Aspartame breaks down in the digestive track and doesn't enter circulation. It breaks down into three well known compounds that are found in much greater amounts in our natural diets, phenylalanine, aspartic acid, and methanol.
The amounts of these digestion products are much lower than those obtained from many other natural dietary sources.3,25 For example, the amount of methanol in tomato juice is 6 times greater than that derived from aspartame in diet cola.25 The amino acids aspartate (ie, anion of aspartic acid) and phenylalanine are very common in the diet, found in foods such as lean protein, beans, and dairy, with 100 g of chicken providing an almost 40 times greater intake of aspartate and a 12.5 greater intake of phenylalanine than a diet soda.25 In the body, the 3 digestion products follow their normal metabolic pathways, being broken down further, taken up by tissues in the body, or excreted. Thus, due to the rapid digestion of aspartame in the gastrointestinal lumen and small intestinal mucosal cells before reaching the bloodstream, the intact aspartame molecule is never present in internal tissues in the body or breast milk.3,25,28 The absence of aspartame in the breast milk of lactating women consuming aspartame was recently confirmed.21
I am a founder of a startup (Octant - a16z backed) that has a small & growing software engineering and data science team (see the Nov who's hiring post). Some thoughts on some of the discussion here:
1. Compensation – In academia, you will likely take a big salary hit (much of this is discussed). There are a few exceptions like newer institutes like Chan Zuckerberg, Arc Institute, etc that are paying much more competitive salaries though. In well-backed startups and larger biotech/pharma, cash is likely equal (or often more) to software comps elsewhere – the bigger hit you take is usually in equity – no one has been able to match FAANG on total comp with RSUs in the mix. Startups can provide options, but it's not very fungible. For example, we benchmark salary on comparable A16Z pre-public non-bio companies use as well as stats from the broader SV SWE salary datasets. There are startups in bio that pay even higher to lure talent.
2. Research vs Product – Over the last decade, there are a bunch of highly profitable tech companies and large funded new startups (e.g., Calico, Altos, Deepmind, etc) trying to take on bio as the next frontier. These places (like those named in the blog post) pay very competitively. Thus far, these places often turn into a big mess because it becomes hard to deliver products (like drugs) in a mostly academic-y atmosphere. I don't think anyone has really cracked this nut yet (or if it's even possible).
2. Culture of SW importance – In a lot of startups these days, this has changed quite a bit over the last 5 years. Lots of software & data science first startups. I think in the larger pharma/biotech though, the centrality of drug discovery takes a lot more oxygen than software, which are often thought of as innovation bets and different places have different levels of long term commitment.
3. I think one important difference is the type of company. There are many software companies in healthcare/bio that are software products supporting R&D, healthcare, drug development etc. Many of them have done quite well (e.g., Benchling, Komodo Health etc in A16Z portfolio alone) and are basically just software companies that just happen to be in bio. There are many others like most drug discovery companies (like us) where software and data science is enabling, but the product is often ultimately drugs. For a lot of SWEs, this becomes problematic because people often want the satisfaction of having externally deployed software products to push into the world. The heroes and heroines of this world are often drug hunters over tool developers, and this has cultural consequences as well. Some people are really good with this (getting a lot of satisfaction out of enabling new drugs to treat serious disease), but a lot of folks aren't.
4. The current biotech crash has been bigger and more sustained than the tech crash thus far. High interest rates impact this industry much more than others, because revenue on new drugs, which drive a large part of the industry usually take a decade or more to develop before revenues are flowing. This is less of an issue in healthtech companies that can often deploy much more quickly (90% of healthcare costs are not drugs).
5. Finally, there are many happy SWEs and DS in bio at companies that value software and can build good careers in it building products that ultimately help human health in new ways. It's a pretty amazing time in biology, with a suite of new technologies to read, interpret, write, edit, deploy molecules/DNA/cells that are really unlocking many of the mysteries of human diseases. I feel lucky every day we get to continue building in this space.
Octant is a well-backed (Largest investor is A16Z) team of experienced technologists and entrepreneurs at the frontiers of biology, chemistry, and computation. We are developing an integrated platform combining synthetic biology, high throughput chemistry, and modern informatics and software infrastructure to scale discovery of small molecule therapeutics. We are hiring Senior Software and Informatics Engineers to build robust and scalable software and data systems and capitalize on the tremendous volume of data we're producing (see here: https://www.octant.bio/blog-posts/octants-multiplexing-super...).
