Alec Nielsen

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@alectricity

Multicellular in Boston, Co-founder & CEO @AsimovBio

Boston, MA asimov.com Joined April 2009

2.1K Following 4.2K Followers 1.5K Posts

Latest posts 5

Alec Nielsen @alectricity Oct 7

Co-sign

Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc Verified account @SynBio1 Oct 7

In the AI era, I expect to see many new modalities emerge in biotech. These will be therapeutics in unusual shapes and sizes, not the legacy small molecule drugs that our IP laws, tech transfer departments and biopharma term sheets were designed to bring to market.

CRISPR was a practice run. It was an experiment to see how well the existing biotech ecosystem is set up to commercialize new modalities. 14 years after the CRISPR patent wars, it should be seen as a failure and motivate significant reform.

Imo the failure of CRISPR reveals two needs:

1) We need better legal and financial tools for nonexclusive foundational IP licenses. If a new modality has 100 applications, we can't assign exclusive rights to 3 companies who then spend the next decade suing each other.

2) We need better infrastructure for modality-wide safety trials and re-use of clinical data. If a new modality has 100 applications, we shouldn't demand that each use build a new portfolio of clinical evidence from scratch.

I believe the AI era will deliver dozens of CRISPR-scale new medical innovations. Let's not allow the CRISPR fiasco to happen again.

statnews.com/2026/10/07/car…
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Alec Nielsen @alectricity Oct 2

big news for asimov today: we're partnering with lonza on in vivo lentiviral vector manufacturing. i'm pretty excited about this one for a lot of reasons.

ex vivo CAR-T has now treated tens of thousands of patients, and many of them have been cured of their cancer. but it requires extracting and engineering human cells outside the body, which means every dose is its own batch. it's an impressive manufacturing effort, but it's hard to scale.

in vivo approaches skip the cell extraction step. you dose the gene delivery vector directly into the patient, and it engineers the target cells inside their body. this means one drug product can serve many patients, but the catch is that the vector is now the actual drug, not just a reagent, so consistency and a well-defined product profile matter a lot more.

traditionally, lentiviral vectors are made by large-scale transient transfection of a production host cell line, which is plagued by scalability and consistency problems. every cell in the bioreactor can receive a different number of plasmids, anywhere from zero to thousands.

stable producer cell lines take a different approach. they're clonal engineered lines with the production genetics integrated into the genome, so no transfection is needed during manufacturing. the whole process starts to look more like antibody manufacturing, which is highly controllable and scalable.

(as an aside, refactoring the lentivirus genome to gain tight control over the multi-step molecular process it encodes is one of the most technically impressive feats i've seen since starting asimov)

we're seeing order of magnitude higher titers and infectivity with our stable producer systems compared to transient transfection. with lonza, we're pairing that with their process development, analytics, and GMP manufacturing expertise to support drug developers.

we think in vivo cell and gene therapies are the future, and that they'll bring many more drugs to patients in the years to come.

Asimov Verified account @AsimovBio Oct 2

Today we are announcing a strategic collaboration with @LonzaGroup to advance in vivo lentiviral vector manufacturing.

In vivo lentiviral therapies turn the vector from a manufacturing reagent into the drug itself, raising the bar for titer, product quality, and scale. While traditional transient production systems limit scalability and consistency, stable cell lines have the potential to enable scalable, reproducible and controlled product profiles for lentiviral vectors.

To provide developers with a scalable path from sequence to clinic, we’re bringing together Asimov’s LV Edge stable cell lines with Lonza’s expertise in process development, scale-up, analytics and GMP manufacturing. By connecting early design decisions with development and manufacturing considerations, we are creating a stronger foundation for clinical and commercial production.

Learn more here: asimov.com/news/lonza-and…
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Alec Nielsen @alectricity Sep 22

I love living in the future

Erika Alden DeBenedictis Verified account @erika_alden_d Sep 22

Today, Pioneer Labs is announcing our first step towards terraforming Mars. 🚀🌼

With equipment that fits in just a single rocket launch, we can convert Martian dirt, water, and air into enough building materials to construct a small city on Mars.

To do it, we made the first microbe for Mars. We found the best microbe on Earth and used evolution to teach it how to source all of its nutrients directly from Martian materials.

The first astronauts will be greeted with safe shelter already filled with water, oxygen, and rocket fuel for the return journey.

This is the first step toward using biology to make Mars a friendly place for life. It lets us live off the land and helps us build the next great frontier.

It's the first of five organisms we need to green Mars ⬇️

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Alec Nielsen @alectricity Sep 19

v1 gene therapy

Crémieux Verified account @cremieuxrecueil Sep 18

But, I'll add: the Romans also made an icosahedron.

If it's related, it changes how we should expect to explain the dodecahedron.

But no one knows what this one was for either!

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Alec Nielsen @alectricity Sep 9

don’t forget you can now safely vortex the shit out of this guy