Free Radicals

Free Radicals is back! Apologies for the brief pause - Eric and I have each been working on exciting projects in the longevity space that we’ll share more on soon. Onto this week's episode...Some of the proteins in your body last for decades, accumulating chemical damage your body can’t remove. While most of the aging field is working on cellular rejuvenation, Aaron Cravens is building enzymes to clean up that damage.His company, Revel Pharmaceuticals, engineered an enzyme that removed decades’ worth of one form of damage from donated human tissue in the lab. The results attracted attention from the New York Times and Bryan Johnson.Eric Dai and I sat down with Aaron on Free Radicals to discuss the science behind the headlines, how AI helped make it possible, what it will take to turn this into a treatment, and how to build the SpaceX of longevity.

Producing the 3 to 5 grams of a biologic needed for IND-enabling studies costs millions of dollars using traditional CHO manufacturing.A single egg, meanwhile, contains 6 grams of protein, costs just 10 cents, and requires only chicken feed and water as inputs.Neion Bio is taking advantage of this incredible technology to turn chickens into drug factories. And they’ve already signed a commercial deal with a drugmaker to produce biosimilars.With AI leaders promising to unleash countless new therapies, we’re going to need to scale up our manufacturing. That sci-fi future may be one where we stop producing drugs in huge steel tanks, and instead start farming them like we do our food.We sat down with co-founders Dimi Kellari and Sam Levin to discuss this future. [Disclosure: I’m an investor, though I wasn’t at the time of recording.]Thank you to SynBioBeta for hosting us!

Twenty years ago, Dr. Derya Unutmaz predicted we would reverse aging by 2045. People thought he was crazy.Now, he thinks he was too conservative, and has moved the date up to 2040 because AGI arrived earlier than he expected.I sat down with Derya to ask if such bold predictions are too fatalistic. Is the future guaranteed? Shall we just sit back and wait for AI to save us? Derya disagreed.The golden age for humanity is within our sights, but there is much work to be done.Academia is failing us. If it doesn’t adapt to the pace of progress AI enables, we have no shot at curing aging this century. And we need to invest trillions into collecting the data that superintelligence will need to solve biology.There is much work to be done, but if we pull it off, the future can be brighter than anyone imagines.Dr. Derya Unutmaz is a Jackson Laboratory immunologist whose roughly 190 scientific publications have been cited more than 30,000 times.Special thank you to Adam Gries and vitalismfoundation.org for hosting us at Vitalist Bay!

Health podcasts are probably shortening your life expectancy. Not just because of the health anxiety they create, but because that time could instead be spent writing a letter to your congressperson.Aging kills 85% of Americans, and the US spends $15-20 per person per year on cancer research but only $1 on aging biology. No amount of zone 2 and sauna are going to save you from that gap.I sat down with Andrew Steele, scientist, author of Ageless, and founder of the Longevity Initiative, to talk about closing it. His position: if he had $10M to spend on his own longevity, he'd spend every dollar on policy and communication, because that's where the leverage is.With health systems pushed to their limits and demographic crises looming, the time is right to organize against aging.Andrew is a phenomenal communicator, and played a huge role in inspiring me to start this podcast. You’re gonna love listening to him, and I highly recommend you follow him as well.Special thank you to Adam Gries and vitalismfoundation.org for hosting us at Vitalist Bay!

Reprogramming molecules are getting dosed into patients for the first time, with the goal of restoring function lost due to aging. I‘ve had over 30 recorded conversations about the longevity space and didn’t realize this is happening so soon!We sat down with Dr. Jamie Justice, the geroscientist running the $101M XPRIZE Healthspan competition, and she told us there are five teams pursuing reprogramming, and hundreds pursuing other approaches. The $101M prize is to be awarded to teams that can restore muscle, cognitive, and immune function by 10 to 20 years.We discussed how the longevity field has a serious hype problem. We‘ve found hundreds of interventions that can extend lifespan in model organisms (reprogramming among them) and yet none have been translated into humans.The XPRIZE is changing that, by challenging the field to get out of the lab and into the clinic. $101M for those that can show results now, not in a decade, is a huge incentive to turn the hype into reality.

AI is accelerating the pace of progress for benevolent scientists and nefarious actors alike. We discuss how DARPA is preparing to defend agriculture & civilians from novel biological threats, and why such defense requires training foundation models for biology. We also dive into why DARPA is betting on blood as the operating system for the body, lessons from GLP-1s for human enhancement, how to create computers out of neurons, and much more.Dr. Michael Koeris directs DARPA's Biological Technologies Office (BTO), the group that leverages biological properties and processes to revolutionize our ability to protect the nation’s warfighters. Prior to DARPA, Dr. Koeris was a highly successful biotech entrepreneur, holds over a dozen patents, and was a professor of bioprocessing.DARPA is a research & development agency within the Department of War. Created in response to the launch of Sputnik in 1957, DARPA represents America’s commitment to never again face a strategic technical surprise. The agency has funded many transformational technologies, including mRNA vaccines which were pivotal during COVID.

Kris Borer is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and author of the new book Radical Life Extension.We discuss why Kris rejects incrementalist approaches to radical life extension, and his argument that supplement, lifestyle interventions and small-molecule "geroscience" drugs offer only minor improvements at best to life span. We cover the four part plan to cure aging spanning traditional drugs, advanced bioengineering, tissue/organ replacement, and biostasis (cryopreservation), and we dive deep for the first time on the podcast into replacement: body transplants, lab-grown organs, chimeric organ donors and even... brain replacement.Resources & Links:Kris’s Book: Radical Life ExtensionLongevity Biotech FellowshipRepair BiotechnologiesThe Economic Laws of Scientific ResearchTomorrow Biostasis

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.

Twelve months ago, we didn’t have working antibody design models. Now we have models that can compress 18 month design timelines down to one month, and agents that can collapse weeks of work by expert protein designers to an afternoon. This is an exciting time.Simon Kohl is a former Google DeepMind research scientist on the Nobel Prize–winning AlphaFold 2 team, and is now the founder and CEO of Latent Labs, a startup that is building a future where AI agents can design safe, effective and personalized drugs at the push of a button for every patient. With 3 frontier models released in just 9 months, this future is coming quickly.

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