Building in healthcare, tech, & retail. Sculpture nerd. Helping scientists at CU Health. Fmr: Founder @ Toggle Health, Humana, Walgreens, Target, LaunchBlueKY
Louisville, KY
Joined November 2009
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I don't know about cooked. This sounds like big pharma's dream. They acquire most of their innovations anyway. This gives them more stuff to acquire
🚨BREAKING: Anthropic just showed what Claude did inside 6 drug companies
>3 months of regulatory writing done in 4 hours
>~35,000 antibody designs in a month
>human review time cut 89%
>a cancer therapy part made 70% shorter, worked BETTER in lab tests
also bought a one person company that took a muscular dystrophy drug from idea to mice in under 18 months
big pharma is cooked
Jake Miller retweeted
Surprise 1: Anthropic acquired a one-person biotech
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.
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Surprise 2: that person is me
Surprise 3: I’m here to tell you all about it
Yes, this is what you think it is; after 6 yrs of increasingly loose anonymity: the Professor Oak reveal post
…and yes, it has gotten so boring around here that I’m literally doxxing myself to spice up the timeline
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Ok, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cody Tranbarger. I mostly tweet, but occasionally find time to dabble in drug dev & starting/building biotechs. My past lives span the VC, crossover, startup continuum; Prof Oak has been my way of keeping a digital foot in those worlds, despite having my physical feet planted elsewhere.
The past 18 mo, ‘elsewhere’ was Mithril Medicine, a co. I founded to develop bsAbs for LAMA2-CMD & other ECM-related genetic diseases.
Mithril was born out of hands-on building with @MikeNGladstone, @JasonPaulRhodes, @LifeSciVC, & team @atlasventure. Somehow, I made enough half-decent calls along the way (even a broken clock is right twice a day, eh?) to convince them Mithril/I warranted a small seed. While I can hardly rationalize such an outrageously cavalier bet, I’m grateful for it, & I'd partner with Atlas again in a heartbeat.
In typical AV fashion, Mithril’s primordial form was virtual, decentralized, & ultra-lean. This stage tends to be short-lived, but for Mithril, it worked surprisingly well, for surprisingly long, thanks in part to the rapid maturation of the AI tools I used liberally.
Eventually, Mithril became a bit of an experiment itself - to find the upper bound of how far it could scale as a single operator + a bunch of Claude (+ a stellar bench of part-time consultants).
In parallel, I started spending time with @nc_frey, @an1lam, & @CoefficientBio team; and promptly experienced, for the 1st time, AI at the frontier. Soon thereafter, Mithril stopped looking like an experiment, & started looking like a preview of an entirely new operating model.
From that spark came “Pipeline-in-a-Person.” The idea immediately resonated when we shared it here back in April; and it was central to the shared vision that led to Anthropic’s acquisition of Mithril, & my joining the team.
Why join Anthropic? Three reasons.
(1) For Mithril, the programs continue, with more resources & infrastructure behind them, and as much Claude as I can put to work.
(2) For me, the chance to start several more programs, & find out how many one person can actually run in parallel - an almost unprecedented luxury for a curious drug hunter.
(3) For our mission, a path to institutionalize & scale this new way of working, then put it in the hands of all of biopharma, all over the world - which, candidly, I find the most energizing.
Will AI x Bio cure diseases? Unequivocally yes, imo… but not by the route that gets the most airtime. Rather than timeline acceleration & compression, I see orchestration & parallelization as today's low-hanging fruit.
Most drug hunters see a handful of go/no-go calls in a career, & spend entirely too much of the rest trading emails (my inbox can attest).
Give them the bandwidth to run several programs at once, and the time to focus on scientific judgment, and I’m willing to bet they’ll make better calls. And at scale, better calls translate to more drugs, higher hit rates, broader patient impact, & likely, a disease or 10 or 100 cured. I couldn't be more excited to build toward that future @AnthropicAI.
Finally, a heartfelt thank you to BioTwitter/X. The end of anonymity is bittersweet, but if anyone’s earned a proper introduction, you all have.
It’s difficult to overstate how much this app has done for me: a decade of education, plenty of friends, many job opportunities, several mentors, a few investors, even a co-founder (fmr). It was the generosity of this community that inspired me to start posting 6 years ago, after just as many years lurking. I hope I’ve been able to pay it forward, in my own small way.
But, to be clear, Prof Oak isn’t going anywhere. Same beat, same themes, and now, a front-row seat to drug development at the frontier. Stay tuned for dispatches from the trenches; and remember...
Gotta Cure 'Em All
I think Noah is right. Social media amplifies the "humans who are behaving badly" so people's perception of our fellow humans have plummeted
And thankfully chickens aren't one of the intelligent dinosaurs or else I would feel guilty about eating them
It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi film: A lineage of dinosaurs survives the asteroid and evolves ultra-high intelligence.
