In this episode of Science in Real Time, host Carli Reyes sits down with Dr. Tarun Vemulkar, CTO and Co-Founder of Semarion, to explore how their groundbreaking SemaCyte® platform is reshaping the way scientists handle, study, and analyze cells. They dive into the intersection of materials science and cell biology, unpacking how Semarion’s smart materials enable faster, more reproducible cell-based assays — ultimately accelerating the path from discovery to therapy.

What You’ll Hear:

• The Origins of Semarion – how the team spun out to solve long-standing challenges in cell handling.
• The SemaCyte® Platform Explained – how controllable microcarriers enable miniaturized, high-precision cell assays.
• Bridging Materials Science and Biology – how Semarion’s interdisciplinary approach is unlocking new efficiencies in drug discovery workflows.
• Real-World Applications – use cases for pharma, biotech, and academia in streamlining screening and model validation.
• Looking Ahead – where Semarion sees the future of smart materials and how they’re scaling their impact across the life sciences ecosystem.

🌐 Explore & Connect

Learn more about Semarion and the SemaCyte® platform on their website or LinkedIn. 

Got an idea for a topic or a guest you’d love to hear on Science in Real Time? We’d love to hear from you!
Connect with us at our ScienceIRT Website or on LinkedIn: Araceli Biosciences.

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, leave us a review, and share it with a colleague who’s just as passionate about shaping the future of biotech as you are!

🔗 Explore & Connect

• Science in Real Time: https://www.aracelibio.com/science-irt-podcast-biology-big-data/
• Araceli Biosciences LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/araceli-biosciences/
• Semarion Website: http://www.semarion.com/ 
• Semarion LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/company/semarion

In this Molecule Talk episode, host Carli Reyes explores CellCLIP, a provocative new approach at the intersection of high-content imaging and AI. Based on a June 2025 preprint, CellCLIP attempts to link Cell Painting images with natural language descriptions of perturbations, making cellular data more interpretable, searchable, and useful across disciplines. While still preliminary and not yet peer-reviewed, the idea has the potential to transform how scientists connect cell morphology with biological concepts.

What You’ll Hear:

• Cell Painting 101 — how high-content imaging creates “morphological fingerprints” of cells, and why these fingerprints are powerful but hard to interpret.
• The CellCLIP idea — adapting the CLIP model from computer vision to align cell images with text descriptions like drug names, pathways, or gene knockouts.
• Proof-of-concept results — retrieval tests, mechanism-of-action classification, and generalization across genetic and chemical perturbations.
• Why it matters — from improving interpretability to enabling cross-modal integration of biology, and even accelerating drug discovery.
• Open questions — how well CellCLIP handles unseen drugs, whether it learns biology vs. memorization, and how it will scale to massive datasets like JUMP-Cell Painting.

Together, these insights highlight a shift toward bridging cell biology and natural language — creating tools that could help scientists move from abstract image features to intuitive, actionable biological concepts.

Got an idea for a topic or guest you’d love to hear on Molecule Talk? We’d love to hear from you!
Connect with us at our ScienceIRT Website or on LinkedIn: Araceli Biosciences. 

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, leave us a review, and share it with a colleague who’s just as passionate about shaping the future of biotech as you are!

🔗 Explore & Connect

• Science in Real Time Website: https://www.aracelibio.com/science-irt-podcast-biology-big-data/ 
• Araceli Biosciences LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/araceli-biosciences/
• Twitter/X: @AraceliBio
• Instagram: @ScienceIRT_AraceliBio
• TikTok: @ScienceIRT_AraceliBio

References:

• Ramesh, B., Singh, A., Huang, Y., Thienpont, B., & Carpenter, A. E. (2025). CellCLIP: Learning perturbation effects in cell painting via text-guided contrastive learning. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06290 (PREPRINT)

In this month’s Funding Focus, host Carli Reyes unpacks the deals, policies, and investments shaping the future of biotech and drug discovery. From billion-dollar pharma bets to government-backed strategies, we explore how capital is accelerating science on a global scale.

What you'll hear:

• Novo Nordisk’s $550M partnership with Replicate Bioscience to advance self-replicating RNA therapies.
• The UK’s £1.12B industrial strategy to position Britain as Europe’s biotech hub by 2030.
• Phenomic AI’s $20M Series A, fueling the convergence of imaging and AI in oncology drug discovery.
• The bigger picture: how public and private funding are converging into a global biotech ecosystem.

