Ben Nashman
@ben_nashman
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Playing with magnets at @synexmedical | Thiel Fellow
Joined January 2017
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I'm very excited to share a major breakthrough we've made toward solving non-invasive glucose monitoring!
The future of health monitoring is coming.
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I'm so honoured and excited to be awarded a 2021 Thiel Fellowship!
Super grateful to have their support and I can't wait for what's next!
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MRIs and NMR machines require incredibly uniform magnetic fields, not varying in strength by more than a fraction of a part-per-million (equivalent to looking at the thickness of a piece of paper from a mile away!)
How can you possibly build magnets that accomplish this??
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Spin echo visualized
As close to an Uno Reverse Card as you can get in physics
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Neurogenesis almost universally decreases with age in all brain regions after 25. Appears well correlated with age-dependent decrease in fluid intelligence.
Any groups trying to solve this longevity problem? I haven’t heard of a single one, you’d think it’d be more talked about
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I'm super excited to announce Synex's funding!! We're building something that WILL change the face of healthcare and self-measurement. Stay tuned for updates, what we're building is going to blow you away 🤯
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Real time metabolomics.
Preventative MRIs.
Predictive genomics.
I’m calling it: true predictive medicine will be achievable this decade.
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How magnetic resonance works, explained with only analogies.
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Shimming doesn't just affect how nice a signal looks in NMR, but also how well you can see it
Here's a simulated signal with the same energy AND noise, but with a field inhomogeneity of 1Hz versus 10Hz
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“Synex has shrunk this technology to measure concentrations in a finger. I have reviewed their white paper and seen the instrument work.” Simpson said Synex’s ability to retrofit MRS technology into a small box is an engineering feat.
Non-invasive glucose monitoring is coming.
Researchers use magnetic fields for non-invasive blood glucose monitoring
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I’m thrilled to announce that
@JohnCapodilupo
, Co-Founder and former CTO of Whoop, will be joining Synex as President!
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A close family member has had elevated creatinine for the last ~20 years, otherwise in good health. Never was able to get it down to healthy levels
8 months in on rapamycin (5mg/wk) it’s down for the first time. Family physician is shocked
Anecdotal, but interesting data point
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I think there's enough evidence at this point to start pro-actively taking geroprotectors for longevity (drugs that extend lifespan). In particular:
- mTOR inhibitors like rapamycin and rapalogs
- Drugs that limit glucose spikes (e.g. acarbose, canagliflozin)
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The cool thing about working on something new in deep-tech is that you're literally at the edge of human knowledge at every turn
It's not like you're trying to reproduce a paper or following a textbook... the answers are just unknown!
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Most experiments that probe quantum mechanics take years to build, and it makes it feel so foreign and mysterious
In NMR, you can write down the quantum description of what happens when you do a certain experiment, and in just seconds you get your answer
It's really beautiful
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“Innovation” lost its meaning as soon as companies started confusing it with “optimization”. Solving an unsolved problem is orders of magnitude harder than optimizing what already exists
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The best feeling in the world is solving a complex problem with a simple solution
All the struggles and brainstorming are worth it for those "aha" moments
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Hyperpolarized MRI has the potential to nearly completely replace PET scans
Radiation free and can look at many more tracers!
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Therefore, every magnetic field can be written as an infinite sum of spherical harmonics
The special property that we care about is that each of these harmonics are *orthogonal* to each other. They also look pretty neat!
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Founders who brag about team size / funding miss the point. You rarely hear of the huge team spending massively winning in the end –– it's the lean, smart team that knows how to focus and move quickly
Be lean, spend wisely, and deliver efficiently
Brag about outputs, not inputs
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The record for life extension in any animal dates to a 2007 study in PI3K-null mutant C. Elegans worms
Nearly 10x extension in lifespan!
This paper convinced me that radical life extension is possible (but very hard!!)
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@engineers_feed
If a + b = c, then (a + b - c) = 0. Can’t divide by 0 so can’t divide by (a + b - c). Otherwise you get nonsensical results, like the above…
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To do this, engineers design clever coil geometries that produce only specific spherical harmonics. So for each harmonic, there is an associated coil that produces that particular field. Some examples of what these coils look like:
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UI this century will be broadly defined by
Mobile —> AR/VR —> BCI
It’s really just about making accessing information more and more natural. UI of tomorrow will be like comparing mobile today with accessing the internet in the early 90s
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A small and exceptionally talented group of people will almost always outperform the big team with the big brand
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Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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Magnetic resonance is so cool
I've been doing this for a while and am still consistently blown away by what our team comes up with
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The digital revolution gave people the ability to access the world
The bio revolution will give people the ability to access themselves
The future of health monitoring is coming
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Being able to filter through information quickly is more important than having the right knowledge base to start with
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Once the field is "well shimmed" and uniform enough, we can start doing the imaging or NMR experiments that we care about, like the image of me in my profile pic 😉
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It's never been a better time for new magnet materials to be developed. We're well past the plateau of the highest performance neodymium magnets first developed in the 80s, with no major breakthroughs since
This field is ripe for something new
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Wouldn't it be great if something could actually measure your metabolism and go beyond just basic surface level vitals? 😉
I've been wearing an Oura ring for the past few months. I think it's bullshit.
