Daniel Shur

Spreading ideas to enable radical life extension and a sci-fi future @FreeRadicalsBio. Strategy principal @ Google, prev. McKinsey and Neuro / Physics @ Penn

[Daniel Shur @teleodaniel]

Today I am launching the Free Radicals podcast with @EricDai_BioE . Every Tuesday, we’ll be releasing long form conversations with the visionaries giving humanity control over biology and working to dramatically extend human lifespan.

We’re thrilled to host @celinehalioua, Founder + CEO @loyalfordogs, for our inaugural episode. Celine is building the world’s first lifespan extension drugs for dogs.

Follow me, @EricDai_BioE and @FreeRadicalsBio for new episodes every Tuesday.

00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:51 - Celine’s background
00:05:00 - Dropping out of academia
00:07:50 - Finding ways to increase free will
00:09:36 - How to align financial incentives with longevity
00:14:52 - Longevity drugs should be boring
00:21:24 - Celine’s leadership style
00:24:08 - Advice on fundraising and constructing feedback loops
00:26:52 - Loyal’s fundraising history
00:27:57 - Building for Zero Billion Dollar Markets
00:29:11 - How to succeed in biotech
00:30:21 - How to find blockbuster opportunities
00:33:25 - How to create a gold rush in longevity
00:35:25 - The problem with the aging field
00:39:32 - How to identify signal from noise
00:41:54 - AI applications to biology
00:45:15 - Importance of naiveté
00:47:24 - FREE RADICALS

[Daniel Shur @teleodaniel]

Free Radicals is back! Today’s guest is @ElliotHershberg, partner at @AmplifyPartners and author of the popular blog Century of Biology.

We talk about GLP-1s as a breakthrough moment for biotech, why drug development is starting to behave like software, and how falling discovery costs could finally free biotech startups from selling themselves to pharma.

Other topics include Elliot’s "massive markets, medium prices" thesis, the rise of consumer and "n-of-one" medicine, and Sid Sijbrandij @sytses going founder mode on his own cancer.

Thank you to @SynBioBeta for hosting us at their conference, where we recorded this episode, and several others we’ll be releasing soon!

Follow me, @FreeRadicalsBio & @EricDai_BioE for weekly episodes with leaders in biotech and longevity.

0:00 Intro
2:12 What era of biotech are we in?
3:58 GLP-1s: the once-in-a-generation breakthrough
7:04 Inside Lilly's trillion-dollar valuation
9:09 The Gillette Era of GLP1s
9:54 The Bryan Johnson Era of Biotech: Biohacking goes mainstream
12:55 The $1T question on Consumer Biotech
14:33 Patent cliffs, fast followers, and building for "me-last" therapies
18:20 Disintermediating pharma: HIMS, Loyal, and the standalone biotech
19:41 Why do biotechs sell to pharma in the first place?
23:03 Longevity: a science problem or an ecosystem-alignment problem?
27:14 Why GLP-1s came from pharma
29:52 Why Elliot is Bullish on Standalone Biotechs
33:03 Is Drug Development Becoming more like Software? Not if upside is capped at <$10B
41:30 The geroscience hypothesis and longevity as massive markets, medium prices
45:36 Treating age related diseases or aging as an indication
47:55 How do you value curing aging?

[Vitalist Bay (May 14-17) @VitalistBay]

"Longevity is the most important problem of humanity we have to solve soon with the help of AI; billions of lives are at stake."

That's how @DeryaTR_ framed his upcoming talk at @VitalistBay.
The AI x Bio track lineup ↓

[Daniel Shur @teleodaniel]

New episodes of @FreeRadicalsBio will be on pause until May 26th because we’re taking our show on the road!

This week we’re at @SynBioBeta. Next week @VitalistBay. We’ll be recording conversations with some amazing leaders in AI and Bio at these conferences!

We’ll be back to our regular weekly episodes soon.

And on a personal note this is the first time I’ve ever been at an event as a member of the press

[Daniel Shur @teleodaniel]

So excited for the future

[MTS @MTSlive]

SITUATION DETECTED: SpaceX has approved a new compensation package for Elon Musk ahead of its IPO.

200M super-voting shares if SpaceX hits a valuation of $7.5T and establishes a Mars colony of 1M people. He gets nothing if they miss targets.

[Daniel Shur @teleodaniel]

"All great snake oil... all great lies are built on a seed of truth.

The reason there's so much excitement around longevity is that we are able to modify aging biology in animals... and there are drugs in clinical trials... but consumers are not patient."

In today's episode of the @FreeRadicalsBio podcast, we dive into the history of the geroscience field with Dr. @JamesPeyer, founder & CEO @CambrianBio.

We discuss what makes geroscience's approach drug development so unique, how to unlock the flywheel of innovation that will get us longevity escape velocity, and Amplifier Therapeutics' "zone 2 in a pill"... which might prove to be the first ever true longevity drug.

Follow me and @EricDai_BioE to stay up to date on the latest news in longevity biotech!

[Daniel Shur @teleodaniel]

@MartinShkreli @zerophases @kanzure Everyone has a disease - it’s called aging. Every single person feels worse at 35 than they did at 25 - huge market to reverse that. The challenging thing is figuring out how to actually do that though…

[Nathan S. Cheng thinks you should work on aging. @realNathanCheng]

1/ How long do you want to live?

For most of human history, aging was inevitable.

It's now solvable.