We'll also share behind-the-scenes context and a look ahead at September — from the next wave of AI-biotech partnerships to new government R&D packages that could reshape where startups take root.

Got an idea for a topic or a guest you’d love to hear on Science in Real Time? We’d love to hear from you! 

Connect with us at our ScienceIRT Website or on LinkedIn: Araceli Biosciences. 

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, leave us a review, and share it with a colleague who’s just as passionate about shaping the future of biotech as you are!

🔗 Explore & Connect

• Science in Real Time Website: https://www.aracelibio.com/science-irt-podcast-biology-big-data/ 
• Araceli Biosciences LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/araceli-biosciences/
• Twitter/X: @AraceliBio
• Instagram: @ScienceIRT_AraceliBio
• TikTok: @ScienceIRT_AraceliBio

🔗 References:

• Novo Nordisk & Replicate Bioscience partnership: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/novo-nordisk-seeks-new-obesity-diabetes-drugs-with-replicate-bioscience-2025-08-28/
• UK Life Sciences Industrial Strategy: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/biotech-growths-missing-link-appetite-for-risk-09q8zt0qw
• Phenomic AI $20M Series A: https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/funding-roundup-phenomic-ai-20m-series-a

In this BioScope episode, host Carli Reyes takes you inside four groundbreaking stories that show how discovery science is evolving from proof-of-concept experiments to predictive, life-like models of human biology. From organoids that grow at the pace of a developing fetus to AI systems that simulate entire cells, this episode reveals how scientists are pushing past traditional limits and creating tools that make biology more realistic, scalable, and powerful.

What You’ll Hear:

• Kidney organoids on a human timeline — the first fetal kidney models that grow step by step over nine months, opening new windows into birth defects, prenatal gene programs, and drug safety during pregnancy.
• “Minibrains” with a twist — immune cells called microglia aren’t just cleaning up, but actively building neural circuits, reshaping how we think about brain development and disorders.
• CellForge AI — a multi-agent AI that builds predictive “virtual cells” you can experiment on in silico, accelerating discovery while reducing reliance on costly lab experiments.
• Vascularized organoids — mini-hearts and mini-livers sprouting branching blood vessels, finally overcoming a major barrier in organoid research and bringing drug testing and personalized medicine closer to reality.

Together, these stories highlight the convergence of stem cell science, high-content imaging, and AI — a new era where we don’t just observe biology, but predict and design it.

Got an idea for a topic or a guest you’d love to hear on Science in Real Time? We’d love to hear from you! 

Connect with us at our ScienceIRT Website or on LinkedIn: Araceli Biosciences.

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, leave us a review, and share it with a colleague who’s just as passionate about shaping the future of biotech as you are!

🔗 Explore & Connect

• Science in Real Time Website: https://www.aracelibio.com/science-irt-podcast-biology-big-data/ 
• Araceli Biosciences LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/araceli-biosciences/
• Twitter/X: @AraceliBio
• Instagram: @ScienceIRT_AraceliBio
• TikTok: @ScienceIRT_AraceliBio

References:

Kidney Organoids

• Namestnikov, M., Cohen-Zontag, O., Omer, D., Gnatek, Y., Goldberg, S., Vincent, T., Singh, S., Shiber, Y., Yehudai, T. R., Volkov, H., Genet, D. F., Urbach, A., Polak-Charcon, S., Grinberg, I., Pode-Shakked, N., Weisz, B., Vaknin, Z., Freedman, B. S., & Dekel, B. (2025). Human fetal kidney organoids model early human nephrogenesis and Notch-driven cell fate. The EMBO Journal, 44(14), e00504. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44318-025-00504-2
• Reuters. (2025, August 20). Health Rounds: Human fetal kidney development mimicked in test tubes. Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/health-rounds-human‑fetal‑kidney‑development‑mimicked‑test‑tubes‑2025‑08‑20/

Minibrains & Microglia

• Yu, D., Jain, S., Wangzhou, A., Zhu, B., Shao, W., Coley-O’Rourke, E. J., De Florencio, S., Kim, J., Choi, J. J., Paredes, M. F., Nowakowski, T. J., Huang, E. J., & Piao, X. (2025, August 6). Microglia regulate GABAergic neurogenesis in prenatal human brain through IGF1. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08958-5
• Lanese, N. (2025, August 24). 'Minibrains' reveal secrets of how key brain cells form in the womb. Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/health/neuroscience/minibrains-reveal-secrets-of-how-key-brain-cells-form-in-the-womb?utm_source=chatgpt.com

