Daniel Shur

AI is accelerating the pace of progress for scientists and nefarious actors alike. That means new opportunities to unlock human longevity, but it also means novel biological threats. DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office is preparing for both futures. In this episode of the Free Radicals podcast we sat down with Dr. Michael Koeris, DARPA Director (@mkoeris). We discuss how biological foundation models are needed to protect us from novel threat agents, how blood is the universal OS of the body, how DARPA & the pharma industry are learning lessons in enhancement and longevity from GLP-1s, and much more. 0:00 Intro 2:13 DARPA’s efforts across combat casualty care, synthetic blood & soldier enhancement 6:32 GLP-1s and the new paradigm for pharma of enhancement rather than treatment 11:57 How DARPA can fast track drug development to get us longevity medicines sooner 14:40 Turning red blood cells into nanobot drug factories 19:13 Blood as the universal management layer for the body 21:24 Why Mike is a LinkedIn influencer & how to collaborate with DARPA 25:07 Replacing silicon with biology for more efficient compute 28:37 Why non-invasive brain computer interfaces are the future 30:07 How Cortical Labs has created the SDK for coding with neurons 32:09 How to scale up physical & synthetic data collection to decode biology 35:52 Protecting our crops & our civilians from AI-designed biological weapons 39:14 Reshoring biomanufacturing to ensure American resilience 41:36 The unique danger of biological weapons & how to address them 46:51 The acceleration of technological progress & a call to work with DARPA to build the future Look up Free Radicals podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, etc. Follow me, @FreeRadicalsBio and @EricDai_BioE for weekly episodes. Thank you to @SynBioBeta for hosting us!

Exactly seven years ago, in the summer of 2019, @JamesPeyer and I made what many considered a wildly ambitious - and perhaps even controversial - decision: we started @CambrianBio, a biotechnology company dedicated to slowing, and ultimately reversing, aspects of human aging. At the time, the very idea sounded like science fiction. Aging was widely viewed as an inevitable fact of life, not something medicine could meaningfully address. Suggesting that the biological processes underlying aging might one day be prevented, slowed, or even reversed was often met with skepticism. Since then, the conversation has changed dramatically. Scientists have uncovered a growing number of molecular and cellular mechanisms that drive aging - the so-called "hallmarks of aging." These interconnected processes gradually erode the body's ability to maintain itself, contributing to frailty, chronic disease, and the functional decline that we collectively recognize as aging. Today, the notion that aging biology can be targeted therapeutically is no longer confined to a handful of academic laboratories. It has entered the mainstream scientific discussion and increasingly the public consciousness as well. Yet despite the excitement, the field remains in its infancy. Most proposed longevity interventions are still preclinical. Many promising ideas have yet to be tested rigorously in humans, and it will likely take years before the full potential of this emerging field becomes clear. At Cambrian, we are at the forefront of this movement and have spent the last seven years navigating the ups and downs of the biotech cycle while building a strong portfolio of therapies designed to target the root causes of age-related decline. That journey has brought us to an important milestone today: our most advanced program is now ready for prime time: Our lead candidate, ATX-304, is a first-in-class full-spectrum AMPK activator that has already demonstrated positive results in human studies and is now advancing into Phase 2 clinical trials – which makes it one of the most advanced longevity drug candidates currently in clinical development. If you'd like to dive deeper into why AMPK is often called the body's metabolic master switch - and why we believe activating it could fundamentally change how we age - I highly recommend James's blog post.