21 Aug 2026Router Wars | Callosum $100M | AI Cancer Cures | OpenAI CFO IPO Plans
Ruxandra Teslo: What the Moderna Result Actually Means
Ruxandra Teslo (Works In Progress) returns to contextualize the news: the vaccine is an adjuvant therapy that reduced melanoma recurrence by roughly 50%, not a cure, and only interim phase 3 data has been released. She explains how mRNA technology works, attributes the stock spike to a short squeeze and Moderna's politically charged status among generalist investors, and argues CAR-T cell therapies and checkpoint inhibitors were bigger oncology milestones. She also points out the vaccine was designed back in 2017 because clinical trials take 5–10+ years, and says comparing frontier labs to companies like Moderna is apples to oranges.
20 Aug 2026Protein Binding | OpenAI Q2 Revenue | META Trial | TIME’s VC Rankings
Ruxandra Teslo Breaks Down Anthropic's Protein Results
Ruxandra Teslo, writer and editor at Works In Progress, explains the science: drugs target proteins, AlphaFold predicts protein structures, and models like David Baker's RF Diffusion (2023) already generate binders — Claude Science acts as a 'mini scientist' orchestrating these open-source tools with specialized tacit knowledge. She argues binder design is not the main bottleneck in drug discovery (finding which proteins to target is), so this is not an AlphaFold moment; the real significance is automating scientific pipelines. She notes the biology community is broadly excited about AI but disappointed the open-source models weren't credited, and she's skeptical all diseases will be cured in 10 years.