CellForge AI

• Tang, X., Yu, Z., Chen, J., Cui, Y., Shao, D., Wang, W., Wu, F., Zhuang, Y., Shi, W., Huang, Z., Cohan, A., Lin, X., Theis, F., Krishnaswamy, S., & Gerstein, M. (2025, August 4). CellForge: Agentic design of virtual cell models. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2508.02276  
• GitHub — CellForge code repository (https://github.com/gersteinlab/CellForge) 

Heart Organoids with Vessels

• Abilez, O. J., Yang, H., Guan, Y., Shen, M., Yildirim, Z., Zhuge, Y., Venkateshappa, R., Zhao, S. R., Gomez, A. H., El-Mokahal, M., Dunkenberger, L., Ono, Y., Shibata, M., Nwokoye, P. N., Tian, L., Wilson, K. D., Lyall, E. H., Jia, F., Wo, H. T., Zhou, G., Aldana, B., Karakikes, I., Obal, D., Peltz, G., Zarins, C. K., & Wu, J. C. (2025, June 5). Gastruloids enable modeling of the earliest stages of human cardiac and hepatic vascularization. Science, 388(6751), eadu9375. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adu9375
• Bai, N. (2025, June 5). How a Stanford breakthrough in lab-grown mini-hearts could change medical research. San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved from https://www.sfchronicle.com/science/article/heart-organoid-medicine-drug-discovery-research-20357811.php?utm_source=chatgpt.com

In this episode of ScienceIRT, host Carli Reyes sits down with Dr. Naina Kurup from Ginkgo Datapoints, a business unit of Ginkgo Bioworks, to discuss the release of the GDPx3 dataset. They dive into what GDPx3 is, how it was built, the scientific and operational challenges behind it, and what it means for the future of biotech and AI-driven discovery.

What You’ll Hear:

1. Inside Ginkgo Datapoints – making biology easier to engineer through large-scale, AI-ready datasets
2. The GDPx3 Dataset and breaking down the data – from transcriptomics to high-content imaging, what’s included and how researchers can use it.
3. Behind the scenes of generating GDPx3, and how Ginkgo’s infrastructure and automation enabled scale and speed.
4. Cell painting and what academia, pharma, biotech, and startups all stand to gain from open access to GDPx3
5. Looking Ahead and where to access GDPx3 

Explore the dataset today on the Ginkgo Datapoints website or directly on Hugging Face. For partnership inquiries or dataset support, reach out via the Ginkgo DataPoints contact page or connect with the team on LinkedIn.

Got an idea for a topic or a guest you’d love to hear on Science in Real Time? We’d love to hear from you!
Connect with us at our ScienceIRT Website or on LinkedIn: Araceli Biosciences.

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, leave us a review, and share it with a colleague who’s just as passionate about shaping the future of biotech as you are!

🔗 Explore & Connect

• Science in Real Time: https://www.aracelibio.com/science-irt-podcast/
• Araceli Biosciences LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/araceli-biosciences/
• Ginkgo Datapoints: https://datapoints.ginkgo.bio/ 
• GDPx3 on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ginkgo-datapoints/GDPx3
• Ginkgo Datapoints LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/ginkgo-datapoints/ 

Welcome to Science in Real Time, a podcast by Araceli Biosciences. In this kickoff episode, host Carli Reyes introduces the mission behind the show — to capture discovery as it happens, not just when it’s published. You’ll learn what to expect each week, why this podcast exists, and how it aims to spotlight the people, tools, and questions that are shaping the future of biotech in real time.

What You’ll Hear:

1. Why Science in Real Time exists — and why now
2. Carli’s journey from the bench to the mic
3. A preview of the show format:
   • BioScope – fast takes on biotech breakthroughs
   • Funding Focus – the business behind the science
   • Molecule Talk – deep dives into biology that matters
   • In the Spotlight – conversations with innovators driving science forward
4. An invitation to join the community and shape future episodes

Who This Podcast Is For:

• Bench scientists & postdocs
• Biotech founders & platform builders
• Data scientists, investors & curious thinkers
• Anyone passionate about how scientific discovery happens in the real world

Connect with Us: Got an idea or a guest to nominate? We’d love to hear from you.
Visit: aracelibio.com
LinkedIn: Araceli Biosciences

If you liked this episode: Subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a friend or colleague who’s building the future of biotech!