Kirill (Kyrylo) Bessonov

AI for Science: a paradigm shift for scientific discovery and translation: "From the landmark US CHIPS and Science Act legislation to major initiatives such as Canada’s Acceleration Consortium, leaders around the world are placing big investments in scientific research and innovation to solve today’s grand challenges and those yet to come. To meet the growing urgency of our time, the fundamental way scientific research is conducted in the future must be transformed by advancing and connecting recent breakthrough technologies across the physical and virtual worlds — from remotely controlled, high-throughput automated experimental laboratories at scale all the way to new and powerful foundational AI and physics-based models driven by high-performance computing and rich data resources not previously available." https://lnkd.in/gCdmcfdv

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Updated from 2020: NGDI UBC Researchers have developed a novel oral amphotericin B formulation in the treatment of #leishmaniasis & systemic fungal infections that is cost-effective, safe, tropically stable, accessible and with positive human phase 1a (single dose) and phase 1b (multiple dose) safety results. https://lnkd.in/gnCzhdTD #nanomedicine #drugdelivery #fungal #parasitic

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🌟 Proud to share that our research in the Kronstad Lab at UBC has been featured! We've been exploring the vulnerabilities of Cryptococcus neoformans, a fungal pathogen that poses a significant threat to immunocompromised individuals, leading to conditions like fungal meningitis. Our work is uncovering ways to disrupt the fungus's defenses, bringing us closer to potential new treatments. It’s inspiring to see how our collective efforts are advancing science and healthcare. #InfectiousDiseases #Immunocompromised #MedicalResearch #Cryptococcosis #Microbiology #ScientificDiscovery #UBCResearch #HealthcareInnovation #PathogenDefense #KronstadLab #Mycology #Immunology #NewTreatment #MedicalInnovation #DrugDevelopment #TherapeuticAdvances #LifeSciences #teamwork

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I am always interested to keep up to speed with developments in radiopharmaceutical therapy (RPT) that uses alpha-emitting radionuclides! Many scientists are endeavoring to produce a successful RPT based on Ac-225, and it seems TRIUMF and CNL are looking to become key players in the manufacturing of this rare radionuclide. Alphas have high linear energy transfer (LET), which (to a certain limit) implies a large relative biological effectiveness (RBE). In alpha-emitters, only one alpha is emitted per nuclear decay, an the daughter nuclei tend also to produce further alphas, as well as gammas. The alphas have a range in water on the order of 10 to 100 microns, and the gammas have essentially infinite range. As the alpha-emitters diffuse from the target site, the deposited energy may be distributed over a large region. On one hand, this could provide good coverage of large tumours, and reduce the requirement to have the radionuclide transported to the entire tumour. On the other hand, there is also potential for energy deposition in adjacent non-targeted cells, which may not be tumour cells. My dissertation is focusing on Auger-electron emitters. Auger electrons are emitted in bursts, sometimes dozens per decay of the parent nucleus, and some nuclei (such as Sb-119, the subject of my PhD) are pure Auger emitters i.e. no other radiations are yielded. Furthermore, Auger electrons have extremely short range, due to their low energy (~1 eV to ~100 keV), varying from a few nanometres up to 10 microns. A pure Auger emitter localized to a cell nucleus could result in a much larger fraction of the total energy released to be deposited in the nucleus, where DNA, the well-established target for causing radiation-induced cell death, is located. This comes with a significant challenge: the radiopharmaceutical must be transported to the tumour cell and then also into the nucleus.

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80% of Canadian postdocs start their postdoc with an academic goal, however most postdocs will not stay in academia. One third of Canadian postdocs change their career goals during postdoc. Reasons for goal change include a limited number of academic positions, lack of interest or due to family reasons. Challenges are not unrelated to opportunities. 80% of Canadian postdocs experience severe mental health challenges The Chair of the Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars/ l'Association Canadienne des Postdoctorantes et Postd and ICoRSA Research Staff Association member, Dr. Henrietta “Henny” Bennett joined the #OECD Multistakeholder Dialogue to present the challenges faced by researchers in Canada showed by longitudinal study Canadian National Postdoctoral Survey #Read #more about Dr. Henny’s presentation and key messages of the event here: https://lnkd.in/dX2c6xAN # OECD - OCDE  #researchcareers #science #research #innovation Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars/ l'Association Canadienne des Postdoctorantes et Postd #SciTechSustainableFuture

