“The future of biology is programmable.”

To give you a sense of how important this topic is, Patrick Hsu is the first guest we’ve had back to Ground Truths since the podcast began a few years ago. Nearly 2 years ago we spoke about digital biology but so much has happened since to help unravel the complexities in the language of life.

Patrick is a co-founder and core investigator at the Arc Institute. His work is at the intersection of biology, engineering, and AI. At the ripe old age of 33, he’s a pioneer of genome editing technologies and my go-to for tracking progress in digital biology. Besides that he’s a great explainer with frequent use of metaphors and simplification of very complicated stuff.

Here’s what we discussed with the relevant links:

—Our recent review in Nature Biotechnology on the large language of life models (LLLMs). GBAI-generalist biological artificial intelligence

—The 2 multi-agent AI Nature papers in May for accelerating drug discovery: Full House (Robin) and Google Deep Mind (Co-Scientist) Multiple drug candidates were described as an outgrowth of multi-agent AI , with a 200-fold decrease in workflow time.

Below Figure from synthesis of the Robin and Co-Scientist papers: “AI devises hypotheses and ways to test them,” Nature News and Views, by Oliver Elemento

—Biomni published in Science 9 July

An infographic by NotebookLM below helps give you a sense of what—a diversity of important tasks— accomplished by Biomni

—New workbench offerings by the AI companies including Anthropic’s Claude Science, Open AI, Google DeepMind and the competition with academic spinoffs

—Spud Cells

—Virtual Cell project, which it’s such a big deal, and the importance of perturbations

—Alzheimer’s disease with OpenAI for finding mechanistic new targets for drug discovery

—The Nature Editorial

—Mid-Journey’s Ultrasound Imaging of the “Whole-Body” (and we’re not imaginative enough, the need to think big)

—Mitigating the worries about humans as lab assistants and nefarious use to produce bioweapons

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