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.

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.io

• Join us at Vitalist Bay! vitalistbay.com

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.

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.

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.

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/biorev202121

Hastings Center Report: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hast.5007

And check out Michael's band on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/7hfcgDpc3SuCHfEAIhwWYr

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.

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.