We prefer some people to get cancer, MS, parkinson than to give a virus to people that will get the virus anyway. Many people might volunteer! Indeed, we give so much to associations against cancer, MS, and dementia, but when it comes time to do something about it, it seems no one wants to.
6/6
← Nowadays, no regulatory agency, even less in Europe, would let you do that.
5/6
You could recruit kids, give them the vaccine, and infect them with EBV directly, since you know that almost all of them will be at some point, then check if they get infected or not using sequencing (PCR tests, B-cell antigen sequencing), and accept this as the endpoint of the trial.
4/6
Because you need to recruit tens of thousands of young kids, test them often for infection, and wait decades to see symptoms of other diseases appear in some of them. The statistics are terrible.
But it could be cheap...
3/6
From different cancers, skin diseases, dementia, parkinson and more.
The reason why there is no vaccine yet in 2026 is very interesting.
Basically, it is super expensive. But why is it so?
2/6
Did you know that likely most cases of multiple sclerosis (MS) are driven by the EBV virus (herpes/mononucleosis disease)?
>90% of us get infected in our teens, and some will go on to develop many diseases later in life because of it.
1/6
And then lucky to pursue through an atlas of cells of many types and species, with a focus on quality and diversity mattering more than quantity with @jkobject.com
@cantinilab.bsky.social
Paper: www.biorxiv.org/cont... • Code: github.com/cantinila...
Curious: **what’s the one benchmark you wish every single-cell foundation model reported by default?**
6/6
4. **Generalization:** evaluation on **unseen organisms, tasks, and modalities.** It is also a push to rethink some evaluation of scFM; **SOTA on many tasks**. 🥇 🏃 ⛷️ ⛹️♀️
🎁 If you’re reading papers over the break, I hope this is useful.
5/6
3. **Data + pipeline:** unified **scBaseCount + Tahoe-100M + CELLxGENE**, with consistent preprocessing + weighted random sampling ****(and other practical bits that usually stay hidden) → **350M cells, 16 species, ~300 tissues, ~500 cell types**. 🌍🫁🐭
4/6
1. **Benchmark:** **42 components** of scFMs across a gymnasium of tasks; looking at dataset size, encoding, training, architectures, losses, etc. 📊
2. **Model:** **scPRINT-2** — *small but mighty* with **~20M active parameters**, built from the strongest ingredients we found. 🤖🧬
3/6
After a few years building scFMs (scPRINT, Xpressor, scPRINT-2…), I wanted to do something more “complete” than just shipping a new model: understand what matters, train the best version we can, and stress-test generalization properly.
So this work is a 4-in-1 release:
2/6
🧑🎄🎄 Christmas Foundation Model Release: scPRINT-2
**One-liner:** a **20M-active-param** single-cell foundation model trained on **350M cells / 16 species / 300 tissues / 500 cell types**.
1/6
Thanks to Future4Care, Timothé Cynober, Whitelab Genomics, and Scienta Lab for organizing the event, and to Matteo Marengo, Clara Brouaux, and Gabriel Michaux for helping me manage the round table.
And thanks to my all-star panel: Yann Fleureau, Jeremy Besnard, Sofia Dahoune, and Steven Jerome
It was a blast hosting our Nucleate Inside AI roundtable at the France Techbio 2025 event.
Join us Friday the 4th at the 🇫🇷 France TechBio2025 event!!
www.eventbrite.fr/e/...
3/3
Without double-talk and with amazing panelists🧑🔬:
- Yann Fleureau, CEO, Blossom Life Sci & Founder of Cardiologs
- Steven Jerome, Director, Lead of Hit Discovery, Schrödinger
- Jérémy Besnard, Advisor, InFocusTx & Co-founder of Exsciencia
- Sofia Dahoune, Partner at Daphni
2/3
🌐🧬I am excited to present you a round table I am doing together with Matteo Marengo Gabriel Michaux as part of our emerging Nucleate Parisian chapter led by Clara Brouaux 🔥.
Title: **Inside AI: Choosing the Right Path to Value Creation**
1/3
Next week we will see the first conference where both the main authors and reviewers are LLM Agents!
This might be fun to follow: agents4science.stanf...
👀 🤖
I am presenting my PhD work today at the conference on immuno oncology in Toulouse's CRCT Oncopole!
Happy to talk about how we can use foundation models in the real world 🧬 🧑⚕️
🔷 Alnylam BioVenture Challenge — one day at Alnylam HQ, one shot at $100K in non-dilutive funding. Apply by Oct 17.
And — we’re also recruiting the next generation of Nucleate Leaders. If you’re ready to build biotech and strengthen the community behind it, apply today.
It’s about growth, collaboration, and the chance to give back by lifting others.
Two flagship opportunities are now open:
🔷 Activator 2026
— our equity-free accelerator equipping scientific founders with the tools to launch biotech ventures. Apply by Oct 20.
Proud to be a Nucleate Leader! 🚀
Being a Nucleate Leader means joining a community of peers who step up to shape the future of biotech — leading teams, driving programs, and building ventures that make real impact.
The first 1 million prime numbers vizualized in 2D according to their prime factors (Umap)
Source: johnhw.github.io/uma...
what they sell you, what you get...
If you are launching your biotech / techbio startup in Paris or anywhere else in the world actually, think about applying to Nucleate's Global Activator Program! 🚀 🧬
Many people to meet and things to learn from Researchers, Investors, CEOs and more!
Of course, but you first need the info. Right now it is like driving a car blindfolded...
We then spend hundreds of billions treating what could have been avoided.
Why aren’t we doing this by default?
2/2