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Take home from cell and gene therapy meeting ISCT 2024: ISCT, International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy meeting in #Vancouver is over and the good news is that cell&gene therapies are advancing rapidly. 📍It was encouraging and stimulating to see Emily Whitehead, the first patient treated with CAR T cells, to be with us and talking to us. Very motivating for my next work. 💎CAR T cells have truly revolutionized the treatment of hematologic malignancies, but unfortunately only 4% of people with advanced or metastatic cancers are eligible for CAR T therapies. ❓ Reasons?: high costs, complicated logistics and low manufacturing capacity ❓ What is happening now and where is the field moving to solve that? 💡 Manufacturing equipment for CAR T cells is evolving rapidly to save resources and produce the product at a lower cost 💡 POC: Advanced manufacturing technology will allow the expansion of manufacturing sites closer to patient care 💡 CDMOs offering more complex and faster services to facilitate cell therapy development and manufacturing 💡 Allogeneic off-the-shelf products (NK cells, macrophages, allo T cells,...) are in advanced development to produce many doses from one production batch, which will reduce the price per dose, reduce product heterogeneity and improve logistics. 💡 Non-viral systems are in clinical trials and will allow cheaper manufacturing with better safety for patients. 💡 In vivo CAR-based therapy is in early development, but will hopefully offer CAR gene transfer directly into immune cells without the need for cell manufacturing (at least for some indications). 🗻 And this will hopefully further escalate in future... 💡 Solid cancers: Improving the technology to be successful in solid cancers ( 90% of all cancers) will dramatically increase the indication range for CAR-based or similar therapies. 💡 Autoimmunity: Importantly, CAR technology is massively expanding to non-hematologic malignancies such as autoimmunity (8-10% of the world population). ❓ 💡 Any other comments or thoughts? ---------------- At the SaxoCell Cluster for cell and gene therapy in #Saxony, #Germany, we are working together on these and other CGT technologies to further revolutionize the treatment of #cancer, #autoimmunity and other life-threatening #diseases. https://lnkd.in/gf6D2ETB #ISCT2024 #ISCT #SaxoCell #CellGene #CGT #Technology #manufacturing #Therapy #CART #NKcells #CARNKcells #cancer #immunotherapy #Innovations #autoimmunity #EtmDresden

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I will be attending the ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) in Montreal on 14/July: https://lnkd.in/g8USaDGD Abstract: Bioassay protocols have lagged other areas of drug discovery in terms of digitization. While molecules and proteins have spawned entire disciplines (cheminformatics and bioinformatics), most archives of assays carried out by companies are siloed away as a combination of bespoke pick lists, plain text, and sporadic links to globally meaningful dictionaries. Published experiments often err on the side of terseness and obfuscation by referring to similar work. This leads to serious challenges to anyone who wants to federate data, or effectively search it, or use it as the basis of any kind of machine learning inference. Reproducibility issues are further confounded by the difficulty of ascertaining whether any two experiments are comparable. Public ontologies can greatly improve the machine readability of assay protocols by virtue of having universal meaning. We will describe an open source project - BioAssay Express - that uses templates to gather and organize ontologies into a coherent user interface for curating data content. We have marked up 4000 assays from PubChem using our templates, plus another 2600 from the DataFAIRy project, using a hybrid automated model/expert curation workflow. This freely available data can be precisely and rapidly searched as well as used for sophisticated analysis techniques and model building. We have integrated these curation tools into a commercial product in order to make the process of creating marked-up data less work than traditional writeups, with the ultimate goal of making machine readable data the standard practice rather than a post-publication cleanup chore.

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Ever wondered what it's like to pursue a PhD in Canada? 🤔 I have been featured on *Scholarly Scouts* where I share my journey, lessons learned, and tips to navigate the wild (and rewarding!) world of biomedicine! 🎓🧬 Huge shoutout to Mia Edgerton-Fulton for inviting me to participate in this awesome project 🙌. If you're passionate about STEM, or just curious about life as a PhD student, you definitely don’t want to miss this! 💡💼 🎥 Check it out below #PhDLife #STEMAdvocacy #ScholarlyScouts #CareerTips #Biomed #Grateful

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Last week, we convened our inaugural face-to-face YCharOS meeting, bringing together representatives from Canadian funding agencies, antibody manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and academia at McGill University. The objective of the meeting was to strategize how to scale this academic initiative from testing antibodies for 100 proteins to the human proteome. Through panel discussions, reverse brainstorming (thanks Hannah C. – but is it typical to fill up the entire whiteboard in few minutes with potential future problems 😉), and various presentations, we identified several potential strategies that will require a few more weeks to digest. We'll provide a summary of the meeting along with our forward strategy. A big thank you to our antibody manufacturer partners—abcam, ABclonal Technology, Aviva Systems Biology,Bio-Techne, ABCD Antibodies, Cell Signaling Technology (CST), DSHB, GeneTex, Inc., Institute for Protein Innovation, Proteintech Group, Synaptic Systems GmbH, Thermo Fisher Scientific, YCharOS Inc. —for making the YCharOS project possible and for attending the meeting. Who can guess the type of IgG represented in that picture?

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Working on RNA-lipid nanoparticles (RNA-LNPs)? I m packing my bags for Vancouver and hope to see you there. We have some great updates to share. As you may have seen, Precision NanoSystems has joined the Cytiva family – and together, we’re presenting new data at #ISCT 2024! What's on? 👉 Efficient gene editing in CD34 hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells using non-viral lipid nanoparticles 👉 Ex vivo engineering of primary cells using RNA-lipid nanoparticles and scale-up manufacturing for cell and gene therapies 👉 Optimization of multiplex CRISPR-Cas9 editing of human primary T cells using LNPs and subsequent off-target evaluation 👉 Strategies for producing clinical and commercial RNA-LNP drug products See the full agenda details here: https://lnkd.in/dWFq9rMX #LNPs #nanomedicines

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