Had an inflection point in my side business this week, as we started phase 2 of our drug discovery program (and actually started getting some hits!). I'm itching to get away from my day job, but that wholly depends on some additional funding coming through. Have some irons in that fire, but nothing solid yet. The biotech funding situation is shaky right now anyway, so there's no harm in biding my time while I can. Either way it's exciting, and I'm getting closer and closer of realizing what seemed like a pipe dream until very recently.
Back in 2018 Forever Labs filed a patent to concentrate extracellular vesicles (EV's) from blood, most notably exosomes. The patent sat on the shelf but in 2020 the clinics we work with had to stop performing stem cell banking procedures due to the lockdowns. We had a team, largely sitting on our hands. Plus, the ugly truth was that the banking business, as cool and important as it was/is, wasn't scaling. It's tough to convince someone to stick a needle into their hip and suck out their bone marrow. So, we blew the dust off of the EV patent. We ran studies in the lab and had them validated by outside labs and it turned out that we could concentrate trillions of exosomes from blood and add them to platelet rich plasma treatments (PRP). The team in the lab started calling it a, "Super Shot," and the name stuck. We knew it worked in the lab, but that's a whole lot different than it working in the clinic. We were initially focused on orthobiologic treatments, knees, shoulders, tendons etc. But we became aware that PRP was being used to treat hair loss. We enlisted the National Hair loss Medical Academy to run two studies, one in men and one in women. We saw a 100% response rate. Far greater than standard PRP. We ran a 6 month study in ortho and found that SuperShot accelerated healing and the gains made lasted longer. In short, there is THERE there. The product works. We have secured product distribution in both ortho and aesthetics. We negotiated and were able to get our aesthetics distributor to commit to pay for 40% of the FDA 510k process. We anticipate 510k clearance in 6-8 months, perhaps sooner. The unit ecomoniccs are amazing. I'm pretty excited. It's a lot more fun running a company that sells a product that people can use immediately and that has product-market-fit. The doctors love it. We will still keep the stem cell banking company running, but we believe it's SuperShot that will give our investors the return they signed up for. Aside: I'm going to Brazil in December to see McCartney. Taking my best pal from childhood, another Beatles fanatic. I'm excited. Hope everyone is well. Onward! -TNG
That's awesome! Great to hear the success :) Regarding the Beatles, how did you feel about Now and Then? It felt to me too muddy and repetitive. Very much a mishmash of each Beatle's post Beatles solo career. But not in a good way.
Thank you! I think that's actually a pretty good synopsis of how it sounds. None of the re-vamped songs, including, "Free as a Bird," sound like the Beatles. That said, I listened to Now and Then with no anticipation of greatness. I find it to be a pleasant tune. It's popped into my head a few times this past week. It's a good track, not great. I'm glad it exists though.
I just listened to, “now and then,” again and I have to say, I think it’s actually a really good tune. Melancholy and hopeful all at once. Maybe it doesn’t sound like the Beatles we knew, but it’s the closest to what, I can only guess, the Beatles would have sounded like had they regrouped in 2023. It’ still has that Lennon/McCartney yin/yang, sweet/sour thing going on. I dig it. It’s growing on me.
I came across this article yesterday after hearing that the CEO mentioned has officially resigned. I don't know any of the people, but the words "toxic culture" will always have me interested. Reading through it I had to stop, send it to my colleague and ask "Is this what we dealt with?" regarding our former manager. Examples: “That’s a typical example of behaviours of, say one thing, formally write down another,” he said. Yep. “She’d say, ‘I want you to do A, B and C, please’. And so you do it, then the next week she’d go, ‘No, no, no. I ask for D, E and F’.” Oh yep. It's like I was there. In my previous role, we had to manage up to such an extent we'd convince our manager that any idea was hers. We'd plant the right seeds at the right time so she'd come to the same conclusion we came to months earlier, and only then she'd allow something to happen. Fuck, we became some manipulative people. Turning up 20 minutes early to meetings, to plan how to approach the entire conversation - and it was just a weekly check-in! She finished up last week, I got invited to the leaving drinks and it'd be weirder to not turn up. So I was there with my former colleagues and I could see the tension start to ease as she made her farewell speech; knowing she'd not be back in the office the next day. Anyway they're picking up the pieces and seeing if people are willing to return. People like myself. But I can't. I enjoy my new job too much and also fuck that noise - not even for the money they'd offer. Eyes forward and all that. I finally got a copy of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. Looking forward to tucking into it."One senior leader described having a meeting with George, where they made crucial decisions about an upcoming project, only to be sent an email summary 30 minutes later that wasn’t representative of the things the pair had agreed upon.
