Comment by antichronology

> finding sequences on NIH

Almost! Yes most of the data is on NIH sub-institutes. For us we take most of the data from NCBI and intelligently pair it together. The training objective of our model takes pairs of sequences (thus the Joint Embedding Architecture) and trains the model to recognize that they are semantically similar but differ in appearance. This is conceptually similar to a lot of the contrastive learning literature from computer vision.

Sounds like a fun side project :)

There are some great tools out there for putting together plasmids for gene therapies where you can plug in different "elements". Promoters UTRs payloads - check out SnapGene I believe they have a free version.

I personally am hopeful that the political headwinds will blow over. When it comes to cancer vaccines it's one of the most exciting new modalities for treating cancer.

1 in 2 Americans are going to get cancer in their lifetime so no matter political affiliation, the need for health will ultimately drive people to invest in the modality.