It gave me an appreciation for the expensive pieces of equipment I'd have never been able to buy myself.² These systems allow for tighter feedback loops between wet lab experiments and analysis of generated data, because so much more high quality data can be produced.

Still having the roadblock of needing to get up to speed in electrophysiology, I looked around for labs in the region that were closely related to the types of work I sought to do. I came across the Kirichok Lab, because they were the academic partner to a company called Equator Therapeutics that had recently relocated to Saint Louis to take advantage of the space at BioStl. While the Kirichok Lab’s focus is on the biophysics of the mitochondrial membrane, they have been very gracious with their time to help me get up to speed on the complexities of electrophysiology including equipment selection, different methods of detecting voltage and more.

Biology is context heavy

By this time, despite having the dream scenario come to be in terms of lab resources, I was in the valley of despair on the Dunning-Kruger curve.

Graph from Slidemodel.com

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a simple graph correlating actual competence in a domain of knowledge against confidence. When I spent thousands of dollars buying second hand lab equipment, you might say I was at the “Peak of Mount Stupid”. Learning how to use what I'd acquired and training with other labs put me into the valley of despair.

These days, I am taking a cool walk along the slope of enlightenment.

This being said, the fitness landscape in biology is not as simple as the 2d Dunning-Kruger Graph.

Ahead of me lies Mount Electrophysiology, and Mount Cell Reprogramming. The latter features the induced pluripotency alpine loop with an optional summit of Mount Stem Cells.

When I realized how much time it would take to truly summit each of these peaks, I knew I would need a team.

I have had an entity for over a year that I created to buy reagents, consumables and more. Until recently, this was just a wrapper for Benjamin Anderson as an independent scientist. That changed this summer when I raised our seed round. Now, I am excited to be

Announcing Aion Biosciences

I was at the temple of Apollo in Delphi, Greece when I decided the name. I read something on a placard about the three different greek deities of time: Chronos, Kairos and Aion.

Chronos represents the linear progression of time. Kairos, on the other hand, represents the fleeting and opportune moments of time.

Aion is the Greek god of eternity, often depicted as a young man with a lion’s head and wings. He was considered a primordial deity, representing the concept of time as infinite and cyclical. Aion is associated with the eternal cycle of life, death, and rebirth, and was believed to be the personification of the cosmic cycle of time that governs the universe.

Photo of a mosaic depicting AION. Source.

I knew then and there that'd be the name. Two other supporting reasons collapsed in my brain, the first being that my favorite book by Carl Jung is also called Aion and second, because the word is pronounced the same way that 'ion' is. In the lab, ions are fundamental to our work.

We raised a seed in June. I am pleased to have partnered with two top-tier firms: Long Journey Ventures and 1517.

The thesis of Long Journey Ventures is that while the cycle of a fund is only 5-10 years, they want to invest in people doing their life's work. One of their partners described it to me that, 'When we make an investment decision, we ask ourselves if this person is working on what they are going to spend the next 30 years exploring in one way or another.' Alignment #1, check.

1517 in their own words invests in

dropouts working on hard problems & sci-fi scientists at the earliest stages of their companies.

Alignment #2, check.

I talked to a lot of other great firms, some of whom I hope we can get involved at later stages, but if you were ask me at the onset who my dream cap-table consisted of, I would have said Long Journey and 1517, and so I could not be more motivated to be creating value for these two groups.

In the time since raising funds, we've hired two outstanding people, and are looking for more scientists skilled in stem cell biology, cell reprogramming and electrophysiology to join us. If you know someone exceptional, make an intro or send them our job description.

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Much of what I wrote above were lessons synthesized from countless challenges. There will be even more ahead. I will embrace each one with gratitude. If you’re living your life right, the challenges faced today are the product of yesterday’s dreams.

Have faith and carry on.

-Benjamin Anderson

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Nostr: benjamin@buildtall.com

1. I am purposefully obfuscating the lab I was intended to visit because I admire and respect the scientist there.

2. I’m talking flow cytometers, top of the line fluorescent microscopes, protein purification equipment and much more, including all the basics.