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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • They make quality stuff for the prices, an old job got a bioreactor (basically a carboy for homebrewing wired with sensors & computer-controlled pumps) for $25k from a Chinese manufacturer. They later sold it to the Open Insulin project & used the money to buy a textured vegetable protein extruder from China to make vegan deli meats. Both had kinda wonky unintuitive user interfaces, but they were solid pieces of hardware













  • lysdexamphetamine (Vyvanse) is an interesting prodrug version of Adderall that often gets joked about by Felix & a low dosage might address both the short half life of Ritalin while not keeping you too wired to sleep.

    The strategy for Adderall XR is having slow release encapsulation, plus different amphetamine salts which take varied amounts of time to become active.

    Vyvanse instead attaches a lysine amino acid to the amphetamine molecule, rendering it inert until an enzyme in your bloodstream cleaves off the lysine, yielding the active form.

    This prodrug strategy eliminates variables that might affect the release rate of the active drug from an XR capsule before it hits your bloodstream, meaning you get a “spikier” release profile instead of a low & slow consistent dose curve. Variables like a lower stomach pH, which promotes quicker degradation of encapsulation material or how fast the various salts dissociate from the active amphetamine molecule. With the lysine prodrug it doesn’t matter how much of the prodrug enters your bloodstream, it’s release rate is tied to how quickly that enzyme can cleave the lysine off the amphetamine.