Today we have published our newest playbook. Catalytic Capital is a practical guide looking at the tools available to help donors deploy capital in ways that absorb risk, improve project economics, and attract additional private investment. Read more here: renaissancephilanthropy.org/… 1/2

This was a big effort, led by Harvard Medical School (@harvardmed, hms.harvard.edu/news/researc…), with FlyWire at Princeton (@PrincetonNeuro). It is the work of 100 authors, the BANC-FlyWire Consortium of proofreaders and citizen scientists. 15/18

Today we're launching Deliverome Bio, a focused research organization tackling one of the biggest bottlenecks in medicine: getting therapeutics to tissues beyond the liver.

Episode 3 of my new podcast features Dr. Jacques Carolan (@JacquesCarolan), a founding Program Director at ARIA (@ARIA_research), the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency. He directs two neurotech programs aimed at one of the most important opportunity spaces: developing tools and systems to interface, at scale, with the human brain. One program is built on the idea that brain disorders are circuit problems, and funds tools to target those circuits with molecular precision across the whole brain. The other aims to deliver high-performance neurotech to the brain non-invasively or at most in a 30-minute outpatient procedure. We dig into the engineering and biology behind both programs, potential scaling unlocks for the field, how ARIA programs drive breakthroughs, Jacques background, the role of media in shaping the future, and much more. I hope you enjoy the conversation! Other links to this episode and references below. Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:22 Why 20 years of neurotech breakthroughs haven't reached patients 00:04:08 The two variables that determine whether any medical technology gets adopted 00:09:17 Brain disorders cost the UK £100B/year and we're barely treating them 00:16:15 Using stem cells and gene therapy to build better brain interfaces 00:21:40 Self-regulating gene therapy that helps the brain quiet its own seizures 00:24:03 The non-technical reasons transformative neurotech fail to reach patients 00:31:34 Watching a 30-second brain ablation stop severe tremors 00:38:11 The case for delivering brain implants and therapies without opening the skull 00:50:56 Why high technical uncertainty makes distributed teams better than vertical integration 01:02:55 Why the UK keeps producing world-class neuroscience but not world-class neurotech companies 01:11:04 What AI-driven hypothesis generation means for breakthroughs per pound 01:20:40 From quantum computing to improv comedy to running £119M government brain programs

🚨 There are 30M legacy medical devices in the US and 6.2 vulnerabilities per device. Our health infrastructure is NOT SECURE. To fix it, we need tools that automate vulnerability detection and remediation at scale. Today, my team is releasing those tools. 🧵

2. @AdamMarblestone & @Andrew_C_Payne on how to map the mammalian brain’s connectome to solve fundamental problems in neuroscience, psychology, and AI robustness: ifp.org/mapping-the-brain-fo…