Free Radicals

Daniel Shur and Eric Dai
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Interviewing visionaries dedicated to giving humanity control over biology. All problems are solvable, including aging and death.

  1. 5 DAYS AGO

    Inside the AI used by Sam Altman’s $1B+ longevity startup - Rico Meinl, Head of Applied AI at Retro Bio

    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.

    1h 16m

  2. 3 MAR

    Why DNA Damage is Central to Aging — Christopher Bradley, CEO of Matter Bio

    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.

    1h 21m

  3. 24 FEB

    The moral and economic case for delaying aging - Raiany Romanni-Klein

    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.

    1h 9m

  4. 17 FEB

    Achieving Longevity Escape Velocity with patient avatars — Martin Borch Jensen, CSO of Gordian Biotechnology

    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.

    1h 45m

  5. 10 FEB

    How a Stanford & Google AI pioneer invests in longevity biotech - Karl Pfleger

    Today’s guest is Karl Pfleger. After spending a decade as one of the first AI researchers at Google from 2002 to 2011, he has dedicated himself to the cause of rejuvenation biotechnology for nearly a decade. He is a philanthropist, community builder, and prolific angel investor with over 35 investments into rejuvenation biotech startups. His website, agingbiotech.info, provides valuable information to the entire field, and his talks and X posts are highly insightful and influential within longevity.  Karl has deeply researched and nuanced takes, and those really show in this conversation. We’ll cover why epigenetic reprogramming won’t solve aging, Karl’s investment strategy and what distinguishes true rejuvenation technology, and why better diagnostic technologies could be the key to personalized aging interventions.

    1h 44m

  6. 3 FEB

    Finding genes at scale for age reversal - Shift Bio CEO Daniel Ives

    Dr. Daniel Ives is the founder of Shift Bioscience. Shift has built a novel single-cell aging clock that has enabled them to run high-throughput screens to discover genes that regulate aging, with the goal of identifying a therapy to systemically reverse aging. We’ll dive deep into Shift’s latest work on SB000, a germline-expressed gene that rejuvenates cells without inducing pluripotency, and SB101, a pro-aging gene whose inhibition both reverses cellular age and prevents fibrosis, opening a clear path to clinical development. Daniel also shares his philosophy on why reversing aging might be easier than we think, the coming cultural shift when anti-aging drugs become mundane reality, and why he won't rest until we can double human lifespan.

    1h 18m

  7. 27 JAN

    Polyphron CEO Matthew Osman on his Computation-First Tissue Foundry

    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.

    53 min

  8. 20 JAN

    NFX GP Dr. Omri Drory on how to end involuntary death

    Dr. Omri Amirav-Drory is a General Partner at NFX whose mission in life is to end involuntary death. Omri has backed companies like Mammoth Biosciences, Immunai, and Centivax, and has earned a reputation as one of the most respected seed investors in tech-enabled life sciences and longevity. He previously founded Genome Compiler and sold it to Twist Bioscience, which is now worth $2.5 billion. We’ll talk about why longevity research could solve America's biggest economic problems, Omri’s 4 step ABCD plan for beating death, and why AI alone won’t solve aging.

    1h 20m
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About

Interviewing visionaries dedicated to giving humanity control over biology. All problems are solvable, including aging and death.

Information

  • Creator
    Daniel Shur and Eric Dai
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    14
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Daniel Shur and Eric Dai
  • Show Website
    Free Radicals

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