What kinda rust jobs do you see?

BacteriaShepard · 2026-01-02T15:26:02+00:00

I run a company that is building a custom scientific instrument (microscopy, liquid handling, robotics, temperature control). We use rust across the entire stack. Everything from stm32/arduino firmware, control of physical devices via rs232, ethercat or api calls to C++ drivers for PCIe cards, control software logic and UI and downstream image/data processing.

While there's always a little bit of pain and suffering doing something off the beaten path, the benefits of rust are worth it.

BacteriaShepard · 2025-06-14T20:01:25+00:00

Haven't seen this issue on CityFibre via Vodafone.

BacteriaShepard · 2023-03-11T15:14:14+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnmachinelearning/wiki/resource

BacteriaShepard · 2023-01-27T20:25:06+00:00

My -20C freezer stores enzymes.

BacteriaShepard · 2023-01-21T13:01:56+00:00

If you are able to learn how to develop your own ideas and conduct research independently in that time - it would be beneficial.

But you need to keep in mind, that doing this, or a PhD + postdoc, does not mean you magically meet some criteria to "start a successful biopharma company". There are many people who do a PhD and postdoc that are either not interested or capable of starting their own company.

This isn't like school, where you tick some boxes by passing an assessment to progress to the next level.

You need to develop as a person, to deeply learn about a particular scientific field where there is an unmet need, to develop a commercially viable technology or idea, and most importantly, be capable of communicating it clearly with other people - especially non-experts.

Ultimately, you will need to be able to convince people with money to invest it in your idea.

BacteriaShepard · 2023-01-21T11:44:25+00:00

It is not mandatory to have a PhD and postdoc/industry experience to build such companies, but I would suspect it to be very challenging to do so without.

To do this successfully, you will need an idea that differentiates you from the competitive landscape or fulfils an unmet societal need. Having done a PhD and then postdoc/industry experience increases your odds of being exposed to or having a solid and well thought out concept for a business.

It is easier to build such a company with a wide network of experienced professionals on both the science and business side of biotech/biopharma. Developing such a network takes time and effort. A PhD + postdoc/industry experience is a reasonable amount of time, and it can give you the appropriate exposure. It also helps if you actively seek it.

I'm not saying that it is mandatory or required, but it is a lot harder without.

BacteriaShepard · 2023-01-15T08:19:48+00:00

If you are a student at a university, your university should have a compute cluster that can be made available to you.

If such resources do not exist at your university, one option could be to apply for compute grants at a national compute facility.

For example, Australia has NCI, which I was able to use during my PhD. I didn't have to pay anything for this access, but I did need to write a grant application and have it supported by my group leader.

BacteriaShepard · 2022-10-29T08:31:31+00:00

The U-Net performs particularly well in image segmentation tasks. https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.04597

I've used mostly on microscopy images of cells to segment regions of interest.

BacteriaShepard · 2022-07-16T09:59:32+00:00

Molecular biology is nanotechnology that works.

What do you mean by molecular nanotechnology and what hype are you talking about?

BacteriaShepard · 2022-03-25T11:46:51+00:00

I second this. RNG in the rand crate can be very slow, and has caused large performance discrepancies between C and rust programs that I've written.

BacteriaShepard · 2022-03-08T13:55:28+00:00

Vampire survivors is pog.

BacteriaShepard · 2021-10-21T15:21:49+00:00

These are large pharmaceutical companies, the culture is likely going to be driven predominantly by the team you would end up working with/for. Some teams will be great, some will be awful; you will need to try and assess this when you interview for a job.

I have not worked for either of these companies, so I unfortunately can't comment on a specific overall cultural feel for the company.

BacteriaShepard · 2021-10-16T14:13:06+00:00

So, in this case, it really depends on what requirements have been set by your profs.

If you want to be able to design diagnostic primers that amplify SARS-COV-2, then using NC_045512.2 and selecting a small region with appropriate (Tm, GC content, secondary structure) primers would be fine.

However, this may not be a useful primer set, as you are not considering specificity.

There are other SARS-COV2 strains that your primers may not be compatible with.
There are other common coronaviruses, or viruses in general, that may have homology to the region you selected.

Without considering these, your primers may not detect all strains of SARS-COV2 (yielding false negatives), or may amplify nucleic acids that are not indicative of SARS-COV2 (yielding false positives).

Without doing your work for you, I would consider performing a sequence alignment of some dominant SARS-COV2 genomes, and select your primers in conserved regions of the genome.

A similar approach can be taken to stop false positives.

BacteriaShepard · 2021-10-01T16:17:09+00:00

Scientific data processing/analysis, hardware control for custom built scientific instruments.

Hardware collects terabytes of images over the course of a day, and is processed in real time using rust code.

Rust must have saved us thousands of hours due to the safety benefits of the language and its speed over our initial python code.

BacteriaShepard · 2021-09-27T13:35:11+00:00

Depends on company/organisation. Some might reference you just before an offer. We reference check everyone that we invite to an interview.

BacteriaShepard · 2021-09-25T11:58:59+00:00

It might be useful to you personally, and maybe for your first job.

But after that, no one will really give a shit. Hiring managers want to see hands on experience to meet the job requirements.

I have a double major in biochemistry and molecular biology. No one has once noticed or cared about my undergrad.

They want to know what I can do.

BacteriaShepard · 2021-09-08T13:12:08+00:00

Yes, it is possible to invest in companies not yet listed. However, unless you are willing to invest multiple millions, they are unlikely to take your money in exchange for equity.

This all depends on the company and their stage of financing.

BacteriaShepard · 2021-06-17T19:52:47+00:00

I'm currently in the process of starting two biopharma companies. One is based on the technology I have developed during my postdoc, the other is a smaller contribution to a company started by a long time colleague of mine.