Apply for LBF8 cohort program: longbiofellowship dot org

/THREAD🧵

[Jason Kelly @jrkelly]

Health and wellness will be the biggest market in the world. It’s inevitable.

[Daniel Shur @teleodaniel]

“You’re born, you grow up, you have a career, and then you get older and then you die. And that's just like the acceptable plan. Even if the plan is horrible… as long as we're going to plan, everybody goes along with it.”

@realNathanCheng is one of the most prolific activists in the longevity field. He argues that aging, decline and death are not really a great plan, even if it's the way things work today. He has dedicated his life and career to finding us a new plan.

Follow me and @EricDai_BioE to stay up to date on the latest news in longevity biotech!

0:00 Intro
2:35 Why did Nathan dedicate his life to defeating aging & death? (And the absurdity of asking that question)
8:59 Why has Daniel been on the fence, despite being longevity-pilled
14:09 The agency and bravery of founders to tackle the hardest problems (like aging)
18:46 Many ways to contribute to longevity besides entrepreneurship
19:41 Is longevity underinvested into?
24:48 What does it mean to treat aging itself as the issue (vs other diseases)
32:23 Do we need more scientific arguments, or philosophical arguments?
39:50 Nathan’s experience longevity-pilling influential people
47:03 Billionaire paradox
53:18 The challenge in going from viewing aging as inevitable to malleable
57:29 What needs to change about our culture to save us from aging & death
1:16:55 Should we be intolerant of pro-death & pro-aging views?
1:22:59 Join us at Vitalist Bay!

[Daniel Shur @teleodaniel]

Even if you were to eat a perfectly healthy diet, you will still age eventually (though slower) and die. We also know that virtually all organisms age (albeit at different rates, and a few don't). Tons of evidence that aging is a real process at the root of diseases, and it can be interfered with.

[Daniel Shur @teleodaniel]

@FreeRadicalsBio @KexinHuang5 @a16z @MenloVentures Apple Podcasts: https://t.co/YVu6SUDyJ1

[Daniel Shur @teleodaniel]

Thanks to AI, this century will be marked by an abundance of discoveries in biology.

Today’s guest on the @FreeRadicalsBio podcast is @KexinHuang5, one of the brightest minds in AI for life sciences.

Kexin recently raised $13.5M from @a16z and @MenloVentures Anthology Fund in partnership with @AnthropicAI, to build @phylo_bio - a research lab studying agentic biology.

Listen to learn how AI will make the dream of a one-man biotech reality within 10 years, how AI can unveil discoveries hidden in existing data, and much more.

Be sure to follow me and @EricDai_BioE to stay up to date on the latest news in longevity biotech!

0:00 Intro
2:47 Phylo’s vision to transform how biologist work
6:35 Phylo’s research areas
12:48 Why it’s harder for AI to do biology rather than software, and how to get around that
18:05 Building a virtual cell is a data problem
22:31 What it means for a biotech to go fully AI-native
27:26 The role of a human scientist & the importance of taste
32:22 Experiments in teaching AI scientific taste
36:57 How agents are transforming biology
42:53 The dream of the one-man biotech
47:21 How AI agents can find low hanging fruit through indication expansion
51:51 Can AI agents inflect biotech progress to give us radical life extension?
1:00:47 POPPER model for hypothesis validation
1:04:17 AI research institutes

[Daniel Shur @teleodaniel]

@FreeRadicalsBio @KexinHuang5 @a16z @MenloVentures Spotify: https://t.co/YwT71c5iTF

[Norn Group @NornGroup]

What will future AI enable in bio? That depends on the training datasets we choose to generate now.

@MartinBJensen: “How do you treat this disease? [...] is it one disease or five different things with different drivers? [This] is way underspecified. Solving those kinds of problems [needs] different kinds of data input. In vivo perturbation at scale [...], I think is one thing you can do."

- Free Radicals podcast with @EricDai_BioE and @teleodaniel

[Daniel Shur @teleodaniel]

@karpathy @jenzhuscott I'd much prefer an AGI future that gives us biotech so that we live on in our actual bodies, rather than as lossy simulations on computers. Let's be more optimistic! Our kids would prefer that too i think

[Daniel Shur @teleodaniel]

@hell_others @omarabudayyeh @jgooten @harvardmed thank you @hell_others!! appreciate the support

[Daniel Shur @teleodaniel]

Two young Harvard professors are coming for the supplements industry.

@omarabudayyeh and @jgooten run a joint lab at @harvardmed, have co-founded 4 biotechs, and raised over $300M to develop genetic medicines and diagnostics.

But what surprised me most: they think like consumer tech founders, not academics. They start with what people actually want and work backwards from there.

And best of all? They’re totally longevity-pilled. Consumers want to feel younger and healthier, and big pharma is waking up to it.

In this week’s episode of the Free Radicals podcast, we discuss the biology of aging, the future of longevity therapeutics, and how Harvard can bring legitimacy to the supplements industry.

One of my favorite episodes yet.

Be sure to follow me, @EricDai_BioE and @FreeRadicalsBio to stay up to date on the latest news in longevity biotech!

[Daniel Shur @teleodaniel]

@omarabudayyeh @jgooten @harvardmed Apple Podcasts: https://t.co/uLm3RWMNTP

[Daniel Shur @teleodaniel]

@omarabudayyeh @jgooten @harvardmed Spotify: https://t.co/8P07SSWhuP