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As a biotechnology reporter, this Newscriptster is constantly impressed by the creative names some companies choose. News publication Fierce Biotech also recognized this aspect of the industry when it hosted a tournament of the best names back in April 2024—a belated congratulations to their winner, Werewolf Therapeutics! But some of our personal favorites didn’t make it into the tournament, so we set out to get the stories behind their names, and a few were quite surprising.
The company Light Horse Therapeutics, which launched after the tournament ended, leverages genome editing to find oncology targets that a small molecule could act on. Its name evokes a majestic equine creature like a unicorn, at least to this Newscriptster. But the name actually comes from a military term for the light cavalry. “This infantry was the first to attack, and we’re a company that is trying to develop drugs that attack cancer in a similar way,” says Light Horse CEO Markus Renschler.
The name Foghorn Therapeutics comes from company cofounder Cigall Kadoch’s childhood in the San Francisco Bay Area, where foghorn sounds were common, says Karin Hellsvik, Foghorn’s vice president of corporate affairs and investor relations. Kadoch thought the foghorn was an apt inspiration because of its variability and critical role in granting ships’ entry to harbors—changes to its frequency and sound convey messages to ships, and without it, ships could collide and sustain damage. The company focuses on the chromatin regulatory system, which, akin to a foghorn, grants access to a DNA section. And Hellsvik says the foghorn remains useful despite the advent of new navigational equipment, which lines up with how working scientists combine advances in technology, like high-throughput sequencing and artificial intelligence, with more established science.
Finally, there’s BigHat Biosciences, which is this Newscriptster’s favorite name. The firm uses machine learning to design new antibodies. It draws its moniker from the mathematical notation hat, which indicates that a given value is an estimation. “Our name BigHat Biosciences really describes what we do here: large-scale (Big) estimation (Hat) in the Biosciences,” Elizabeth Schwarzbach, the company’s chief business officer, tells Newscripts in an email. BigHat has leaned into the name though: its main discovery platform is called Milliner.
If you want to run a biotechnology start-up in your kitchen (suggested name: Kitchen Sink Biosciences), maybe Breville’s RotoVap will be appealing. A Bluesky post from Dec. 6, 2024, by Laura Turculet, a chemistry professor at Dalhousie University, alerted the ChemSky community to the $13,999.95 rotary vacuum evaporator marketed for kitchen use.
Why would anyone need specialty laboratory equipment in their kitchen? According to Matt Hartings, an American University chemistry professor and author of Chemistry in Your Kitchen, the idea isn’t actually farfetched. A rotary evaporator allows culinary professionals to get more pure flavors out of juices and herbs. For example, the recondensed material from a lemon or lime peel extraction in ethanol can yield more flavor intensity.
“As you’re rotovapping, the volatiles, a lot of the flavors that you want, are going to start to transfer from the main ball to the collection bulb. You can get these concentrated flavors out of it. Obviously, if you’ve got something like lime juice, lime juice has natural sugars in it. Those sugars are not volatile. You’re not going to get that into what you collect,” Hartings tells Newscripts.
But this is not very practical for home use. Although the RotoVap is listed for sale on the site of a popular kitchen appliance company, it’s labeled as a specialty appliance, and the machine is made by lab instrumentation company Heidolph, not Breville. Hartings says this device is intended for specialty use, like in a fancy cocktail bar or one of chef José Andrés’s restaurants in Washington, DC. The hobbyist chef will likely find that squeezing lime juice the old-fashioned way is perfectly fine.
Please send comments and suggestions to newscripts@acs.org.
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