Hi friends 👋,
Stocks are worth $0 now (I think, haven’t checked) and the string of perfect weather in NYC has ended, but the optimism streak continues! The world’s researchers and engineers are still cooking up the good stuff, and we’re here to serve it to you.
Let’s get to it.
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(1) FDA Approves Voceryq, the First Plasmid DNA Immunotherapy
FDA / INOVIO, video by Runway
Last Friday, just a few hours after I hit send on the Dose, the FDA granted accelerated approval to INOVIO’s Voceryq, the first plasmid DNA-based immunotherapy approved in the US.
Voceryq will be used to treat recurrent respiratory papillomatosis, a disease I’d never heard of but sounds awful. Caused by HPV types 6 and 11, RPP gives victims wart-like growths in the airway, usually around the vocal cords, that make their voices hoarse, make them cough, and in severe cases, make it hard to breathe.
Surgeons can remove the growths, but the virus remains in the tissue, so the throat growths keep coming back, and patients end up in the operating room again and again for years. In the trial, 26 adults had needed at least three surgeries in the year before treatment.
As shown in the video above, Voceryq delivers two plasmids (small loops of DNA originally borrowed from bacteria) into muscle cells. One carries instructions for HPV-6 and HPV-11 proteins, which teaches the immune system to go after infected cells, and the other carries IL-12, a molecule that turns the immune response up. A device fires brief electrical pulses that open temporary pores in cell membranes so the DNA can get inside without requiring a virus for delivery.
After treatment, 7 of the 26 patients in the trial didn’t need surgery for the entire following year. It’s a small open-label trial, and INOVIO still has to confirm the results in a follow-up study, but it’s on the path now, which thank god, because this was the last shot. The company was set to run out of cash in Q1 2027, but its stock tripled in after hours after posting the results.
This isn’t the first treatment for RPP - Precigen’s Papzimeos, which uses a modified virus to target the same HPV types, won full approval in August 2025.
RPP patients have gone from no treatments beside surgery to two, which is amazing, but the platform will likely prove to be even more important.
If you can get a plasmid into cells and get the immune system to act on it, you can swap in instructions for other HPV diseases, cancers, and infections, which is what INOVIO is planning to do next.
DN-AYYYYYY!
(2) Zipline Raises $1.5B to Build Nationwide Drone Network
There are very few companies out there as cool as Zipline. After starting by serving hospitals and health facilities across Africa, where they were allowed to fly drones and the need was most acute, they came to America last year to do deliveries, starting in Texas.
CEO Keller Clifton said that over the past 18 months, they’ve grown flight volumes 18x and are now doing more that a million deliveries per year per metro.
Now, they’re going to be able to do a lot more. The company raised $1.5 billion at a $21.5 billion valuation in a round led by Paradigm, WCM, and Layer.
They’re using the money to bring drone deliveries nationwide. To that end, they signed “the largest autonomous vehicle contract in human history to expand automated delivery nationally with Walmart,” with whom they’ll scale to 300 supercenters throughout these United States.
This is awesome news. Zipline’s drones are quiet, safe (they’ve done over 150M commercial autonomous miles with no safety incidents), fast, affordable, and don’t require a human chaperone. As I wrote in my Deep Dive on Airbound, I’m incredibly optimistic that a good deal of movement will move to the skies, and this is an important step in that direction.
Since the Eagles stink and I can’t use this on them much, I’ll use it here:
Fly Zipline Fly.
(3) DREADDs Work in Humans
In April, Owl Posting wrote an essay on “new knobs of control,” including DREADDS, which he explains like this:
You use a viral vector to deliver the DREADD gene to whatever cells you want to control. Once the DREADD is expressed on the cell surface, it just sits there, inert. Then you administer CNO, which binds exclusively to the DREADDs. When it binds, the receptor activates its coupled G-protein just like any normal GPCR would, doing whatever you engineered the GPCR to do. And, as far as anyone can tell, there are no off-target effects.
This is unambiguously a new knob. The receptor didn’t exist in your body before. Its binding partner (CNO) doesn’t exist endogenously. As a result, you, and you alone, get to decide when and where it is turned on.
Well, now we have them. In the first adult human study, per a Grok explainer in the replies, “doctors placed inhibitory DREADDs in the hippocampus of 3 people with medication-resistant epilepsy. Taking the drug quieted the seizure-causing cells, cutting seizures by ~93% with only mild side effects. It lets doctors precisely dial down overactive brain circuits on demand.”
That is wild. We have a knob that can turn down epilepsy.
(4) NOM4D Program Demonstrates Automated In-Space Assembly
DARPA
If we’re going to become a spacefaring civilization, we’re going to need to build bigger structures in space than can fit in a rocket. Today, there are two options for big space things: we can fold something up like origami and unfold it in orbit, which is how the James Webb Space Telescope works, or take the ISS approach, where you launch big pieces over many missions and put them together by hand.
Until now!
DARPA’s NOM4D program (Novel Orbital and Moon Manufacturing, Materials and Mass-efficient Design, great name) is working on a third option. They can send up a box of parts and assemble them in an automated way. On Thursday, DARPA announced that a Caltech payload had done just that, in what the agency calls the first-ever demonstration of automated in-space assembly. Hopefully, it’s the first of many many.
In this case, a simple gantry robot, which moves along three straight axes, joined composite truss pieces with custom connectors one section at a time while unrolling a thin reflective mesh. It is a proof of concept for future space antennas.
Program manager Andrew Detor compared the system to Tinkertoys or K’nex. It’s meant to be super simple, without fancy robotics or advanced algorithms. NOM4D is aiming at structures hundreds of meters to kilometers across, like space depots, habitats, huge solar arrays, and radio antennas large enough to listen all the way to the edges of the universe.
And speaking of making things in space, not boring capital portfolio company Varda is currently making drugs in space!
(5) Telepathy Tapes Season 3: The Reincarnation Records
A couple of years ago, after listening to Season 1 of The Telepathy Tapes, I wrote The Return if Magic, and then I kept going down the rabbit hole, which led to pieces like Means & Meaning and Riding the Leopard.
Season 3 came out last month, and it’s on reincarnation. Reincarnation is a compelling bridge to believing that the world is more magical than we appreciate. For one thing, an awful lot of the world’s people believe in reincarnation as part of their religion, but for another, it’s a surprisingly well-researched topic. Since psychiatrist Ian Stevenson created the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia in the 1960s, researchers there have documented and coded more than 2,500 cases worldwide of young children who spontaneously report detailed memories of previous lives.
I don’t want to spoil the series, but I do think you should give it a listen and consider what it might mean if it’s true.
With all the Means stories we cover here in the Dose, mix in a little Meaning.
And while we’re add it, this popped up in my feed yesterday…
