Arc Institute

Arc was founded so that brilliant minds can pursue their boldest ideas. Today, our newest Investigators and Awardees join the Arc community. These exceptional scientists are pioneering research into critical questions about complex human disease. Join us in welcoming: 🧑🔬Core Investigators Felix Horns, Isha Jain, and Christoph Thaiss 🔬Science Fellow Uche Medoh, PhD 🦠Innovation Investigators Maayan Levy and Theo Roth 💥Ignite Award recipient Will Allen. We’re also excited to let you know that our 2025 faculty search applications are now open! Core Investigator candidates can apply now through coordinated searches with University of California, San Francisco, Department of Neurology or Stanford University Bioengineering Department, or through our open call! Potential Science Fellows and Innovation Investigators may apply through our open searches: https://lnkd.in/gCcPc-yh Head to our blog for more on our new scientists: https://lnkd.in/gqyb4fg8

Exciting collaborations old and new are flourishing at our first Investigator Retreat. Thank you Hani Goodarzi, Chun Jimmie Ye, Xiaojie Qiu, Silvana Konermann, Patrick Hsu, Jingtian Zhou, Luke Gilbert, Andrew Yang, Anna Molofsky, Nathanael Gray, Alanna Schepartz, Isha Jain, and William Greenleaf for sharing your progress yesterday and sparking new ideas. See everyone next year!

It’s not often we catch all of our Core Investigators in one place, standing still, but we did it! Welcome Dr. Felix Horns - Patrick Hsu, Silvana Konermann, Lingyin Li, Luke Gilbert, Hani Goodarzi and Arc Science Fellows Uche Medoh, PhD and Jingtian Zhou are glad you're here.

🎉 Today, Arc welcomes our newest Core Investigator, Dr. Felix Horns! Dr. Horns joins the Arc community as a Core Investigator and Stanford University School of Medicine as Assistant Professor of Genetics. The Horns lab works at the interface of synthetic biology and genomics to discover the fundamental principles governing how cells and tissues operate, particularly within the immune system and the brain. At Arc, the Horns lab will create and apply new technologies for monitoring and manipulating living cells, shedding light into how cells change over time and how therapeutics could be delivered directly to cells within the body. Welcome to Arc, Dr. Horns! 🥼

We are thrilled to gather our Core Investigators, Science Fellows, Innovation Investigators, Ignite Awardees, and Technology Center leaders for our first Investigator Retreat. Thank you to Carolyn Bertozzi for launching with an inspiring keynote, and to Lingyin Li, Zhenan Bao, Uche Medoh, PhD, and Katrin Andreasson who shared their work and plans. Can’t wait for Day 2!

An exciting update from Arc! Today, we launched our Scientific Advisory board and welcomed our first Scientific Advisors, Nobel Laureate Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi and Dr. Aviv Regev, EVP of Genentech Research & Early Development. Both Drs. Bertozzi and Regev have long careers leading interdisciplinary research into human disease and mentoring the next generation of scientists. They have redefined their fields, and we're proud to have them at Arc. We’re also pleased to announce that Meta CFO Susan Li and entrepreneur Reid Hoffman have joined former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman on the Arc Board of Directors. As Arc continues to grow, we’re honored to have the support of these veteran leaders from some of the world’s most respected companies. Welcome to Arc! Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/gs8eKUGG

🧬 Turns out, mRNA isn't just a passive genetic courier. Arc’s Hani Goodarzi and lab, in collaboration with Luke Gilbert’s lab, discovered that mRNA can actively control its own expression using newly discovered "RNA switches." The team found over 200 of these switches in human cells, previously thought to exist only in simple, single-celled organisms. This has the potential to help revolutionize drug development, especially for "undruggable" proteins that can’t be targeted by therapeutics directly. Congrats to Arc Core Investigator and UCSF Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics Hani Goodarzi, Arc Post Doc Matvei Khoroshkin and the entire team on this exciting work. Read the study in Nature Methods: https://lnkd.in/e7ygr5s5 Learn more in Matvei Khoroshkin's ‘Behind the paper’ blog post: https://lnkd.in/eX3R2qEC Check out the Goodarzi lab’s SwitchFinder tool designed for the systematic discovery of RNA structural switches within transcriptomes: https://lnkd.in/eav4WZ7U

Interested in how Lingyin Li and postdoctoral researcher Chris Ritchie unlocked the secrets of PELI2, a new player in autoimmunity? You can learn more at the Arc blog: https://lnkd.in/gyvjsBhi

Introducing a powerful, programmable new mechanism for genome design: DNA recombination with bridge RNAs, discovered by Arc’s Patrick Hsu lab. As the first natural RNA-guided DNA recombinase, this system enables insertion, excision, or inversion of any two DNA sequences. CRISPR has revolutionized gene editing. But for true large-scale genome design, scientists need a precise and programmable way to rearrange large segments of DNA. The bridge recombinase programmably joins two DNA molecules without exposing DNA breaks, overcoming key limitations of existing approaches. How does it work? The recombinase enzyme relies on a noncoding bridge RNA with two loops. One loop binds the donor DNA and the other loop binds the target DNA – the first example of a bispecific guide RNA. The two loops can be independently programmed to control the directionality of the DNA rearrangement. The new discovery is the result of two and a half years of collaboration with scientists across disciplines, institutes, and continents. The research was led by Patrick Hsu Matthew Durrant Nicholas Perry, with significant contributions from Arc Core Investigator Silvana Konermann’s lab, and the Nishimasu lab at the The University of Tokyo, led by Hiroshi Nishimasu. It is an early example of scientific output from Arc Institute’s collaborative model, which blends expert scientific staff with graduate students from Arc’s partner universities–UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and UCSF–in an interdisciplinary research environment across computational and experimental science. “We are excited to explore new applications that stem from our team’s interdisciplinary research across computation, genetics, biochemistry, bioengineering, and structural biology—the deep synergistic work that Arc was specifically designed to accelerate," said Hsu. Read more: https://lnkd.in/gipcKrFn First study in @Nature: https://lnkd.in/g6RwBQGE Second study in @Nature: https://lnkd.in/gHSh9tSb Learn about job opportunities at Arc: https://lnkd.in/gyfgqR3n Video by Visual Science

🎧 Exciting new discovery from Lingyin Li and postdoctoral researcher Chris Ritchie on PELI2: a protein that functions like noise-canceling headphones for the cGAS-STING pathway. cGAS-STING is a crucial immune defense mechanism for the human body that’s triggered in response to threats like viral and bacterial infections and cancer. But how does it know when to fight and when to stand down? Lingyin and Chris found that PELI2 acts like a sensor, filtering out cellular “white noise” that could chronically trigger STING—and lead to inflammatory conditions like lupus and neurodegeneration. At the same time, PELI2 turns into an amplifier when interferon levels grow above a certain threshold, ensuring that STING turns on at the right time. As Lingyin explains, “This research was highly interdisciplinary, combining “hardcore” biochemistry with immunology, genetics, and computation, but likely would not have received funding under traditional models. It’s the kind of curiosity-driven, interdisciplinary work that we’re uniquely positioned to do at Arc.” Read the full study in MolecularCell: https://lnkd.in/gmj6VDHK