Free Radicals

Jonathan Anomaly is a co-founder of Herasight and former PPE professor. Herasight is pioneering polygenic screening for embryos, to help parents undergoing IVF select embryos for health, intelligence, height, and other traits people care about.We discuss the ethics of embryo selection and radical life extension. Jonathan has a Nietzschean view of humanity: within each of us we have the opportunity to either envy greatness in others, or seek to cultivate it within ourselves and in the world. In an era of total biological control, humanity can transcend its limitations and become something better.Watch on YouTube. Read the transcript.

Elliot Hershberg is a partner at Amplify Partners and author of the popular blog Century of Biology. In this episode, we talk about GLP-1s as a breakthrough moment for biotech, why drug development is starting to behave like software, and how falling discovery costs could finally free biotech startups from selling themselves to pharma.We also talk about Elliot’s "massive markets, medium prices" thesis, the rise of consumer and "n-of-one" medicine, and Sid Sijbrandij going founder mode on his cancer by measuring himself, using AI to build a pipeline of personalized therapies, and is now disease-free. Thank you to SynBioBeta for hosting us at their conference, where we recorded this episode, and several others we’ll be releasing soon!Check out Elliot's blog at centuryofbio.com

Nathan Cheng is an activist who has dedicated his life and career to defeating aging and death. After going through an existential crisis and dropping out of a Physics PhD, Nathan discovered the longevity movement and became one of the most prolific activists in the space. He is a founder of Longevity Biotech Fellowship, Vitalism Foundation, Longevity List, Longevity Marketcap and a General Partner at Healthspan Capital.In this conversation, we reflect on the absurdity of questioning people like Nathan why they choose to dedicate themselves to fighting aging (when it’s the thing that kills over 100k people per day), why longevity is underinvested into, and much more. Resources:Longevity Biotech Fellowship: https://www.longbiofellowship.org/Vitalism: vitalism.ioJoin us at Vitalist Bay! vitalistbay.com

Two young Harvard professors are coming for the supplements industry. Dr. Jonathan Gootenberg and Dr. Omar Abudayyeh run a joint lab at Harvard Medical School, have co-founded 4 biotechs, and raised over $300M to develop genetic medicines and diagnostics. But what surprised me most: they think like consumer tech founders, not academics. They start with what people actually want and work backwards from there. And best of all? They’re totally longevity-pilled. In this week’s episode of the Free Radicals podcast, we discuss the biology of aging, the future of longevity therapeutics, and how Harvard can bring legitimacy to the supplements industry.As PhD students at Harvard in Feng Zhang and Aviv Regev’s labs, Jonathan and Omar pioneered research on programmable targeted genetic engineering with CRISPR. Now Jonathan and Omar lead a joint lab at Harvard, where they develop molecular and artificial intelligence based approaches to program biology, unravel cellular aging, rejuvenate hair, develop next-gen therapeutics, and decode biological complexity with virtual cells.

Dr. Michael Ringel is a leader in pharma and biotech who spent over 25 years at Boston Consulting Group, where he served as managing director and senior partner, advising top pharma companies on R&D strategy.Michael is now the Chief Operating Officer at Life Biosciences, a company founded by Dr. David Sinclair, to treat aging with partial epigenetic reprogramming. Earlier this year, Life Bio earned FDA clearance to proceed into human clinical trials with their lead candidate, marking the first time that humans will be administered an epigenetic reprogramming drug, which may be the holy grail of longevity.Michael also sits on the US board of the Hevolution Foundation, an organization that is investing up to one billion dollars per year into longevity research, and is also on the board of the American Federation for Aging Research.In this episode, we discuss Michael’s insightful paper on why aging is an optimization by evolution, why that means it’s malleable, how Life Bio is going into the clinic with the first epigenetic reprogramming therapies to reverse diseases of aging, and how to push the longevity field forward.Why We Age by Michael Ringel: https://www.nature.com/articles/biorev202121Hastings Center Report: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hast.5007And check out Michael's band on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/7hfcgDpc3SuCHfEAIhwWYr

Retro Biosciences was seeded with $180M by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to develop therapies to prevent and reverse age-related disease, and is widely recognized as one of the leading AI for longevity companies. Today’s guest is Rico Meinl, the Head of Applied AI at Retro Biosciences.In this episode, we discuss Retro’s work with OpenAI to engineer 50x more effective Yamanaka factors, what it means to build foundation models that can reason across natural language and protein sequence, and why the bottlenecks in biology are more experimental than computational. We also get into the biology of aging and how AI can enable therapies that dramatically advance healthy lifespan.

