Friedberg invokes sirtuin genes that switch cells between growth and healing modes to advise startups.
“And this is a time for everyone to activate their CIRT genes and stop focusing on growth and focus on healing.”
“One of the things that, you know, I have a strong belief in is like, I think in twenty years we could kind of eradicate all infectious disease.”
Friedberg notes DNA sequencing costs have fallen faster than Moore's Law over twenty years.
“Yep. Now digital technologies have driven the cost down of DNA sequencing faster than Moore's Law in the past twenty years.”
Friedberg describes Altos Labs raising three billion dollars to pursue epigenetic partial reprogramming using Yamanaka factors for cellular rejuvenation.
“They raised about $3,000,000,000 in startup funding, and they're pursuing this kind of epigenetic partial reprogramming of cells to make them more youthful.”
Friedberg states gut microbiome research has grown geometrically as DNA sequencing costs have dropped dramatically.
“So the number of papers on the gut biome has kind of grown geometrically last couple years.”
Friedberg explains Ohalo's core idea: making sex cells carry complete DNA from both parents, which occurs spontaneously in nature.
“what would happen if we could get the sex cells to have all the DNA of the mother and all the DNA of the father, the complete genome?”
Friedberg uses Arc Institute's EVO2 model in production at Ohalo to score plant DNA before phenotyping.
“We feed the whole DNA sequence of every plant in, and that model will tell us, Hey, these genes are dysfunctional or may have issues.”
Friedberg explains Ohalo successfully applied boosted breeding across multiple plant species by converting single cells back into plants.
“We did it across multiple plant species. We were able to grow the plants back into plants because you're doing this to single cells at a time and you try and get those single cells to think that they're plants and grow back and then start to phenotype them or measure them.”
Friedberg states there are more bacteria in the gut than cells in the body affecting health outcomes.
“So there's more bacteria living in our gut than there are cells in our body.”
Friedberg states there are more bacteria in the human gut than cells in the body with profound health effects.
“So there's more bacteria living in our gut than there are cells in our body. The human gut, as you guys know, has all these bacteria that can have a profound effect on your health,”
Friedberg explains that partial application of Yamanaka factors can reverse aging in cells without converting them to stem cells.
“In 2016, another scientist published a series of papers showing that instead of putting a lot of those four proteins on the cell, you could put a small amount.”
Friedberg emphasizes the enzyme worked on skin from patients over 70 years old.
“This is from greater than 70 year old patients just by putting this enzyme on the skin.”
Friedberg explains the breakthrough combines AlphaFold and directed evolution to create novel proteins not found in nature.
“And so it's kind of a groundbreaking demonstration of combination of alpha fold, what's called directed evolution, where you change the order of the DNA that changes the structure of the protein to test different proteins, do high throughput screening, and ultimately make a novel protein that doesn't exist in nature today”
Friedberg explains CML is the predominant aging molecule in extracellular matrix that nothing naturally breaks down.
“CML is kind of the predominant molecule that that gets formed in this extracellular matrix that's driving aging, and nothing breaks it down. So these scientists set out to try and create an enzyme.”
Friedberg describes directed evolution technique where DNA order changes create different protein structures for high throughput screening.
“And so it's kind of a groundbreaking demonstration of combination of alpha fold, what's called directed evolution, where you change the order of the DNA that changes the structure of the protein to test different proteins, do high throughput screening,”
Friedberg reports that the enzyme eliminated 52 to 97% of CML from body proteins including collagen and hemoglobin.
“They started to test it on the proteins that we would find in our body, casine, collagen, retinal proteins, which are in your eye, hemoglobin, and they were able to get rid of 52 to 97% of the CML, just degraded away.”
Friedberg reports researchers found 64-dimensional model best predicts neuron connections in fruit fly brain.
“So by taking normal space and saying, let's use a 64 dimension framework for how we can start to connect all these neurons together, that's where they had the best predictive model.”
Friedberg describes neuroscience research showing fruit fly brain connections poorly modeled in three-dimensional space.
“And when you build the model using what's called Euclidean geometry, so just normal space that we live in, three-dimensional space, they came up with a score and the score was not very good.”