Over the past couple of years, one of the more ambitious experiments in American manufacturing has been taking place in Central Texas. It is called Proto-Town, and it has been something of a secret. …

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It runs loops around the perimeter of the third floor of this bio lab, serving as a courier. The machine’s job is to visit workstations and keep other robots - arms bolted to lab benches - fed with whatever they need be it pipette holders, sealed plates or something in a labeled bag. The little bot is relentless and unconcerned about me or much else beyond its job. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot chairs still rotating slowly on their bases from where it clipped them on the last pass.

About a hundred robotic arms fill this room, each one positioned beside a different scientific tool. The arms must deal with centrifuges, incubators, chambers and tubes. They run simultaneously and continuously. The small robot links them together, ferrying consumables between stations the way a junior scientist carries things between benches. Except the benches are robots. And so is the assistant.

All of this is the brainchild of Michelle Lee, the founder and CEO of Medra. And, at this moment, she’s rather proud that one of her robots has learned to open and close a glass door with ease.

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MEDRA TODAY formally announced the opening of its 38,000 square foot warehouse in San Francisco. The company runs what it calls “physical AI scientists”: general-purpose robot arms with cameras mounted near their grippers and nine different sensors - all governed by software that lets the arms operate lab instruments the way a trained human would.

Standard lab automation gear, the kind that has existed for two decades, comes with dated APIs and rigid interfaces. Only about five percent of the instruments sitting on a scientist’s bench fall into the “can be automated” category. The rest — centrifuges you open and balance, pipettes you grip and tilt and time — were designed for hands. Medra thinks it has technology to automate the old and the new. Its software uses computer vision and manipulation models to adapt to the instruments that labs already own. Lee says that, if successful, Medra’s physical AI scientists can bump the overall automation number for bio-tech tasks from five percent to seventy-five percent.

THE PLATFORM works in two linked layers.

The first is physical: cameras are mounted on every arm and every lab bench with the nine sensors doing yet more monitoring. When an arm opens a centrifuge, for example, the wrist camera reads the rotor angle to balance the load. When a pipette misses a pick-up, the system catches the mistake and sends a notification. The sensor network logs the exact angle of every pipette tip, the exact depth of its insertion, the timing between reagent additions — all of it automatically. With humans in a lab, this layer of practice is tacit — an experienced scientist builds intuition for what to do over years, and once they leave or retire, their knowledge goes with them. Medra’s sensors would be among the first systems to put this information on the record. “The way science sometimes works is super subtle,” Lee says. “You vortex it thirty seconds more, shake a certain way, suddenly it starts working. How do you capture that? The robots just capture exactly what they do.”

The second layer is the AI scientist: a software agent that reads the results, identifies what’s going wrong, proposes protocol changes, and rewrites the protocol itself. It can run autonomously or hold for human approval. According to Lee, one customer ran an experiment to test whether their antibodies would bind to a target protein. The answer came back zero — meaning the antibodies weren’t sticking to anything. The AI scientist narrowed the problem to two hypotheses, designed a test to distinguish them, proposed adding a vortexing step mid-protocol, and watched binding jump from zero to more than seventy percent.

There was no automation engineer involved - just a chat interface and an arm. The doing and the thinking on one platform.

The arms are general-purpose hardware, sourced from the same manufacturer that supplies Toyota factories. The software is what makes them useful in a lab context.

“We adapt general robots for the reality we live in,” Lee says.

We’re in the midst of an AI-for-bio boom with a bottleneck problem. Companies like Chai Discovery can now design drug candidates at a pace that would have been unthinkable five years ago. But a designed molecule is not a validated one. Every drug candidate still has to be synthesized and tested in a physical lab by physical scientists who can only run so many experiments in a day. The software has sprinted ahead of the hardware.

Whether Medra is the company that closes the gap is another question. Lab automation and versions of “AI scientists” have been overpromised for two decades. But somebody has to build the throughput. A hundred arms running in San Francisco is a worthy attempt.

Medra’s old lab was 4,000 square feet and had a handful of robots in training. This new building has three floors of weight-bearing concrete and 38,000 square feet of space. Back in November, Medra had 15 employees. Now, it’s up to 45. Five customers have experiments scheduled to run across the robot army inside of the only autonomous lab in the city.