But that's exactly what happened. Birds are literally dinosaurs. And some birds have primate-level cognitive abilities.
stevestewartwilliams.com/p/t…
Jake Miller retweeted
My husband has used AI agents to revive old fonts, ornaments, & cuts from 19th century newspapers. The agents even built an editor where you can create your own invitations/pamphlets/cards using old cuts & fonts. Have been using it for @Quillette invitations already
font-revival.com/
So it wasn't our phones listening to us, but actually our smart TVs?
If you've ever wondered why smart TVs are so cheap, this is why.
@log4j rooted his Samsung and found an always-on hot mic, automatic content recognition, geolocation, network mapping, ad targeting and user profiling, shared with Samsung's "400 partners".
A lot of it can be blocked in <15 min, wrote a basic guide below.
What your TV is doing
The main culprit is ACR (automatic content recognition). Your TV screenshots what's on screen, fingerprints it, and sends it home to build your ad profile. Samsung does it every 500ms, LG every 10ms [1].
What is insane: it happens on connected devices too.
Plug in your laptop, your console, your work machine, and your TV can fingerprint that via HDMI [1].
He also found that if your Samsung doesn't have a mic, it'll look for one from a connected soundbar or bluetooth device.
teapaw.org/log4j/status/211376224…
It's on by default, and you likely agreed to it on the setup screen you clicked through in 10 seconds.
Step 1: Turn off ACR
Samsung: Terms & Privacy → Viewing Information Services
LG: Live Plus
Vizio: Viewing Data
Roku: "Use info from TV inputs"
Sony/Google TV: Samba Interactive TV
Menus vary by model, but those are the names to look for. While you're in there, opt out of interest-based ads, reset your advertising ID, decline every optional privacy agreement, turn off voice recognition, and delete apps you never open.
Step 2: Give smart devices their own network
Put the TV, cameras, speakers and vacuum on your router's guest/IoT network. The logic is simple: these devices rarely get patched. If one gets compromised (getting drastically more frequent with AI), it shouldn't be able to see your other devices or home network.
Step 3: Block trackers for the whole house with DNS-level filtering
NextDNS (cloud-based) is easy and has a solid free plan. Pi-hole is a little bit more work if you prefer self hosting. For simplicity we'll focus on the former.
1. Sign up at nextdns.io (free tier is plenty)
2. Privacy tab: add a blocklist (OISD is a good bet) and turn on Native Tracking Protection for Samsung, LG, Roku, Amazon (see attached image)
3. Setup tab: copy your endpoint
4. Paste it into your router's DNS settings as DNS-over-HTTPS/TLS (or use the IPs + "Link IP" if your router only does plain DNS)
5. Bonus: block outbound port 53 except to your router. Some devices hardcode their own DNS to get around you
Then open the NextDNS logs and watch how often your TV phones home. It's eye-opening. If an app or update breaks, find the domain in the logs and allowlist it.
Why they do this
TV prices are down 97% since 2000 [2]. Most of that is better manufacturing and brutal competition. But once margins on the hardware hit zero, the cost moved to you.
In Q3 2024, Vizio lost $6.7M selling TVs and made $115.8M in gross profit from ads and viewing data [3]. They've said on earnings calls that they keep TV prices low to grow the audience they sell to advertisers. Walmart bought them in 2024.
This isn't a conspiracy theory either. Vizio paid $2.2M to the FTC in 2017 for tracking 11 million TVs without consent. Last December, Texas sued Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL over ACR. Samsung and LG have since agreed to stop collecting that data without explicit consent [4].
TL;DR
1. ACR off
2. Ads + voice off
3. Smart devices on their own network
4. NextDNS filtering on the router
Sources:
[1] ACR study: arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203
[2] Cost of US consumer goods: aei.org/economics/chart-of-t…
[3] Vizio Q3 2024: sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/…
[4] Texas v. Samsung: texasattorneygeneral.gov/new…
I get that "why am I watching this weird AI commercial" feeling every time I see Elizabeth Holmes speak
Jake Miller retweeted
Wow… The Babies are No Longer Protected Against Measles
Moms antibodies used to give 6-9 months of Ab protection to infants
Now, protection is gone by ~4 months
Neutralizing Ab titers = 0 by 6m
And… if we give MMR early to fill the gap it can drive a long-term problem
1/
Jake Miller retweeted
Two routes to $10 billion
"The vertical axis is my best estimate of net revenue per patient-year. The horizontal axis: the patient-years that estimate implies (sales ÷ price). Each point shows one assumption twice. Shaded bars are my price ranges. Each dashed diagonal is one level of annual sales; everything on a line earns the same."
positioningpharmaceuticals.s…
I love this quote, but I also have an irrational fear that the bowling ball will just show up somehow if I do this
"They’re claiming that believing something enough causes it to happen without you having to take any action. So for anyone who believes this, I really want you to, every morning, believe as hard as you can that there’s a bowling ball in your freezer, and just do it every morning until you no longer believe this works."
