Matthew Scholz has been told many times that his idea for reprogramming the body’s immune cells to create drugs was impossible. Maybe dangerous. Maybe just dumb. Scholz, a computer scientist with no formal biology training, could easily have been written off as a quixotic dreamer until this spring, when he got his breakout moment. The foundation started by Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, decided that Scholz’s startup,Immusoft, just might be onto something, granting it close to $400,000…

While most of us are still reeling in shock after last week’s one billion Instagram buy, Peter Thiel — through both Founders Fund and the Thiel Foundation — is leading the charge into a future where humans don’t age or suffer from cancer, among other things. Call it crazy or whatever you’d like, but there’s no doubt that people who are trying to drastically change the world for the better often do…

Peter Thiel, an early venture investor in Facebook and FierceMarkets, has handed out a round of grants of up to $350,000 to a slate of 6 startup biotech companies, each of which promises a game-changing approach to medicine. And he’s hoping that handing out checks to these startup dreamers will help ignite some radical thinking on the possibilities of our collective “amazing future.”…

Although the concept of cell programming isn’t new, Immusoft Corp.’s approach represents a new spin on the science. For a biotech company, Seattle-based Immusoft started with a decidedly different pedigree. With a background in computer sciences rather than chemistry or biology, Matthew Scholz, the company’s founder and CEO, conceived an idea to fight disease by modifying information in human immune cells…