
Free Daily Podcast Summary
by Daniel Shur and Eric Dai
Interviewing visionaries dedicated to giving humanity control over biology. All problems are solvable, including aging and death.
The most recent episodes — sign up to get AI-powered summaries of each one.
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
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.ioJoin 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/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
Interviewing visionaries dedicated to giving humanity control over biology. All problems are solvable, including aging and death.
AI-powered recaps with compact key takeaways, quotes, and insights.
Get key takeaways from Free Radicals in a 5-minute read.
Stay current on your favorite podcasts without falling behind.
It's a free AI-powered email that summarizes new episodes of Free Radicals as soon as they're published. You get the key takeaways, notable quotes, and links & mentions — all in a quick read.
When a new episode drops, our AI transcribes and analyzes it, then generates a personalized summary tailored to your interests and profession. It's delivered to your inbox every morning.
No. Podzilla is an independent service that summarizes publicly available podcast content. We're not affiliated with or endorsed by Daniel Shur and Eric Dai.
Absolutely! The free plan covers up to 3 podcasts. Upgrade to Pro for 15, or Premium for 50. Browse our full catalog at /podcasts.
Free Radicals publishes weekly. Our AI generates a summary within hours of each new episode.
Free Radicals covers topics including Science, Life Sciences. Our AI identifies the specific themes in each episode and highlights what matters most to you.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.