Another person said they experienced similar confusing behaviour.
Another person spoke about having “meetings before meetings” to figure out “how to not get attacked” or to get something over the line.
https://i.imgur.com/WHMZ8JF.mp4 The FrankenKern has two spindles. One of them is a $50k ISO20 grinding spindle from Fischer SFJ. It runs at 20k RPM and takes whatever tools fit in an ISO20 tool holder. The other is a $4k 1/8" PCB cutter from NSK. It runs at 50k RPM and takes anything on a 1/8" shank. It'll have three spindles but that's another story. The crazy-expensive grinding spindle clamp is 60mm, to fit a 60mm Fischer SFJ. The NSK is 50mm. Not only that the digging end of the Fischer protrudes about 50mm more than the NSK would like to. So I basically need a 75mm sleeve with set screws in it, that's 60mm on the outside and 50mm on the inside, preferably as straight as possible (both spindles have a runout of 1 micron or less). Paging McMaster-Carr The unpleasant discovery, though, is that your magic $50 McMaster drill bushing is Rockwell 61. As in, "will burnish your cheap shitty Chinese Amazon drill bits to a shiny bluntness" even before you acknowledge that you're trying to drill a curved surface with a 40-year-old drill press. So you wander into Western Tool, as one does, and say "I need to drill and tap some 3mm holes in this" and they look at it and they look at you and they hem and haw and you say "and it's 1144 so my understanding is you can't anneal it, drill it, tap it and re-temper it" and they go "hmmm" and they get on the phone with drill manufacturers and they come back and say "so we've got $10 bits that are rated to Rockwell 45, I can get you this one that's rated to Rockwell 80, good luck with the tapping, you're better off thread milling it" and you sit there going "where the hell am I going to find a machine with enough precision and rigidity to thread mill a 3mm hole" and then you mentally stare at the camera like the monkey kid in Jumanji. BUT You also decide to look up the thermal expansion coefficient of 1144 and recognize that at the circumference you're working with you get about a micron per degree c and the difference between 0.0015" shim stock and 0.0020" shim stock is 75 degrees and it's already got between 0.003" and 0.0035" clearance so you get yourself about $10 worth of stainless steel shim stock of Amazon and put your drill bushing in the oven and decide to write a pubski post about it while you wait for it to heat up for a second time because yes indeedy, a 0.004" feeler gage will totally fit between a bushing at 350 and a spindle at 40 and when that thing tightens down? It's gonna take a blowtorch to get it off again prolly. Wish me luck. EDIT: well that was just this side of catastrophe. Thermal expansion of 1144 is 11.5 microns per minute. Thermal expansion of 303 is 17.2 which means I had time to get it partway on before it locked up like the 405 on the day before Thanksgiving a good inch away from anywhere useful. Some judicious blowtorching some gentle persuasion via claw hammer and we again have four parts but I'm thinkin' (A) 1 shim is enough (B) we're gonna let that spindle hang out in the freezer overnight.
This past weekend we went to a Make Your Own Chai workshop at a tea festival. Mine was a mix of black tea and rooibos with spices including black pepper, cardamom, cinnamon, orange, and nutmeg. It's actually quite delicious. I named it Chai Chai Slide. which while a good name, isn't as good as the person next to me who named theirs "Don't knock it 'till you Chai it"
That's a fantastic name, don't chaide yourself over not picking something perfect
I can't get another account I have here, Web_Rand, approved.
Does anyone have an invite code for BlueSky they can send my way?