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Biotech today is very similar to the early days of Silicon Valley. The 2020s are going to be defined by tech risk, with the following decades being more market risk like software/computing is now
🚀Technology risk
Can we build it?
💵Market risk
We can build it, but will people buy it?
⚖️Political risk
We can build it, and we know people will buy it, but will they ban it?
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We’re adding more great roles to the team 💪
If you’re a physicist or electrical engineer that’s inspired to work on a groundbreaking problem in healthcare along a world-class team, check us out
Come help us miniaturize MRI by 1000x!
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We're looking for someone to join as part of the core software team at Synex.
If you want to work with the smartest group of people I've ever seen and play a key part in building the next generation of health monitoring tech, check us out:
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When dedicated longevity therapies come out, there’s probably going to be a massive switch to thinking of aging as a disease by the general public. Once people realize something can be treated, it’s no longer just “a part of life”
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I get asked a lot if Synex is an NMR company.
No, it’s not. We’re a health-tech company — our mission is to make healthcare predictive, preventative and widely accessible
NMR is just by far the best way to get there!
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I sometimes think how lucky I am that I get to see a secret glimpse of the future every day
It's easy to get tunnel vision on all the work, but stepping back it's pretty nuts to think how crazy the future of health monitoring is going to be
Exciting times!
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Seeing what's been in CAD for months become a reality is so satisfying
I've never been as excited about the next few months, we've got some crazy things in the works
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If people get this excited about
@NASAPersevere
landing on Mars, imagine what it'll be like once we get humans on Mars
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Ignoring everything else about 2020, this year has actually been great for science — phosphine discovered on Venus, first “movie” of a black hole, Nobel prizes were VERY well deserved, room temp superconductivity, new vaccine & anti-viral tech, most epidemiology work ever...
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One of the coolest things I find about NMR signals is that many "errors" you encounter are simply convolutions with the ideal signal
It's such a fantastic property as it makes simple yet effective post-processing possible!
Felt like doing a bit of math so here we go...
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If you want to work on cutting-edge applied physics and are interested in ultra-miniaturized magnetic resonance, this is the role for you.
Preferred specialties include electromagnetics, magnetostatics, and an ambition to solve really hard problems 😉
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The best ideas happen early in the morning
The best results happen late at night in the lab
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Almost all the sensors in modern wearables are miniaturized 20th-century tech. There isn’t much more low hanging fruit left to integrate
Measuring beyond basic vitals is a nonlinear jump in difficulty, but the future wearables that do it will have a nonlinear jump in usefulness
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I think it's feasible to do full brain imaging at cellular resolution in the next 10 - 20 years
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The trick is that for each harmonic that exists in the field, we add just enough current in the associated coil to perfectly cancel out that component. This lets us iteratively "shim" the field until it's super uniform
[src: ]
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I think, non-intuitively, this could be (partly) explained by a selection effect
As survival rates improve, more people with a genetic predisposition to cancer are able to pass their genes to the next generation
Over time, this would manifest as a rising incidence in cancer,
BREAKING: American Cancer Society data finds that new cancer diagnoses in the United States are expected to rise over 2 million for the first time this year, with an increase in cancers among younger people.
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Founders who intro their company by talking about how much they’ve raised first and product second 🚩 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩
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Excited to be featured on
@TechTO
's Company of the Week! Huge thanks to
@alexandernorman
for your continued support 🙌
If you want to join our mission to make healthcare proactive with next-gen magnetic resonance technology, check us out – we're hiring!
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This is big
A single cycle of reprogramming with Yamanaka factors reverses multiple aging biomarkers in mice, throughout the body
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@uOttawaNMR
After years of staring at NMR spectra I still have to google upfield vs downfield
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Every person working in longevity should keep this poem up on their wall
It’s the eternal fight against nature — do not go gentle into that good night
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“Yes, I accept the geroscience hypothesis.” 😌
Rapamycin & Canagliflozin
Two drugs consistently shown to increase lifespan across model organisms
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@Andercot
Permanent magnet: we haven’t gotten a higher remanence material since neodymium magnets were discovered in the 80s
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A lot more is possible in engineering when you think from first principles over best practices
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And for those of you that I know will ask – we don’t usually dress this fancy. Our Christmas party was postponed cause of omicron, so happy April holidays from Synex!
