Alex Hoekstra talk on Open Source Vaccines and the Mind First Foundation

delton13727 May 2023 16:06 UTC
5 points
2 comments1 min readLW link

Join us for a special evening with Alex Hoekstra. Alex was awarded a $100k ACX grant in 2021 to support the open-source vaccine initiative he co-founded, RaDVaC.

Alex will talk about lessons learned during the pandemic, the FDA, and the future of open-source vaccines. He will also talk about his work at the Mind First Foundation, where he has been thinking about AI and augmenting human intelligence.


Schedule
6:00 − 6:30 A/​V setup and informal socializing in the hallway
6:30 - Alex Hoekstra’s talk starts
7:00 − 8:00 Q & A and “fireside chat” with Alex and other members of the RaDVaC team
8:00 − 8:30 socializing
9:00 pm—library closes

Location:
The Cambridge Public Library Main Branch, in the basement auditorium. Parking is available on the street and in the basement lot under the library.

Background on RaDVaC:
During the pandemic RaDVaC developed the first open source SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. Their vaccine has several features that separate it from vaccines currently under use—it is intranasally delivered, uses synthetic peptides, and is extremely easy to produce. Over 100 people so far have tested the vaccine to verify its safety and protocols for efficacy studies (including challenge trials) have been developed.

RaDVaC has written a whitepaper which explains how anyone can synthesize their own vaccine. This radical approach has garnered them much attention worldwide.

Read more here : https://​​radvac.org/​​

Background on Alex:
Alex is co-founder of the Mind First Foundation and RaDVaC. He is a biotechnologist with over ten years of experience in biotech R&D. He previously worked as Project Coordinator for the Personal Genome Project (PGP), an initiative of George Church’s lab at Harvard. He currently serves on the board at BosLab, Boston’s DIY Bio lab.

delton13727 May 2023 16:06 UTC
5 points
2 comments1 min readLW link