Customization is Medra’s moat. A new customer describes their protocol: instruments, throughput, consumables. An agent asks questions, builds a simulation from a JSON file, optimizes the layout, and runs the protocol virtually before the first arm moves. More than eighty-five percent of customers arrive with a request Medra has never fulfilled before. Because the software and hardware layer is consistent across protocols, reconfiguring from one setup to a hundred doesn’t require massive rebuilding. Over the last three months, Medra went from none of these systems in the building existing to a hundred arms running antibody binding.

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Medra’s customers own their experimental data: the sequences, the targets, the candidates. What Medra retains is process knowledge – the pipette angle that produced good results, the vortex duration, the timing between reagent additions. The data edge compounds the more protocols the company runs.

One gap, though, remains. The system can detect a missing plate, catch a dropped tip, and read a centrifuge rotor. It cannot distinguish one colorless liquid from another. Humans still open boxes and load the consumables. For now, there’s no way around it.

LEE GREW up in Taiwan and came to America at fourteen. Her family worked in chemical engineering, and so, as one does, she studied chemical engineering, built a go-kart in undergrad, won a grant for an iPhone, and spent 2015 interning at SpaceX. You can hear traces of her time at SpaceX - and remnants of Elon Musk’s unwavering commitment to speed and infrastructure — in the conviction in her voice. Just ten years ago, everyone she knew at Google was praising Project Loon – Starlink seemed like insanity.

Now, she tells me, “Starlink feels inevitable.”

Lee was supposed to become a professor at NYU. Then, in 2021, AlphaFold 2 was released, and she started thinking through why it worked. Protein folding was solvable because fifty years of structural data existed to train on. Data for problems like drug target validation, antibody design and gene function is still limited, and the only way to get more data is to run more experiments. Labs can run only as many experiments as they have scientists, and scientists, like all humans, have limited working hours and, when they leave, take their technique with them.

From 2022 to 2024, Lee tried to build standardized cell culture boxes – something she could sell to multiple customers. She quickly learned that every lab wanted the work done differently and ended all the pilots in 2024. Then she rebuilt the hardware and software, this time designed to be reconfigured for each customer instead of sold as a fixed product.

The first Medra customer signed a six-figure contract on the basis of a PowerPoint and photographs of a robotic arm (the arm hadn’t even been hers — she had borrowed it from a friend with access to a lab.) The team had exactly one employee: Lee.

THE MODEL she uses to explain Medra is TSMC. TSMC manufactures the chips that make it possible for chip designers to exist. Medra wants to be what makes it possible for a drug discovery company to run experiments without building its own lab.

She grew up watching semiconductor manufacturing transform Taiwan into a geopolitical asset. Then realized early on that the infrastructure had to exist domestically. “Science is so critical to the United States’ — any nation’s — prosperity and also national security,” she notes. “If all our antibiotics come from abroad, what happens when there’s a national security crisis?” There’s urgency in her voice. “We need to move fast.”

The Chinese pharmaceutical industry has been moving fast for decades. Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, and most major American pharmaceutical companies manufacture extensively in China, where Chinese scientists, technicians, and — you guessed it — robots have been accumulating process knowledge at a volume no American lab has matched. As with more traditional manufacturing, the U.S. has fallen behind, which is not ideal as we head toward a century possibly full of bio-tech breakthroughs.

Medra offers the hope that the U.S. could play off its AI and software strengths and find a way to compete.

The arms are still running when you leave the third floor, and will still be running as you head to bed tonight. The small robot is still on its circuit – tip rack here, plate there – moving through the room on a schedule that doesn’t stop at five or take weekends. The jobs queue and clear. The arms complete their protocols. The chairs spin slowly in the corners.

“If we could cure cancer, Alzheimer’s, infectious disease – we have the ability to do that,” Lee says. “We just don’t have the throughput.”

The bot makes another pass.

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We juiced every second of our 90 minutes with the cofounders of OpenAI. We got into the company restructuring. Why Sora got cut. Why the social network is dead. The “personal AGI” that knows your calendar and your taste and books the concert ticket without asking. Sam said he’s worried Elon Musk will drop the lawsuit before it gets to court. Read that however you want.

There’s new OpenAI tech on the horizon too — a model that “makes ridiculously great images,” another that’s allegedly better at writing.

