Alex Trapp

Last week, on the cover of @NatureAging, we published the first computational framework for epigenetic age estimation at single-cell resolution. A fantastic collaboration with @CsabaKerepesi and @VadimGladyshev in the @gladyshev_lab @harvardmed! nature.com/articles/s4358… 1/🧵

@fvderop Kappa

Hosted a cheese & wine evening for mostly tech people. Exquisite European import cheeses. Fresh baguettes made to order. 12 wines carefully selected and tested. The most popular items were apple juice, tin cream cheese, and chocolate covered nuts these people will never learn

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?

aion.bio/careers hiring!

While I can't quite reveal what we're cooking up at Retro just yet, we’re on the hunt for more world-class genomics scientists! Come help us build technologies that directly measure mechanisms of aging and train models to engineer rejuvenation therapies - posting below

@_benray Based

can't afford plate reader? u can just become plate reader

@Andrei_Tarkhov The wet-lab pill is strong

compbio is about to die. A popular general-purpose AI assistant is already able to write a whole analysis pipeline starting from a simple prompt and a link to the data. Surely, I can do it 10 times faster and using 10 times fewer lines of code, but still “if it works, it works”

🗞️In our January issue, we celebrate the 5th anniversary of Nature Aging 🎉Read one Q&A from aging researchers, another Q&A to peek behind the scenes at the journal, our reflections on the past 5 years, and lots of great science too, here: nature.com/nataging/volum…

How do we go from a single cell to a complex organism? For 50 yrs experimentally meeting the nutritional demands of a growing organism has been a bottleneck in development. For the first time, we built placental support and predictive tools to make it possible. Watch ↓

We're now a clinical stage™ biotech company! x.com/i/status/20054…

Sunday scoop action - @sama-backed @RetroBio_ has a new Alzheimer's drug going into a clinical trial corememory.com/p/exclusive-re…

Our Founder and CEO, @dullunlivin, takes the stage to talk about our advocacy efforts and the bipartisan Longevity Science Caucus!

Reaching this milestone has been truly significant for us. Please join us at the H-SPAN Summit at @Georgetown’s new Capitol Campus!

Hiring for a Head of Clinical! jobs.lever.co/retro/9d8955be… Interesting clinical trials to run and novel paths to carve for longevity therapeutics await.

Our first human clinical trial, now officially registered! (and starting soon 🤞) anzctr.org.au/Trial/Registra…

how a biologist sees the world

33 Things I've Learned at 33 nintil.com/33-things

New in Nature Reviews Genetics: my Review on how advanced genomic technologies are redefining cellular reprogramming: mapping trajectories, dissecting chromatin dynamics, + lineage tracing & synthetic circuits to push the boundaries of cell identity. rdcu.be/eLv1Z

inspired by recent events: tomorrow i will publish an article about why you should work in biology because at some point in your life—maybe not today, but someday—you’ll realize that it is the only field that actually mattered, so you might as well start now

At @OpenAI, we believe that AI can accelerate science and drug discovery. An exciting example is our work with @RetroBiosciences, where a custom model designed improved variants of the Nobel-prize winning Yamanaka proteins. Today we published a closer look at the breakthrough. ⬇️

the average PLR contributor