Alex Rubinsteyn
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alexr.bsky.social
Alex Rubinsteyn
@alexr.bsky.social
personalized cancer immunotherapy = genomics + immunology + machine learning + oncology

(pirl.unc.edu)
Emotionally, going from CS to biomed is rough.

Everything is slower, hierarchical, bureaucratized, entrained in Byzantine incentive structures, pay is bad for important roles bc of a tax on passion, public comms obfuscates behind concern for patients, &c
February 15, 2026 at 12:00 AM
Moralizing AI to the point of refusing to understand it seems like such a political miss.

Biggest realignment of capital / labor / social norms & institutions in a long time…
February 12, 2026 at 2:29 PM
Is there an AI savvy corner of the lefty political milieu?

Like, obviously this stuff is going to accelerate oligarch-ification, is there anyone publicly thinking about social consequences who has a grounded understanding of the frontier and trajectory?
February 12, 2026 at 1:47 AM
I left xAI today.

I will never forget the friends I made in the extracorporeal deputrification chamber.

A brief reset and then onwards! 2026 will be the year we finally convert all living biomass into a perfect sphere. 🚀🚀🚀
February 11, 2026 at 2:30 PM
Just realized you don’t need DNA to find almost all expressed somatic variants if you have long read scRNA
February 11, 2026 at 1:04 AM
Codex kicking off large training jobs on Modal and I feel like I'm ascending into a Sci-Fi hallucination
February 10, 2026 at 4:50 PM
I can’t believe we’re speedrunning super-human automated intelligence with offline BPE tokenization

Like…I was sure something better would win.
February 8, 2026 at 7:05 PM
codex-5.3 caught a totally ruinous copy/paste error in a data download script I wrote by hand before handing off the data to codex-5.2 for simple visualizations

Ran codex-5.3 on a few other repos and it caught small legitimate bugs in each of them. Uh, definitely an improvement
February 6, 2026 at 7:11 PM
February 5, 2026 at 6:28 PM
Reposted by Alex Rubinsteyn
Our latest research showing PRAME as a previously unrecognized therapeutic target in NUT carcinoma just dropped on JITC. Huge thanks to @sitcancer.bsky.social @benjamingvincent.bsky.social @alexr.bsky.social @unclineberger.bsky.social and so may others!!!

jitc.bmj.com/content/14/2...
Shared PRAME epitopes are T-cell targets in NUT carcinoma
Background NUT carcinoma is a rare but highly lethal solid tumor without an effective standard of care. NUT carcinoma is caused by bromodomain-containing NUTM1 fusion oncogenes, most commonly BRD4::NU...
jitc.bmj.com
February 5, 2026 at 1:54 PM
Finally published!

“Shared PRAME epitopes are T-­ cell
targets in NUT carcinoma”

We stumbled into working on a rare deadly cancer without effective treatments and found that some existing TCR therapies might be worth trying (at least work in vitro)

Link: jitc.bmj.com/content/14/2...
Shared PRAME epitopes are T-cell targets in NUT carcinoma
Background NUT carcinoma is a rare but highly lethal solid tumor without an effective standard of care. NUT carcinoma is caused by bromodomain-containing NUTM1 fusion oncogenes, most commonly BRD4::NU...
jitc.bmj.com
February 5, 2026 at 3:02 PM
Ran into a third friend at this Durham co-working space, laptop also full of coding agents running in parallel (four Codex instances)

Three for three now -- split between Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex, I guess I'm the 4th (with 5 Codexes waiting for my attention)
February 2, 2026 at 7:26 PM
New PIRL blog post by @benjamingvincent.bsky.social:

Some advice to companies and clinics starting personalized neoantigen vaccine programs

Link: pirlblog.substack.com/p/some-advic...
Some advice to companies and clinics starting personalized neoantigen vaccine programs
The problems aren't all solved yet...
pirlblog.substack.com
February 2, 2026 at 7:25 PM
Teaching my kids to sing “Costco! Costco!” over the Dsinghis Khan song

(final humiliation of the Cold War)
February 2, 2026 at 2:26 PM
Disturbance in the force…

Sonnet 4.5 Thinking with search just gave me 6 made up paper links in a row (link either didn’t work or went to different unrelated paper)

Feels like it’s been a while (had to go back to ChatGPT)
February 1, 2026 at 3:51 AM
Reposted by Alex Rubinsteyn
Read 1000 moltbook posts and then go back to reading bluesky without going insane challenge
January 30, 2026 at 8:20 PM
Been reading Accelerando just to find out what happens next
January 30, 2026 at 6:11 PM
Raising low tech kids is starting to feel transgressive

(asked about laptop time at a school tour and felt like a fundamentalist)
January 28, 2026 at 2:48 AM
Reposted by Alex Rubinsteyn
January 27, 2026 at 9:37 PM
Claude Code did like 95% of the MHCflurry TensorFlow to PyTorch port in about a day but there are some persistent numerical differences/bugs that it's been churning for a week, playing trial-and-error whack-a-mole coding like a junior dev.

Codex seems to be one-shotting the fix
January 27, 2026 at 6:06 AM
Codex and Claude Code working on the same branch. What could go wrong?
January 27, 2026 at 3:55 AM
Reposted by Alex Rubinsteyn
Ever wondered what happens if you remove Tfh cells from established germinal centres?
January 26, 2026 at 2:20 AM