Mackenzie Morehead

The Failures and Futures of Cancer Vaccines

The cancer vaccine field has yet to become a systematic science despite decades of work and a steadily rising number of clinical trials since the first clinical PoC a decade ago.  A core problem facing cancer vaccine development lies in the nature of neoantigens themselves. In infectious diseases, the antigenic

Towards Material Abundance

The ages of man are named and defined by materials from the stone age onward. Solving each of humanity’s core problems from energy to climate to compute requires radical materials innovations. Here are a few of the world-changing materials we at Compound are excited about: * Reducing PEM electrolyzers'

Dozens of Nobel-Worthy Innovations Awaiting Biomanufacturing 2.0

Many thoughtful breakdowns of Synbio 1.0 have pointed to poor product selection, the difficulty of addressing commodity markets on a venture timeframe and of retaining the data value from horizontal platforms. We at Compound feel each of those lessons ought to be internalized but that of equal if not

Putting Cryptography Back in Crypto

We’re entering an era in which you can probe a black box and an answer comes out that’s cryptographically guaranteed to be correct without revealing why it’s true – all the computation remains completely private.  Cryptography's in the midst of a zero to one moment; a

Autonomous Science Part I: Everything’s an API Away

What would you build assuming AGI is a few years away?  A system capable of autonomously conducting novel science is at or near the top of our list. After investing in and studying the field for several years, we believe now is finally the time to work towards that future

Biochemical Wearables, Ingestibles, Implantables: In Between a FitBit and CAR-T Therapy

Innovation outside of pharmaceuticals has gone relatively underappreciated by biotech VCs and the market. In fact, the single greatest biotech success story for a startup founded over the last several decades has nothing to do with therapeutics. That honor goes to Intuitive Surgical which developed surgical robotics all the way

Part II: The Biosecurity Solution Space and Potential for Venture-Scale Businesses

In our prior 18+ months of research within biosecurity we have continued to build a framework for how venture-scale businesses could exist to address this impending and underappreciated problem space. In Part I, we detailed why a cutting edge biosecurity firm should rise to meet the threat we face from

Compute Moonshots: Harnessing New Physics

The digital computing domain is reaching relative maturity, with traditional electronics well into the final phase of their S-curve and GPUs in the middle of theirs. At the same time, demand for compute shows absolutely no sign of slowing, with AI workloads & other HPC going parabolic followed by desired

Neural Net Potentials: Near Frontier and Implications

While the entire world continues to look at transformers as the holy grail for all industries, we continue to believe that other novel computational approaches could prove as crucial in a variety of industries. This has led us to deeply observing Neural Network Potentials.  Modern NNPs are to molecular modeling

Part I: Why Biosecurity Matters – What are We Protecting Against?

Pandemics have killed an estimated 230-400M people in modern human history, with COVID killing an estimated 27M in four years. The Bubonic plague wiped out 17-22% of humanity off the face of the earth while the Columbian Exchange wiped out 90% of exposed native populations. Indeed, the death toll from

Is Attention All You Need?

Given the ease with which Transformers generalize, scale, and their efficiency on existing hardware, they have become the dominant architecture over the last ~7 years, achieving SoTA in most applications. That’s more true now than ever given that most of the researchers and developers are working on them, all

Textiles, Beauty Products, & Home Goods (The Century of Biology: Part II.VI)

A parallel evolution to that changing how the products listed above are made is happening with consumer products. These efforts are also being made to reduce emissions and transition away from oil- and animal-derived products. After all, our current faux leathers called “pleather” are made with plastics. Alongside these reasons,

Circular Plastics: Designing Our Tupperware as Mother Nature Would (The Century of Biology: Part II.V)

Since the invention of plastics a century ago, they’ve become absolutely ubiquitous – you interact with them hundreds of times every day in every component of your life. Why? Well, they’re among the greatest products ever invented. They’re dirt cheap, perfectly uniform, lightweight, can be flexible and / or

Sustainable Fuels & Chemicals (The Century of Biology: Part II.IV)

The nearly $10 trillion chemicals and fuels industries dig up hydrocarbons and then turn them into nearly every physical good we use in our day to day lives from plastic to laundry detergent to running shoes to fertilizers. Efforts to de-carbonize these industries have attracted tens of billions of dollars

Food & Drinks: Soon to be High Tech Goods (The Century of Biology: Part II.III)

Over the next several decades, world food demand is expected to rise by 50%, and demand for animal products by at least 70%. Said another way, every year for decades, we need to feed ~60 million more people. And, as the world becomes wealthier, its citizens demand more meat. Just

Part II.II Addendum: Pharmaceutical Biomanufacturing Scope & Scale

How do you manufacture biological drugs like mRNA vaccines and cell therapies? In big metal vats. The global capacity of such vats is estimated to be over 17 million liters across 1.6 thousand facilities, with two-thirds of that concentrated in America and Europe. Here’s some key trends within

Programmable Medicine: Entire Cells as Therapies (The Century of Biology: Part II.II)

Cells, by nature, are extraordinarily programmable. They can be directed to differentiate from embryonic stem cells into any one of our body’s hundreds of cell types, to recognize and respond to various stimuli, to communicate with one another, among others. Scientists have made tremendous progress towards harnessing cells’ capacity

Programming the Code Your Cells Execute: RNA & Gene Therapies (Century of Biology: Part II.I)

As said in Part I, DNA is like the master file to your body; changes to it are permanent and will affect all cells its host cell divides into. As such, it stays firmly put in the nucleus, safeguarded like the safe in a casino. Every cell in your body

Introduction to Part II: Program, Control, and Create

Read next section: RNA & gene therapies

Artificial Intelligence: The Only Intelligence Capable of Making Sense of the Massive Datasets Generated from the Tools Above (The Century of Biology: Part I.VI)

“At its most fundamental level, I think biology can be thought of as an information processing system, albeit an extraordinarily complex and dynamic one. Taking this perspective implies there may be a common underlying structure between biology and information science - an isomorphic mapping between the two - hence the

Organ-on-a-Chip: Simulating Human Biology at Scale (The Century of Biology: Part I.V)

The rate of progress towards curing a given disease is a function of how quickly scientists can run experiments. Currently, it takes 10+ years to reach a definitive answer on whether or not a drug addresses an issue in human beings. Compare that to a tech startup, which is constantly

Collecting Data from Patients with Advanced Diagnostics Tests and Continuous Health Monitoring (The Century of Biology: Part I.IV)

Continuous health monitoring devices embedded in everything from your watch to bed to toilet will track your heart rate, temperature, exercise level, sleep, microbiome, etc. to get a complete picture of what you look like in a healthy state on a day-to-day basis, while also remaining continually vigilant for the

Visualizing Biology with Microscopy (The Century of Biology: Part I.III)

Since their invention in the late 16th Century, microscopes have been one of the quintessential instruments of the biological sciences. When you imagine a white lab coat biologist, chances are you think of them stooped over a microscope looking at a sample of cells. In fact, the invention of the

Omics: Quantifying Cells' Attributes and Activity (The Century of Biology: Part I.II)

“The desirability of having much deeper knowledge about cells has been well recognized for a long time. However, only in the past few years has it begun to seem feasible to undertake the kind of systematic, high-resolution characterization of human cells necessary to create a systematic cell atlas. The key

I.I Addendum: DNA-based data storage

The amount of data generated each year is already outstripping our ability to store it and that gap will only continue to widen, driving needs to explore higher order storage mechanisms. Global data storage capacity of ~7 zettabytes is one-tenth the 64 ZB[1] of data generated in 2020 alone,