Free Radicals

Dylan Livingston, founder of the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives and a young DC lobbyist for life-extension policy. He explains how he built bipartisan support, launched a longevity caucus, and expanded Right to Try in Montana. Topics include lobbying tactics, funding and regulatory hurdles, surrogate endpoints, and the push for a cultural breakthrough in longevity research.

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/biorev202121Hastings Center Report: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hast.5007And 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.

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.

Raiany Romanni-Klein is a Harvard and Brown-trained bioethicist focused on understanding why secular people like to narrate death and aging as good things, and quantifying the economic impacts of such narratives. She worked with legends like George Church and Steven Pinker on her PhD, and also played a central role in designing the $101 million dollar XPRIZE for Healthspan, the largest science prize ever awarded. Raiany is also the founder of a new think tank designed to study and streamline progress in America’s science and technology, and most recently published a paper demonstrating that delaying overall biological aging by just one year could yield $27 trillion dollars in net present value.Today’s conversation is focused on the ethics and economics of longevity.

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.

Karl Pfleger, AI researcher turned longevity philanthropist and angel investor focused on rejuvenation biotech. He discusses why epigenetic reprogramming is powerful but incomplete. He outlines separable molecular pathologies and the need for combinatorial, repeatable rejuvenation therapies. He also explains why better diagnostics could unlock personalized aging interventions.

Dr. Daniel Ives, founder and CEO of Shift Bioscience and trained biochemist focused on mitochondrial biology and longevity, discusses single-cell aging clocks and gene-targeted aging reversal. He covers discovery of SB000, screening ~1500 genes to find age-regulating hits, SB101 as a druggable pro-aging target, virtual-cell models, and steps toward mouse validation and clinical development.

Polyphron is led by co-founder and CEO Matthew Osman, a twice-exited tech entrepreneur turned biotech founder. Matthew is building a computation-first tissue foundry that applies AI and lab automation to semi-autonomously replicate human tissues in a dish. Polyphron aims to create the world’s most efficient tissue foundry for regenerative medicine.Listen to this episode to learn more about the core bet and technological platform at Polyphron, the remarkable progress they’ve made on two programs in heart and brain tissue in just a year, and what’s next for the company.