Today’s guest on the Free Radicals podcast is
@ricomnl, head of applied AI
@retrobio_.
Retro 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.
This was a fun conversation about Retro’s work with OpenAI to engineer 50x more efficient Yamanaka factors in a matter of months, 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.
Be sure to follow me and
@EricDai_BioE to stay up to date on the latest news in longevity biotech! And Special thank you to
@NFX &
@omri_drory for lending us their beautiful podcasting studio!
0:00 Intro
1:42 Engineering transcription factors for more efficient reprogramming
19:02 How protein models are used
30:40 Exciting developments in protein engineering
36:20 Challenges in predicting protein behavior
39:38 Do scaling laws apply to protein models?
43:41 How these models are useful for longevity
56:15 Existing pathways for damage repair in the body
1:03:07 Will superintelligence solve aging for us?