Raiany Romanni-Klein is a Harvard and Brown-trained bioethicist focused on understanding why secular people like to narrate death and aging as good things, and quantifying the economic impacts of such narratives. She worked with legends like George Church and Steven Pinker on her PhD, and also played a central role in designing the $101 million dollar XPRIZE for Healthspan, the largest science prize ever awarded. Raiany is also the founder of a new think tank designed to study and streamline progress in America’s science and technology, and most recently published a paper demonstrating that delaying overall biological aging by just one year could yield $27 trillion dollars in net present value.Today’s conversation is focused on the ethics and economics of longevity.

Today’s guest is Karl Pfleger. After spending a decade as one of the first AI researchers at Google from 2002 to 2011, he has dedicated himself to the cause of rejuvenation biotechnology for nearly a decade. He is a philanthropist, community builder, and prolific angel investor with over 35 investments into rejuvenation biotech startups. His website, agingbiotech.info, provides valuable information to the entire field, and his talks and X posts are highly insightful and influential within longevity. Karl has deeply researched and nuanced takes, and those really show in this conversation. We’ll cover why epigenetic reprogramming won’t solve aging, Karl’s investment strategy and what distinguishes true rejuvenation technology, and why better diagnostic technologies could be the key to personalized aging interventions.

Polyphron is led by co-founder and CEO Matthew Osman, a twice-exited tech entrepreneur turned biotech founder. Matthew is building a computation-first tissue foundry that applies AI and lab automation to semi-autonomously replicate human tissues in a dish. Polyphron aims to create the world’s most efficient tissue foundry for regenerative medicine.Listen to this episode to learn more about the core bet and technological platform at Polyphron, the remarkable progress they’ve made on two programs in heart and brain tissue in just a year, and what’s next for the company.

Dr. Jacob Kimmel is the President of NewLimit, a biotechnology company developing reprogramming medicines to treat age-related disease and extend human healthspan. Dr. Kimmel co-founded the company with Blake Byers and Bryan Armstrong, and has since raised over $300M from top venture capital funds like Kleiner Perkins, Dimension, Founders Fund, and Khosla Ventures. They expect to initiate their first clinical trial in a few years.Dr. Kimmel has garnered a reputation as one of the brightest minds in longevity and the intersection between artificial intelligence and molecular biology, and NewLimit is often cited as one of the most important companies building in longevity today.

Dr. Janine Sengstack and Rob Cahill, founders of the startup Junevity, are on a mission to extend lifespan and healthspan by combining AI and large scale omics data with genetic medicines known as “siRNAs”. Their cellular reset platform promises to create medicines that can reset each of your organs back to a healthy and youthful state.This year, Junevity successfully restored "18-year-old metabolism" in animal models allowing mice on a high-fat diet to lose fat while retaining muscle. This candidate therapy may become the first known drug to rejuvenate metabolism. Since our recording, Junevity doubled their seed round funding up to $20M to advance this work into human clinical trials, which means we might see their first rejuvenating medicine in the clinic as soon as the second half of next year.

Alex Colville, PhD, is a Co-founder and General Partner at Age1, one of the premier aging venture capital firms where he has invested in companies like Science, Gordian, Loyal, and General Control. Prior to that, he was an investor and founding chief of staff at Amaranth Foundation, where he invested in moonshot biology and aging initiatives. He got his biotech business career started as a management consultant at Putnam Associates and as a consultant to the Maze Therapeutics BD team and Rubedo Life Sciences R&D team. Alex earned his PhD at Stanford in the biology of aging.