7 Fascinating Facts About DNA - Sander Wuyts - #19
Sander Wuyts is a bioscience engineer and CEO of ImmuneWatch, a Belgian biotech startup using machine learning to decode the immune system's DNA for pharma and cancer drug development. He holds a PhD in computational microbiology from the University of Antwerp and Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he studied the bacteria in fermented foods using DNA sequencing before completing a postdoc at EMBL Heidelberg on the human microbiome. After his academic career he co-founded ImmuneWatch, which helps pharma and biotech companies understand what the immune system is attacking, whether a cancer cell, a virus, or a bacterium, by reading the DNA of immune cells. In 2018, while still a PhD student, he made international headlines by becoming the first person in the world to crack the Davos DNA Bitcoin Challenge, a three-year-old public puzzle set by EMBL-EBI scientist Nick Goldman at the 2015 World Economic Forum, claiming a Bitcoin worth around 9,500 euros in the process.
Expect to learn how DNA stores biological information using just four nucleotide building blocks, what Gregor Mendel's pea plant experiments revealed about inheritance centuries before DNA was discovered, how the central dogma of molecular biology connects DNA to RNA to proteins, why we still do not fully understand what every part of the human genome encodes, how CRISPR-Cas changed the way scientists edit and study genes, how DNA forensics works and why the falling cost of sequencing transformed criminal investigations, what ancestry testing companies actually measure when they compare your DNA to other populations, why editing tomatoes and editing humans raise very different ethical questions, how Nick Goldman encoded a Bitcoin inside a physical DNA sample and what it took to decode it, why DNA is a theoretically compelling but practically challenging medium for long-term digital data storage, how ImmuneWatch uses DNA readouts and machine learning to reveal what the immune system is targeting in real time, and what DNA origami and aptamers could one day make possible for targeted drug delivery.
Sander Wuyts online:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sander-wuyts [http://linkedin.com/in/sander-wuyts]
Website: sanderwuyts.com [http://sanderwuyts.com]
ImmuneWatch: immunewatch.com [http://immunewatch.com]
0:00 How Sander got interested in DNA
1:00 Gregor Mendel and the origin of genetics
3:30 From chromosomes to the double helix
5:56 DNA as the basis of all life
6:23 The central dogma: DNA, RNA, and proteins
8:05 How four bases store all biological information
11:42 The Human Genome Project
12:34 CRISPR and gene editing tools
15:52 DNA evidence at crime scenes
19:23 Ancestry testing and consumer DNA services
25:47 How much do we actually understand the genome
28:53 Synthetic biology and engineering organisms
30:00 Ethics of human genetic editing and GMOs
35:10 DNA as a digital data storage medium
35:44 The Davos Bitcoin Challenge explained
40:00 How Sander decoded the Bitcoin
43:03 Winning the Bitcoin and what he did with it
47:22 Current state and future of DNA storage
55:17 ImmuneWatch and reading the immune system
59:09 How ImmuneWatch helps pharma and cancer trials
1:01:23 DNA origami, aptamers, and future applications