Last quarter in tweets

“Last month in tweets” took a hiatus in the first quarter of 2016, but now it’s back! Why the break? The answer is Y Combinator. On January 4th, PLab was accepted into YC’s Winter 2016 batch. The all-consuming 3-month startup accelerator took precedence over basically everything, including blogging. But with Demo Day in the rearview mirror, let’s recap the goings on at PLab since the new year.

 

A long overdue PERL101 update post is in the offing because we’ve made considerable progress with this lead compound for NPC. This includes a 12-week tolerability study in wildtype mice dosed daily and orally with PERL101. The above data is a snapshot of the full dataset. More to come!

 

PLab was featured in Popular Science in January. Every time an article comes out about PLab, rare disease advocates and patients find out about us for the first time and make contact. It’s inspiring and at the same time sobering to realize how much work needs to be done.

 

While our NPC lead program is nearing the mouse efficacy stage with PERL101, our NGLY1 lead program is still in the primary screening phase. In mid-January Alec and I were retesting hits from a yeast glycosylation modifier screen. In the end 25 hits were validated and advanced to NGLY1 flies for further testing.

 

World Rare Disease Day 2016 was last month. Throughout February, there was buzz and interest around rare diseases, including the above mathematically inspired post by Professor Melissa Wilson Sayres at ASU.

 

Fellow YC W16 batchmate OpenTrons stopped by PLab to demo their personalized liquid handling robot. We love working within the science startup ecosystem, which includes companies like Science Exchange, Benchling, ECL, Transcriptic and others.

 

Anyone who’s been following PLab since the beginning knows that we’re committed to being open. That includes being open about our finances.

 

Our partners in NGLY1, the Grace Science Foundation, revamped their website for Rare Disease Day 2016.

 

In the run up to Demo Day, PLab was honored and thrilled to bring on new investor Slow Ventures.

Sangeetha took to the blog to lay out a vision for scaling PLab, and Tom and Tamy rolled out the latest results on our efforts to develop a high-throughout screen for NGLY mutant flies.

And of course the biggest news was our YC launch press. See you next month!