~@SpencrGreenberg
Jake Miller retweeted
Where did 2025’s 30 best-selling medicines actually come from? Industry made more of the molecules than the “pharma just buys innovation” story suggests, but 28 of the 30 rest on biology first found in academic labs. Where a molecule starts tells you surprisingly little. Maybe an interesting set-up for AI and the next 15 years...
asymmetriclearning.substack.…
Jake Miller retweeted
So good
Security called me at 6:12 AM today.
"Patch every PHP server immediately."
I asked what happened.
"Two critical vulnerabilities. Remote code execution. No authentication required."
Cool.
How many PHP servers do we have?
According to inventory: 12
According to reality:
Nobody knows.
We found one running WordPress.
Three running old internal tools.
One under someone's desk.
Two inside vendor appliances.
A forgotten employee directory from 2016.
And a server named:
PHP-OLD-DO-NOT-TOUCH
Naturally, that one runs payroll exports.
Then we found a PHP 5.6 box.
I asked who owned it.
The documentation said:
BRIAN.
Brian left in 2019.
We called Brian.
He said:
"Oh wow, that's still running?"
Excellent.
By 8 AM, leadership joined the incident call.
CEO:
"Can hackers actually get in?"
Security:
"Potentially yes."
CEO:
"Without a password?"
Security:
"Yes."
CEO:
"Then why do WE need passwords?"
Not the lesson.
Finance asked if we could wait until the weekend to patch because downtime affects revenue.
Security explained that the alternative was letting strangers execute code on our servers.
Finance asked for a cost comparison.
At 9:17, someone suggested temporarily taking the vulnerable websites offline.
Marketing refused.
"Our campaign is live."
So for the next hour, the company officially decided maintaining a landing page for 20% off webinar registration was more important than preventing remote server takeover.
We finally patched everything we could find.
Then our scanner discovered another PHP server.
Hostname:
TEMP-PHP-2014
Uptime:
4,512 days.
Nobody knows what it does.
Nobody owns it.
Nobody can shut it down.
But every time we block network access, the warehouse stops printing shipping labels.
Security has classified it as critical infrastructure.
It is running PHP 5.4.
The vulnerability has existed longer than half our employees.
The emergency patch took four hours.
Finding out what PHP actually runs took eleven.
The internet isn't held together with code.
It's held together with servers everyone is afraid to turn off.
Beautiful essay on what it means for humans to be the children of dancers and how AI allows everyone, not just those in college, to have the equivalent of stoned dorm-room conversations
Jake Miller retweeted
Toddlers, it turns out, are tiny altruists: They’re happier giving treats away than receiving them... suggestive evidence that human altruism is driven by the inbuilt emotional rewards of lending a helping hand.
stevestewartwilliams.com/p/e…
Same in start-ups vs large orgs:
"But it does make me wonder why, in some situations, a team comes together almost seamlessly, everyone gets the information they need, and the plan moves forward quickly. And in others, it feels like pulling teeth to get everyone moving in the same direction."
I think many of us who work in clinical environments where emergencies are common have had this experience: you’ve assessed a situation, developed a plan, and some part of that plan needs to be carried out by others. Those people arrive at the bedside, and suddenly you find yourself having to revisit the events and decisions that led to that plan.
I try to take my ego out of these situations. The people coming to help have their own informational needs. They may have important questions or perspectives that haven’t been considered.
But it does make me wonder why, in some situations, a team comes together almost seamlessly, everyone gets the information they need, and the plan moves forward quickly. And in others, it feels like pulling teeth to get everyone moving in the same direction.
I think a lot of it comes down to trust.
Particularly in large medical centers, so many of us are pulled in different directions that it’s difficult to build a core group of people who know and trust one another’s clinical judgment. We’re often working with people we barely know, sometimes meeting for the first time in the middle of a crisis. Without that established trust, even getting everyone on the same page can be difficult, creating tension and sometimes unnecessary delays.
I think back to residency, when I worked with a relatively consistent group of colleagues. There were people I trusted implicitly, and who trusted me. That didn’t mean we didn’t question one another. But there was something reassuring about walking into a room knowing we could work together and move quickly because that trust was already there.
I don’t know that there’s an easy fix, but it makes me think about how we build that kind of rapport and trust when we’re so often working with unfamiliar colleagues, under enormous pressure. It doesn’t feel as easy as it used to be.