Computational biology

Apr 16, 2026

Episode 16: Building AI for Life Sciences

OpenAI research lead Joy Jiao and product lead Yunyun Wang detail the development of specialized AI models for the life sciences. They discuss the new biochemistry-focused model series designed to accelerate research in genomics and protein understanding, the critical challenge of managing biosecurity risks through a "differentiated access" model, and the future vision of AI-powered autonomous labs that could revolutionize drug discovery and personalized medicine.

Apr 01, 2026

The Moonshot Podcast S2, Episode 2: Coding The Natural World

This episode of The Moonshot Podcast delves into the future of biological engineering, showcasing how AI and computational biology are transforming our interaction with living systems. Host Astro Teller first speaks with Brad Zamft of Heritable Agriculture about programming plants for increased yield, pest resistance, and drought resilience. Next, Relly Brandman from project A-Life explains how they're using AI to create a "virtual cell," shifting biomanufacturing from slow trial-and-error to a predictable engineering discipline for producing diverse materials like medicines, fuels, and textiles.

Jan 28, 2026

AlphaGenome author roundtable

A summary of the Google DeepMind team's discussion on AlphaGenome, their unified DNA sequence-to-function model. It covers the scientific motivation, the engineering breakthroughs in processing long DNA sequences at high resolution, the addition of complex biological modalities like splicing and contact maps, and the future direction of the research.

Nov 06, 2025

Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Cure All Disease

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) discuss their strategy to accelerate scientific discovery through the Biohub, an operating philanthropy at the intersection of frontier AI and biology. They detail the development of foundational tools like the Cell Atlas, a 'periodic table for biology,' and their new focus on building virtual cell models to allow scientists to test high-risk hypotheses in silico, ultimately aiming to cure, prevent, and manage all diseases.

Sep 15, 2025

Faster Science, Better Drugs

Erik Torenberg, Patrick Hsu (Arc Institute), and Jorge Conde (a16z) discuss Arc's moonshot to create 'virtual cells' using foundation models to simulate biology. They cover why science is slow, how AI can accelerate drug discovery by predicting cellular perturbations, and the remaining bottlenecks in clinical trials and capital intensity that the biotech industry faces.

Jul 15, 2025

AI is Revolutionizing Scientific Discovery Featuring Nobel Laureate John Jumper

John Jumper, one of the creators of AlphaFold, discusses the journey of developing an AI system to solve the protein folding problem. He emphasizes that the breakthrough was driven more by novel research and a combination of "mid-scale ideas" than by raw data or compute scale alone. The talk covers the importance of blind-assessment benchmarks like CASP, the strategy of releasing a massive, accessible database to drive adoption and trust, and the unexpected ways the scientific community used the tool. He concludes by framing AI for science as a powerful amplifier for experimentalists, accelerating discovery by generating high-quality, testable hypotheses.