No biology/chemistry background required! Learn more about our open roles here:
I imagine how hard this must be on you and your family and kudos for having the energy and wherewithal to try to organize. I think there are a few people/places that might be worth reaching out to in order to learn more.
1. AllStripes (https://www.allstripes.com/) -> It might be worth reaching out to them to get put in contact with other foundations that might be working on the same thing.
3. There is a new company called (https://www.vibebio.com/) that are working on helping fundraise for patient communities using DAOs. I think Alok Tayi is one of the founders there.
4. I know there are some tech founders with family members of rare disease that have gone through similar experiences. For example, I think Rohan Seth at clubhouse has one (https://www.lydianaccelerator.org/). They might be good resources to reach out too.
Thank you! Thanks to Ethan and Julia's weekly meetings on clubhouse, I've heard about some of these. Alok's DAO-based funding system seems very promising. I hope that gets traction. I thought I knew more about RareBase, but now I think I'll need to study their site in more depth.
hey halukakin. so very sorry to hear about your kid.
our family experienced something similar when a loved one fell ill and therapeutic options were unavailable. feel free to ping me at [email protected] - happy to connect and see how we can help.
our vision is to realize every cure for every community. rare diseases is where we are starting.
Hi on a side note, I am curious about how did you get to know that your company was mentioned in this thread? Did the OP reach out to you first? Or did you find this comment while reading HN?
Ethan Perlstein uses ethnic stereotypes to market his company. He opportunistically uses rare disease kids to shield against complaints. I would steer clear.
I met with Ethan once to discuss potential drug repurposing avenues. Obviously, I understand he is doing this for profit and I hope his company becomes a unicorn one day. His weekly clubhouse meetings are on par with phd level courses, they feel like information coming out of a firehose. His contribution to the community is incredible.
Very little drug development happens in academia. You are missing all the time, money spent in public and private markets in the biotech ecosystem that Pharma largely is the back end buyer for through off-balance sheet acquisitions/deals. VCs collectively spend tens a billions a year on biotech (~40B this year), and much more in public markets (IPOs and secondary public finances).
In the example you bring up. Moderna raised and spent billions over a decade since it was founded on the 'academic invention', and didn't have a product until their vaccine. The same is true for BioNTech. There was a large chance these companies could have folded, and before the pandemic, most were deeply skeptical.
Yay! Come work with Nicholas, he’s awesome. I’m a cofounder at Octant and feel free to reach out to me as well (dm here or sri@ the same email address). Also, if you are interested in what some of our SWE/ML interns have done over the last couple of years, read some of their blog posts here:
Jesse Bloom of the Hutch is giving a talk tomorrow on the functional consequences and antibody escape about escape mutations in SARS-CoV-2; these are his slides. The talk tomorrow at HHMO can be found here: http://janelia.org/scienceofcovid19
For the last twenty years I thought things would eventually just come back to center. I’m not sure anymore. It’s possible it’s as follows: One side will win. History will be written by those winners. Pick your side and fight for it?
This is the fight we are being led into but there is another way. Compromise and working together. Truth be told it would be the best for both sides, and both sides are equally as guilty in not achieving it.
I think this is true, and I think this is also the historically precedented answer. The partisanship in Europe in the early 20th century was not resolved by debate or belief, it was resolved by war and more generally political realignment. The vast divide between capitalism and communism was resolved by cold "war," by two superpowers aligning one with each and declaring the opposing ideology a security threat and then trying to starve out the other.
I think we can avoid another major war, but I don't think we can avoid one ideology winning and one losing.
People have used electron diffraction using cryo-em scopes to do sub-angstrom resolution. For example, my colleague Jose Rodridguez published this a few years ago.
The amounts of these digestion products are much lower than those obtained from many other natural dietary sources.3,25 For example, the amount of methanol in tomato juice is 6 times greater than that derived from aspartame in diet cola.25 The amino acids aspartate (ie, anion of aspartic acid) and phenylalanine are very common in the diet, found in foods such as lean protein, beans, and dairy, with 100 g of chicken providing an almost 40 times greater intake of aspartate and a 12.5 greater intake of phenylalanine than a diet soda.25 In the body, the 3 digestion products follow their normal metabolic pathways, being broken down further, taken up by tissues in the body, or excreted. Thus, due to the rapid digestion of aspartame in the gastrointestinal lumen and small intestinal mucosal cells before reaching the bloodstream, the intact aspartame molecule is never present in internal tissues in the body or breast milk.3,25,28 The absence of aspartame in the breast milk of lactating women consuming aspartame was recently confirmed.21
https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/74/11/670/...