Vikram Agarwal
Head of mRNA Platform Design Data Science @Sanofi. R&D in mRNA therapeutics using ML/DL. Formerly @ UTAustin, MIT, MSFTResearch, UW, & Calico. Latest work: gScholar (https://tinyurl.com/3xdfksy6)
- Reposted by Vikram AgarwalDoes the noncoding genome actually carry more genetic information than coding seqs? Motivated by this question we mutated every bp in the 10kb MYC locus. Results are even more exciting: Decoding the MYC locus reveals a druggable ultraconserved RNA element www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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- One sane article in a sea of endless misinformation: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/o...
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- Reposted by Vikram AgarwalEvery reputable expert I know considers mRNA vaccine technology to be one of the most revolutionary advances in medicine in our lifetimes. Its inventors won the Nobel Prize in 2023. Shutting it down now is pointless self-harm to humanity.
- Reposted by Vikram AgarwalCheck out the latest study from our lab, led by Coffee Xiang (@coffeebond007.bsky.social) www.nature.com/articles/s41... (1/2)
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- Very excited that our most significant work, a collaboration w/ Dr. Can Cenik at UT Austin on translational gene regulation, was finally published in Nature Biotechnology in a dual set of studies: Paper 1 -- an AI model trained to predict translation rates from mRNA sequences: rdcu.be/exN1l
- Paper 2 -- Translational co-regulation detected in mammalian cells www.nature.com/articles/s41... A deeper explanation of the human story, scientific conclusions, and Github/Zenodo links to use the pre-trained models: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...
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- Reposted by Vikram AgarwalVaccine refusal, encouraged by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has now led to the worst U.S. measles outbreak since the disease was classified as eliminated in 2000. This was preventable. Vaccines save lives and prevent hospitalizations that are physically, mentally, and financially draining.
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- Reposted by Vikram AgarwalI've seen folks talk about how "in four years" they'll be able to get back to their planned projects and I really don't think that's going to work out. People & projects losing funding now will not be able to hit pause and come back once funding is restored. Hard-won progress & capacity will be lost
- Some exciting news! 🥳👍 finally dropped our open-source AI model to predict translation rates from mRNA sequences online for free academic use! Hope it's widely used among RNA scientists! Code: github.com/Sanofi-Publi...; Model: zenodo.org/records/1537...; Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Vikram AgarwalDeaths from heart disease down 75%, that’s NIH. Deaths from stroke down 75%, that’s NIH. HIV/AIDS no longer a death sentence, that’s NIH. 99% of FDA approved drugs in the last decade, that’s NIH. Please show this video to anyone who doesn’t understand why the NIH is so important.
- At what point in history did science become partisan? Didn't we all agree that innovations help all of us? If our brother/mother/father or YOU are stricken with cancer, do you really think you have "owned the libs" by destroying NIH/NSF funding? The amount of self-inflicted destruction is dizzying 😢
- Reposted by Vikram AgarwalI talked to Nature about the latest development at NSF, which is a five-alarm fire for American science. The scale of immediate impact is massive. We narrowly escaped this affecting @viralemergence.org for now, but will have to shut down in a few months if this stays. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
- Reposted by Vikram AgarwalDr. Anthony Fauci urges Americans not to accept "Normalization of Untruths".
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- Reposted by Vikram AgarwalTime to catch up on the past week’s news about science and medicine in the US. Whew. 1/10
- Reposted by Vikram AgarwalBREAKING: NSF has frozen all grant funding, as of yesterday. It's unclear when they will resume funding awards, or why the pause has been put in place. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
- Reposted by Vikram AgarwalThe possibility that RFK Jr. is going to undermine herd immunity in the United States grows increasingly likely. This would mean that US will be responsible for starting numerous pandemics and potentially destroying the effectiveness of the entire globe’s vaccine arsenal. This is bioterrorism.
- Reposted by Vikram AgarwalIn what proportions is our new NIH Director a flaming ignoramus vs. a brazen liar?
- One of the toughest parts of the field of massively parallel reporter assays to measure >~thousands of elements is that there are hundreds of pubs using them, but no central repo to easily locate the results....until now! Great collab w/ Jingjing Zhao, Ilias G-S, and @nadavahituv.bsky.social!!
- Glad I'm not the only one observing the irony of tech billionaires handing out science prizes while backing an admin that has dismantled American science. New level of #respect for Seth Rogan
- Pretty cool study... But to me it also highlights simply how releasing more historical medical records could lead to powerful scientific findings that would impact public health policy. Not fully sure the reasons the medical community isn't doing that despite being able to anonymize them...