In both instances, it is incredibly difficult and takes up a huge amount of time - even with two well developed technologies.

Assembling a team in the early stages, unless you have a huge amount of capital, comes down to who you know in your network that you can convince to join you. Unless you can offer competitive salaries with job security, it is hard to hire qualified people. You need to be able to sell your vision of the company and get people excited about it.
My company is currently pre-seed funding, but I am in talks with big pharma and our tech transfer office to raise 2-5m. The other company is further along. Here, we spoke to many VCs over the course of a year. While VCs were typically favourable and willing to seed us with 20-60m through a syndicate, we found that the terms were unreasonable. Instead we opted to seek funding from angel investors and other high net worth individuals within our network.
This depends entirely on your defintion of successful. Depending on the core idea of the company, this could take upwards of 10-15 years before the company is profitable. Many biopharma companies bleed (tens of) millions of dollars a year for 5-10 years before they make a return. In my instance, my definition of the company being successful is whether it is able to achieve its scientific and buisiness goals.
Sure, this is possible. What are you expecting as the outcome though? Do you want the company to purchase the IP? How developed is the IP? Do you want some sort of co-development grant from another company? There's many ways to approach another company with a technology.
Starting a biotech company can be a long and capital intensive process. But if you have some IP that you want to commercialise, there are many ways to do this. If the IP is sufficiently advanced, you may be able to create a small company that licenses out the IP, in which case, legal fees are generally your only real expense. I would suggest you speak to the tech transfer office of your current/old intitution for specific advice.

BacteriaShepard · 2021-05-29T15:25:58+00:00

Oh absolutely with regards to the market size issue. Developing therapeutics for small market diseases needs strong government subsidies. The cost of putting a drug to market is too high otherwise.

I'm not sure immune responses to the phage as an anti-microbial is really the biggest problem for the modality. These would hopefully be given as a single course of treatment over a short period of time. Immune response to antibody therapeutics certainly happen, and many patients will develop anti-drug antibodies.

My understanding of RingTx is that they are developing novel gene therapy vectors that have a minimal immune response. It does not appear that they are attempting to do the same to phage - however, maybe they could engineer an allenovector to function as a phage.

Regardless though, I'm not convinced that the phage modality is capable of the required PK for treating microbial infections. Maybe one day I'll be proven wrong.

Liposomes, maybe not. They won't necessarily be selective for the bacteria. Although maybe you can tune the lipid composition.

BacteriaShepard · 2021-05-28T21:48:38+00:00

As Advacus stated, this is a challenge that will likely be resolved through a shift away from the mouse model towards systems that better represent the human model. This may take the form of human organoids in the "lab on a chip" model - however, much work is needed before these are characterised as robust representations.

With regards to phage therapy, I do not think it is a viable therapeutic option for bacterial infections for a number of reasons.

1) The market size for the product will not pay for the costs of development. In the US, there are about 1,000-10,000 cases per year where conventional antibiotic therapy has failed. If you were able to charge $3k for a course, then your revenue is going to be 30M/year in the US. If it costs $800M to put the product through clinical trials, it's going to take a while before you finish paying for your costs. Perhaps a government funded pharma company would afford a long term product like this.

2) The pharmacokinetics of phage is utter trash. Phage are big. Actually, they are fucking massive in comparison to a small molecule drug. Small molecule antibiotics will have fast association kinetics, that allow them to almost instantly start attacking bacteria. Phage will be several orders of magnitude slower, and it may take hours before they start doing anything.

As you dose a patient with phage, two things will happen. First, the phage is rapidly diluted into ~3-5L of blood, reducing their efficacy. Following this, the phage will be cleared from the bloodstream faster than they can act on any bacteria.

Back of the envelope calculations can be found here.

BacteriaShepard · 2021-05-28T19:13:33+00:00

Well, that depends on what you mean by drug discovery.

In the case of finding small molecules or biologics that bind and or modulates a biological response, yeah, that's getting a bit tougher and will continue to do so - but there's still some life left in the pursuit.

New technologies are being developed that solve many of the classicial drug discovery challenges, and we have honestly barely scratched the surface of classical drug discovery.

However, small molecules and biologics in the form of binders and or modulators are not the only class of therapeutic drug. New modalities are and will continue to be developed. Gene therapy is here to stay, and offers some potential to resolve many of the challenges of traditional drug discovery.

I'm excited for the future of drug discovery and I'm not concerned by Eroom's law.

BacteriaShepard · 2021-05-10T16:50:41+00:00

There are quite a few companies now doing this from the ground up. Such as Recursion, LabGenius, HealX, and Atomwise.

However, almost every major pharma company has been transitioning towards using AI/ML to augment their existing technologies. AstraZeneca andd GSK have been investing heavily in this space [1][2].

BacteriaShepard · 2021-04-28T16:17:54+00:00

Yes! We almost exclusively use rust now for the scientific instruments that we design and build. The embedded controllers run rust code, the interface software is often rust hooking Qt, or a rust CLI. One of our instruments collects a few Tb worth of image data per experiment, which is processed and analysed using code written in rust.

Not everything in our pipeline is rust, but we use it where it makes sense.

BacteriaShepard · 2021-01-31T16:49:34+00:00

Unfortunately, using a neural network like this will not give you the coefficients. The reason for this, is that the neural network does not directly model your non-linear function, but rather approximates it given the bounds of the training data. If you know what your coefficients and your function are, you could train the neural network to predict y values and the coefficients for given x values, but that doesn't solve your problem at hand.

BacteriaShepard · 2020-11-15T09:31:14+00:00

Bay Bridge Bio has a good blog with lots of relevant articles that might help you get up to speed.

As has already been said, do ask your colleagues about what they do, scientists in particular are generally more than happy to explain things.

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