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Typcal is brewing the future of pragmatic protein
While the food industry grapples with the compromises of plant-based alternatives and the distant promise of lab-grown meat, a Brazilian scaleup is brewing a practical solution.
How a decades-long conversation with families turned early gene discovery into trial readiness
Every few months, an email lands in Julie van der Zee’s inbox from a family whose history with the Antwerp neurogenetics teams goes way back, sometimes for 30 years or more. A parent or aunt once participated in the early studies that mapped one of the genetic causes of familial Alzheimer’s; now an adult child writes with new questions: Should I consider carrier testing? What about preimplantation genetic diagnosis? Are there clinical studies we could join?
For Julie, who leads the biobank efforts at the VIB-UAntwerp Center for Molecular Neurology, those messages are the living proof that long-horizon science only delivers if relationships, records, and ethics are cared for as diligently as the data.
“Discoveries don’t end at publication,” she says. “Families don’t stop needing information. Closing the loop is part of the job.”
In the 1980s and 1990s, Antwerp research teams led by Christine Van Broeckhoven identified and followed large multigenerational families with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, including presenilin (PSEN1) kindreds. The work was painstaking: clinical histories, pedigrees, consent documents and linked biomaterials that allowed molecular follow-up as methods evolved.
It was also a different era for genetics. Before next-generation sequencing, discovery relied on linkage maps, positional cloning, Sanger reads… All expensive, low-throughput approaches, she says.
While the food industry grapples with the compromises of plant-based alternatives and the distant promise of lab-grown meat, a Brazilian scaleup is brewing a practical solution.
Giovanni Maglia reflects on the future of next-generation proteomics and the challenges of de novo protein sequencing.
We secured media coverage on new trial results from a biotech company.
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