P.s. can you guess what's under the black box? 😉
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When you lie in an MRI enough times you start to recognize what's being scanned by the sounds alone 😉
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The answer is shimming!
We iteratively vary the different components of the field until we cancel out all the inhomogeneities
I'll explain why and how this works in this thread 👇
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Right now all the protons in your body are quietly wobbling around the Earth’s magnetic field, which makes your whole body just a tiny bit magnetic
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Thinking of all the times I've been a test subject at Synex, I think I might have the record for most magnetic resonance scans on a person 😂
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You’re probably used to seeing the blue curve but not the red
Life expectancy at birth has increased massively, while measured from age 90 it’s been relatively flat
Moving that red curve upward is going to require a fundamental change in medicine!
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Twitter gives me a ton of breadth of information, whereas
@joinClubhouse
gives me depth. Feels like the first platform to actually nail that
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@reallytanman
I studied this for a little bit. Dominant cause of skin cancer is UV generating pyrimidine dimers in DNA and improper repair by the cell. Little or nothing to do with lipids. Don’t give bad advice based on cherry-picked correlations
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Who says this isn’t the gom jabbar test 🤔
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When there are no source charges, Maxwell tells us that all magnetic fields satisfy these two equations, where B is the magnetic flux density in units of Tesla (a vector field describing the direction and strength of magnetic field lines in space)
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Sigil is legit, this is a great overview for anyone looking to get an O1
I wish I had a guide like this back when I was getting my visa!
I JUST got my O-1 Visa and moved to the US!
Here's how I did it as a 20 y/o:
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Typical day in hardware design:
Physics: great design!
Electrical: great design!
Mechanical: great design!
Thermal: *laughs*... no
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We’re only able to see a tiny portion of the EM spectrum, yet that’s how we make up our entire view of the world
One day I can see artificial eyes giving people access to so many other wavelengths. Imagine how strangely different the same world will seem…
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Non-invasive glucose monitoring is the Holy Grail of health monitoring and an unsolved scientific challenge for the last 40 years. It takes an incredibly smart and hard working team to solve it, and I’m proud to be working with people like John on this vision
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Going from relaxometry to spectroscopy is the NMR equivalent of a rocket just passing the Karman line versus going into orbit
Both look impressive from the outside, but one is wayyy harder yet much more useful
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The problems with the most opportunity tend to be those that have a lot of people (unsuccessfully) trying to solve them in similar ways
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Pretty soon we'll start thinking of modern CGMs as archaic tech. But even with them so many people see huge health benefits from only blood glucose!
Once there's something more scalable and user-friendly (*cough cough* non-invasive), benefits are going to be impossible to ignore
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When building something new, taking a guess and iterating is a guaranteed way to move faster. Wanting to perfect everything from the start sounds logical but is almost always slower in the end
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At Synex we think of ourselves as low-field, but this is LOW low-field. Definitely check it out if you haven’t already!
I am very happy to share my plenary lecture on the last two decades of millitesla MRI research in my laboratory which I gave at the
@ISMRM
annual virtual meeting.
@MGHMartinos
#physicslife
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Why predictive health and longevity science is so important:
Of the top 32 annual causes of death, 23 are health related
Of the top 5 from this list, *four* are age-related diseases
This might seem obvious to you, but years from now people will be appalled by these numbers
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Something I've noticed after hiring for a while now:
Wanting to work on one thing that's very mission-driven is a hugely positive signal
Wanting to work on many different things because "variety is interesting" is a red flag
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Can’t beat a direct measurement 🤷♂️
…by quantitatively and directly measuring the integrated signal intensities in the 1H NMR spectrum.
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When you work on tech designed for the human body, you start to appreciate all the insane complexity of even the most seemingly simple body parts
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For any vector field, the following identity is satisfied (the vector Laplacian):
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I've talked with people over the years who aren't enthusiastic about predictive health
Their reason is not that they don't care about their health, but that they don't want to know if they'll develop a disease and can't do anything about it
This is important to get right...
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Look through the noise. Focus on core tech and real breakthroughs. You can’t beat the fundamentals
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Not that anyone asked, but a few thoughts I've had recently:
Founders freaking out about the downturn and rate hikes need to put things into perspective. The last 10 years have been a sugar high from crazy low interest rates making cash super cheap
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Lots of entrepreneurs focusing on solving the drug discovery problem, yet vaccine development is also so far behind. A definite opportunity
After more than two decades of research, the world finally has an approved Ebola vaccine.
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This is one of the best intros to aging biology and longevity interventions I've seen to date by
@mkaeberlein
Can't believe it doesn't have more views, highly recommend you give it a watch if you're interested in the field
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“There is grandeur in this view of life... whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
- Charles Darwin 🐤🐦🐧
#DarwinDay
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@kenklippenstein
It’s completely changed prototyping in hardware. Iteration time went from days to weeks down to hours for some parts
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