Artificial intelligence, once called "or trigger the third World War" by Jack Ma, has gradually penetrated into all walks of life. Dyno Therapeutics to keep pace with the times, applying artificial intelligence (AI) to the field of gene therapy. What kind of situation can the combination of the two create?

Bill Gates once said, "Artificial intelligence and gene therapy are the best way to save lives." Dyno has invented a new way to engineer adeno-associated virus (AAV) capsid proteins through machine learning and quantitative high-throughput in vivo experiments. This approach broadens the scope of gene therapy.

Recently, Dyno announced the completion of $0.1 billion A round of financing. The round of financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz, followed by Casdin Capital, GV, Obvious Ventures, Lux Capital and founding investors Polaris Partners, CRV and KdT Ventures. The proceeds from this financing will be used to expand the company's CapsidMap platform.

Dyno's seed round of financing was jointly invested by Polaris Investment (Polaris Partners) and River Ventures(CRV), a US venture capital Charles, for a total of US $9 million.

Driven by "curiosity", George team goes deep into gene therapy

Although AAV vectors have been widely used in gene therapy, there are still many limitations. 50%-70% of the world's population is immune to natural AAV vectors, which prevents most patients from using AAV-based gene therapy. Dyno's goal is to overcome the immunogenicity of AAV vectors and expand the scope of gene therapy.

In 2018, George Church of Harvard Medical School and his team teamed up with original researchers from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden (Karolinska Institute) and Lund University University in Sweden to form Dyno to develop viral capsid modification techniques.

In addition to Dr. George, Dyno's scientific co-founders include Bjorklund Tomas, Eric Kelsic, Alan Crane, Adrian Veres, and Sam Sinai.

Dr. George has multiple identities. He is a professor of genetics at Harvard University in the United States, the dual-material college of the American Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Engineering, the chief director of the Personal Genome Project (PGP), and a member of the first academic advisory committee of Alibaba's "Dharma Academy". Director of the Genome Research Center of Harvard Medical School.

Dr. George is a change maker in several biomedical fields, including genome sequencing, synthetic biology, and genome engineering. He is known in the industry as a "genetics leader", "all-round scientist", "Socrates of contemporary genetic engineering"... In addition to being a scientist, Dr. George also founded about 20 biotechnology companies.

"Curiosity" is a skill that every scientist will light up. As a child, Dr. George would grind tablets into powder and put them in water to compare the growth of tadpoles in medicated and unmedicated water. Plants are also watered with gibberellin-added water in an attempt to make them grow faster and bigger.

During his stay at Duke University, Dr. George, who grew up, missed other courses for the experiment of "X-ray crystallography to study the three-dimensional structure of transfer RNA", which led to the suspension of two subjects and was eventually expelled from Duke University.

However, dropping out of school did not affect Dr. George's pursuit of scientific research. A year later, Dr. George applied for a PhD in molecular biology at Harvard University and was shortlisted. His scientific research career started from this time and slowly reached its peak.

To this day, Dr. George has many achievements, but his curiosity has not been extinguished. "Resurrection mammoth", "dog rejuvenation experiment", "pig organ transplantation" ...... One by one "untrammely" research has appeared in the public eye.

Dr. George has had many honors. In 2008, he was named one of the eight science heroes of the year by New Scientist magazine. In 2011, Dr. George received the Ball Prize and the Franklin Institute Scientific Achievement Award. Dr George is also a popular candidate for the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.