Ferran Muiños

@fmuinos.bsky.social

Scientist working on computational genomics, looking into mutational heterogeneity and somatic evolution. Maths, Stats, ML, Bioinfo. BBGLab, IRB Barcelona.

💯. I think too many people treat AI containment and alignment as an engineering challenge to be solved. As I see it, the problem is far more fundamental, and harder to solve (arguably unsolvable). Understanding why requires understanding evolution. Short thread 🧵

Yoshua Bengio@yoshuabengio.bsky.social · 6d ago

A dangerous myth has gained traction after the recent hacks perpetrated by the AI agents developed by leading companies: That these incidents are just cyber security problems, that it's only a matter of fixing the sandboxes in which they’re trained.

1/17 We are very happy to announce our latest work about the genetic origin and evolution of one of the most aggressive pediatric tumors: “Variable latency between the founder genetic event and rhabdoid tumor expansion” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6.... Follow the thread to know more 👇

Variable latency between the founder genetic event and rhabdoid tumor expansion

Rhabdoid tumors are very aggressive rare pediatric cancers with poor survival affecting very young children. They are characterized by the bi-allelic loss of SMARCB1 or SMARCA4, which is suspected to ...

biorxiv.org

Tumor promotion through the lens of evolution This review grew out of many long conversations, shared ideas, and lively discussions It has been a real pleasure to think together with Allan, Paul, Eve, and Abel about how tumours develop and how carcinogens shape cancer risk rdcu.be/fdC2J

Tumour promotion through the lens of evolution

Nature - This Review revisits tumour initiation and promotion in light of clonal diversity and the presence of cancer driver mutations in normal tissues, aiming to understand mechanisms that enable...

rdcu.be

To better treat cancer, we need to understand its underlying biology. Despite decades of research, some fundamental questions remain unanswered. One is why certain key tumor suppressor or oncogenes lead to cancer predominantly in single tissue: e.g. Rb in the retina, or APC in the colon 1/n 🧪

Diagram illustrating the two-hit model of retinoblastoma

Just learned that pandas and numpy do not provide the same default calculation of the variance: pandas gives the unbiased sample variance estimator whilst numpy gives the MLE estimator 😱 To get the pandas behaviour with numpy, use the kwarg ddof=1 👌

Hello world! Kicking off my first post with some exciting news 📣 Our study on tobacco smoke-induced mutagenesis in head & neck cancer (HNC) is out today in @naturegenet.bsky.social! rdcu.be/efNiH 🧬🔥 We uncover the multiple ways tobacco and alcohol drive HNC development. A short thread 🧵⬇️

The complexity of tobacco smoke-induced mutagenesis in head and neck cancer

Nature Genetics - Whole-genome sequencing and mutational signature analysis of 265 head and neck cancer samples collected from eight different countries provide insight into the vital contribution...

rdcu.be

During apartheid, South African armed forces killed 69 civilians in the Sharpeville Massacre. The world was shocked. This event is still taught in history classes. On average, Israel has massacred more than 70 Palestinian civilians *every day* for the past 18 months.