Entropy and aging

A while back, I got invited to give a talk at the symposium on “Entropy and Aging” organized by UCSF and Steve Cummings. I realized that I had spent years in the industry trenches, and had never presented my papers on entropy, age reversal and the stochastic nature of aging in a single coherent talk — also, I lost access to all my Retro slide decks, and couldn’t use any of the slides I had prepared earlier. It was a good nudge to organize my older works, and present them as a teaser for what we’re building right now at Generative Selection. I prepped for the talk and gave it on Saturday.

The TL;DR of my 12-13 years of working on aging is that it’s entropic, and we need to build next-generation tools to control multiple aspects of it at the same time. The available tools are bottlenecked by small effects and conservatism in the pharma space. Hence, we want to use AI x bio to speed up and scale up the development of programmable and modular biologics against multiple aging phenotypes. Imagine if you could deliver a custom molecular machine to fix a very specific type of damage in a given subset of cell types — right now, it’s not possible. That’s what we believe we need to make possible, and what we are building in house!

I enjoyed the symposium — I haven’t had much time to travel to conferences and present. It’s inspiring to be surrounded by people who also think deeply about aging and care about solving it at some point. Of course, it’s more of an ivory tower style meeting, but still — I wish more people spent more time thinking about what we’re trying to solve and why.

I was the only one invited to present from the companies or startups in the field. There were only two people presenting anti-aging interventions — Vittorio Sebastiano from Stanford and myself. The panel afterwards was supposed to be spicy but, surprisingly, everyone was mostly on the same side. They wished me good luck in my endeavor!

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