The BioHub - by Avetix Episode 143 - Jenny Yang - CEO & Co-Founder at Outpost Bio
Apr 9, 2026
Jenny Yang, Founder and CEO of Outpost Bio, builds an AI-driven platform to decode human microbiology. She discusses why the microbiome can explain varied drug responses. She explains combining high-throughput wet lab work with machine learning. She highlights the need for diverse human samples and gold-standard data to make microbiome insights actionable.
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Early Career Sparked By A Cold Email
- Jenny Yang began applying machine learning to cancer genomics during undergrad by building a small program and cold-emailing professors.
- That led to a summer job with Professor Stephen Jones and a path into personalized oncology and a PhD in clinical ML at Oxford.
Microbiome As The Missing Variable In Precision Medicine
- The microbiome explains variation in therapy response that human genomics alone doesn't account for.
- Jenny notes humans share 99.9% of DNA but microbiomes can be up to 90% different, affecting drug and topical intervention outcomes.
Decoding Microbial Community Interactions
- Outpost Bio builds paired wet-lab and AI systems to decode interactions between microbial communities and molecules.
- They generate datasets of community X plus molecule Y leading to outcome Z, then train models for others to use.