Free Radicals

Dr. James Peyer is founder and CEO of Cambrian Bio. James has spent two decades working to bring the first longevity drug to market. In this time, he’s brought over $500M into the field as a whole, and now has multiple drugs in clinical trials that could plausibly prove to be… the first true longevity drugs, or gerotherapeutics.In today’s episode, we dive into the history of the geroscience field. We discuss what makes geroscience’s approach to drug development so unique, how to unlock the flywheel of innovation that will get us longevity escape velocity, and Amplifier Therapeutics' “zone 2 in a pill”... which might prove to be the first ever true, longevity drug.

Today’s guest is Kexin Huang. Kexin recently raised $13.5M from Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures in partnership with Anthropic, to build Phylo - a research lab studying agentic biology. Phylo’s first product is Biomni, the world’s first open source IBE or Integrated Biology Environment for conducting agentic biology research. They intend to do for biology what the IDE did for software.Kexin completed his PhD in Computer Science at Stanford, where he was advised by Jure Leskovec on artificial intelligence for healthcare and biology. As a PhD student Kexin garnered over 10,000 citations, published in Nature and earned six best paper awards at leading machine learning conferences, all this before the age of 30.Kexin has earned a reputation as one of the brightest minds in AI for life sciences. You’ll see why in today’s conversation.

Today’s guest is Dylan Livingston, the 28 year old founder of the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives, known as A4LI. With A4LI, Dylan has created America’s first and only lobbying group focused on advancing longevity initiatives in Washington DC. Since its founding, A4LI has created a longevity caucus composed of 8 congresspeople, and hosted leaders like Dr. Oz, Newt Gingrich and Matt Kaeberlein at their summits. A4LI also played a key role in garnering bipartisan support to advance Montana’s Right to Try legislation, which expands the right for consenting patients to utilize safe experimental medicines in Montana.In this episode, we discuss how Dylan gets bipartisan support for healthy life extension initiatives, what it’s like selling politicians on longevity, and A4LI’s role in accelerating longevity towards its ChatGPT moment.

Jose Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente is the author of the popular blog Nintil, and Head of Theory at Retro Biosciences. Jose is a prolific blogger, covering a wide breadth of topics across economics, philosophy, progress studies, science funding, and of course longevity. His writing has been published in a16z Future, Works in Progress and by the Adam Smith Institute, and his writing previously won him a fellowship with Emergent Ventures, Tyler Cowen’s competitive program for intellectually ambitious projects.In this interview, you’ll hear how insightful Jose is about deeply technical topics in biology, and you’ll see why Retro Bio was eager to bring him on as their head of theory (the only role of its kind in the entire biotech industry).Our conversation is wide ranging, spanning a deep dive on Retro’s work to replace and engineer microglia to rejuvenate the brain and how our cells have the ability to turn back the aging clock but choose not to. We also covered the technological stagnation and why biological engineering is the new frontier of progress, as well as philosophical topics like transhumanism and how a future of total biological control might impact our values and way of life.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. Previously, we hosted Rico Meinl, the head of Applied AI at Retro, so make sure to give that episode a listen as well.

Christopher is a serial entrepreneur who has dedicated himself to solving aging after his last startup Mana Health was acquired by NBC Universal. His company Matter Bio is developing therapies to enhance DNA damage repair to slow the rate of aging, and to treat cancer through novel bacterial delivery mechanisms. In today’s conversation we discuss the theory of aging as information loss, which Chris contends is primarily mediated through DNA damage, how to unlock new approaches for longevity through large scale genomics studies, and the evolving business of biotech.

Martin Borch Jensen is a scientist, entrepreneur and longevity advocate. He is the co-founder and CSO of Gordian Biotechnology, a company whose platform enables the simultaneous delivery and testing of hundreds of therapeutics in individual animals. They have raised over $60M from top investors like Founders Fund, Horizons Ventures, Fifty Years and the Longevity Fund. They also recently announced a partnership with Pfizer to apply Gordian’s proprietary mosaic screening platform to accelerate the discovery of therapeutic targets for obesity.Martin is also a prominent voice in the longevity community and activist. As founder and president of Norn Group, a do tank for longevity, he launched the Impetus Grants program, which has deployed roughly $34 million to scientists across 145 projects, with funding decisions made within 3 weeks to enable speed.In our conversation today, we cover the state of the longevity field, its major bottlenecks, theories of aging, the role of AI in longevity, and much more.

Dr. Daniel Ives is the founder of Shift Bioscience. Shift has built a novel single-cell aging clock that has enabled them to run high-throughput screens to discover genes that regulate aging, with the goal of identifying a therapy to systemically reverse aging.We’ll dive deep into Shift’s latest work on SB000, a germline-expressed gene that rejuvenates cells without inducing pluripotency, and SB101, a pro-aging gene whose inhibition both reverses cellular age and prevents fibrosis, opening a clear path to clinical development.Daniel also shares his philosophy on why reversing aging might be easier than we think, the coming cultural shift when anti-aging drugs become mundane reality, and why he won't rest until we can double human lifespan.

Dr. Omri Amirav-Drory is a General Partner at NFX whose mission in life is to end involuntary death. Omri has backed companies like Mammoth Biosciences, Immunai, and Centivax, and has earned a reputation as one of the most respected seed investors in tech-enabled life sciences and longevity. He previously founded Genome Compiler and sold it to Twist Bioscience, which is now worth $2.5 billion. We’ll talk about why longevity research could solve America's biggest economic problems, Omri’s 4 step ABCD plan for beating death, and why AI alone won’t solve aging.

Adam Gries is a serial entrepreneur with four successful exits, and products that have reached over eighty million users. He has now set his sights on creating a longevity revolution through his organization Vitalism. Vitalism is a moral philosophy and community of action, forming a revolutionary movement to get humanity to fight as hard as possible to achieve unlimited lifespans in peak health.Our conversation covers the state of the longevity field today, the myth of billionaires’ obsession with longevity, what it will take to revolutionize our culture and industry to treat aging seriously, and much more.

Lada Nuzhna is a researcher and founder driven by two questions: how did we get here, and how do we stay. Lada dropped out of college to pursue her biology research as a Thiel fellow, and to co-found Impetus Grants which funds breakthrough longevity science. Through Impetus, she has allocated over $34M to fund some of the most ambitious projects and clinical trials in aging. She is now developing a new therapeutic modality to target diseases of aging through her startup, General Control. In addition to her work as an investor and founder, Lada is a prolific author of short-form and long-form content, which you can find through her Twitter (https://x.com/ladanuzhna) and Blog (https://www.ladanuzhna.xyz).

Celine Halioua is the Founder & CEO of Loyal - the first company to ever receive FDA approval to develop a drug to extend lifespan in dogs, and they have raised $125mm from Bain Capital Ventures, Khosla Ventures, First Round and others to do so. By building a blockbuster longevity drug for dugs, Loyal aims to lay the foundation for safe and effective longevity drugs in humans. In this interview, Celine describes her thesis that longevity drugs should be boring, what it means to create a new market, how charlatans put the whole longevity field at risk, and much more. We hope you enjoy this episode.