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- Dear America: if your daughter or son or mother or father or YOU have cancer, and there is or could be an mRNA vaccine that would treat it, are you prepared to destroy the research/tech that would save their lives? Because doing so would take your self-sabotage to unprecedented levels of stupidity..
- Most bizarre article I've read in quite some time...of course, Florida is no stranger to bizarre
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- Published in today's issue! OPEN ACCESS article, FREE massive dataset, FREE code, FREE pre-trained AI/ML model. #OpenScience was a mountain of work to make this happen: check it out if you haven't already 😉
- Reposted by Vikram AgarwalInteresting! @nytimes.com still hasn’t covered any of the Stand Up for Science protests today, but they made sure to put this important news front and center online. Powerful reporting…
- Life achievement unlocked: our first cover art accepted alongside our new review on computational techniques to model lipid nanocarriers for drug delivery!
- Waiting for someone to download the 80M papers on sci-hub and train an agentic AI reasoning system to query it...would be illegal but simultaneously synthesize all of scientific knowledge as we know it into one oracle of knowledge...😈
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- #Vibes I'm feeling these days in USA...Incubus was way ahead of their time 🫣
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- Reposted by Vikram AgarwalThe City of Boston is leading 40+ mayors, cities, and counties in an amicus brief against the Trump Administration's drastic and illegal cuts to federal research funding—cuts that will lead to immediate job losses nationwide.
- Very interesting work, congrats @anshulkundaje.bsky.social and team!!!
- Disease diagnostics using machine learning of B cell and T cell receptor sequences www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... TL;DR: BCRs ARE ALL YOU NEED! (Well actually .... keep reading) 1/
- Reposted by Vikram AgarwalThe DOGE firings have nothing to do with “efficiency” or “cutting waste.” They’re a direct push to weaken federal agencies perceived as liberal. This was evident from the start, and now the data confirms it: targeted agencies overwhelmingly those seen as more left-leaning. 🧵⬇️
- Reposted by Vikram AgarwalScientists are now organizing events, called Stand Up for Science, on 7 March in Washington, D.C., and state capitals. So far, they have attracted more than 100 volunteers from some 30 states who are hoping to rally support for research as a public good. scim.ag/4328LAD
- Although I find the NIH cuts very troubling and strongly opposed to them, I think it's a legitimate question to ask why Harvard's indirect costs are 69% and to call for transparency about how they're spent.
- Reposted by Vikram AgarwalIt’s been a tough few weeks. My 10yo daughter was diagnosed with a very rare, aggressive cancer called interdigitating dendritic cell sarcoma (IDCS). I’m reaching out to identify clinicians/patients who have encountered pediatric IDCS or other (non-LCH) dendritic or histiocytic sarcomas cases.
- Fruitful collaboration between our team & Sven Jager/Ziv Bar Joseph's team @Sanofi published today @narjournal.bsky.social: a language model that learns the grammar of all regions of an mRNA from head to tail!! Can be fine-tuned on all of your favorite mRNA-related tasks -- a successor of CodonBERT.
- Amazing & creative work, congrats!!
- Now out in @science.org w/ @jshendure.bsky.social we present 'Genome-shuffle-seq': a method to shuffle mammalian genomes and characterize the impact of structural variants (SVs) with single-cell resolution in one experiment. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
- Am I the only one feeling schadenfreude about USA's arrogance about it's AI superiority, as they got their butt kicked by DeepSeek-R1, and that the facade of needing 100K GPUs for training was an intellectually lazy and uninspiring solution that crumbled before the world's eyes? 👀
- Proud of my team @Sanofi in helping to write this monumental review for the use of computational tools (both from an MD perspective and AI/ML) in modeling LNPs. We hope it will illustrate the power of computation as a complementary approach to devise enhanced delivery solutions for therapeutics.
- 2 interns available in my team!! www.linkedin.com/posts/activi...
- Check out our new & improved V2 manuscript for RiboNN, with new analyses to further sharpen the results!! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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- As someone who has always embraced tech my whole life, I gotta say it's been an embarrassing disappointment to see all of the tech execs (Nadella, Musk, Zuck, etc) kneel to Trump. By doing so, they have utterly normalized extremely degrading behavior. Whole world is twisted, and hope ppl wake up...
- Reposted by Vikram AgarwalMassively parallel reporter assays (MPRAs) testing >680,000 sequences combined with machine learning to improve regulatory element & variant effect prediction. Amazing work by @vagar.bsky.social, Fumitaka Inoue, @jshendure.bsky.social and many others as part of ENCODE. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Super excited to announce our latest work. On a personal note, it's not an exaggeration to say that blood, sweat, and tears got us to the finish line on this: working w/ an outstanding global team of scientists in Germany, Japan, Russia, and USA responding in >100 pages of complex reviewer comments.