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Ashlee pressed them on American manufacturing and whether we’re cooked. Sam says OpenAI will go so far as producing their own actuators for robots. We discussed the possibility of a real permanent underclass, the two futures Sam sees, and the third one Greg wants instead. Safety. Anthropic. The Mythos thing. Sam also talked, briefly, about the days after the attacks on his home.

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The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.

This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.

We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

It did not take long for most of this criticism to dissipate. Within a couple of years, the public became accustomed to the idea of heart transplants and then they welcomed them. Last year, about 10,000 people worldwide had heart transplants, while nearly 165,000 people received a kidney, liver, lung or pancreas.

There would be far more organ transplants if there were more viable organs available. Which brings us to the next medical and ethical quandary that society may soon face.

A three-year-old startup named Kind Biotechnology has begun work on what it calls an integrated organ network, or ION. This acronym undersells what Kind is making, which is a collection of organs that can be grown inside of an animal’s womb and then harvested for transplantation. Cue the gasps from some and the cheers from others.

By creating a series of genetic edits, Kind can alter the development of an embryo so that it forms organs without also forming limbs, a central nervous system and brain. The result is a group of organs growing in the womb. It sounds like science fiction, but Kind has already done this hundreds of times in mice and now rats, according to Justin Rebo, the company’s founder and CEO.

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In the months ahead, Kind plans to expand its technology to larger mammals like pigs and possibly sheep with the hopes of producing organs good enough to endure the transplantation process. One day, Rebo expects that humans might be able to use these animal-grown organs to deal with medical emergencies and to help people live longer.

“We’re working on a platform to build abundant organ medicine, which we believe is a path not only to treating organ failure, but eventually to being more broadly medically useful and even impacting human lifespan,” Rebo says. “The point of medicine is to make people live longer and healthier lives. That’s what it’s always been. And that’s what we’re working on.”

TENS OF thousands of people languish waiting for viable organs each year. Scientists have been attempting to solve this problem for decades by trying to create individual organs in their labs. In some cases, they take the cells of an organ and then coax them into developing more fully to make, say, a lab-grown kidney or liver. Companies like United Therapeutics and eGenesis have also been editing the genes of pig organs to make them more suitable for human use.

While there has been some success with these approaches, Rebo considers them too basic and limited to produce the full complement of organs that humans need. He contends that you can’t create the best organs in isolation and that they need to develop alongside each other. “The heart relies on the kidney to modulate the system environment in the right way to allow it to live and grow,” he says. “And both rely on the lungs and the liver and so forth, and both need access to nutrients, which is provided by the intestines.”

Rebo is a doctor and scientist with a long history in the bio-tech and longevity fields. And he’s not alone on this quest to create organs inside of what could be called headless bodies. R3 Bio, co-founded by John Schloendorn and Alice Gilman, is pursuing similar technology, although without much detail as of yet. Gilman has talked about trying to create animal models that could be used for medical testing so that researchers would no longer need to experiment on living, conscious mammals like primates. RenewalBio in Israel is also believed to be working in this area, trying to build organs from a patient’s own cells. (Schloendorn and Rebo were previously collaborators.)

Before even getting to the ethical considerations of Kind’s technology, there are myriad practical, scientific matters to confront.

Rebo’s vision is that you might grow a collection of organs inside of a pig’s or other animal’s womb and then have those organs placed into humans. To do this well, there would need to be genetic edits made to the organs so that the human bodies would accept them. In addition, you would need to mature the organs outside of the womb so that they could grow and be suitable for humans of different ages.

All of these are incredibly difficult technological challenges, and it’s unclear that we can actually pull them off in anything resembling a cost-effective, repeatable fashion in the nearish future. Rebo, though, talks matter of factly about taking today’s lab research and making it more concrete. He thinks all the major problems are solvable via advances with genetic editing technology and hardware systems that can support the development of organs outside of the body by helping regulate hormonal, immune and other functions.

“So initially the transplants would be into neonatal pigs or neonatal whatever larger animal that we use,” he says. “But even beyond that, I think many people don’t know is that there are case reports where kidneys, for example, were transplanted from a seven-month infant into an adult and they were life sustaining. I want to emphasize that we don’t have a plan to do a human system. But we have seen that you don’t have to keep these things going for an extended period of time for their organs to be useful.”

The notion of a body being able to develop in a healthy fashion without a central nervous system and brain to aid in the process seems hard to fathom. This, however, does happen on occasion in nature. There are babies born without brain stems and without their neocortex, which is responsible for cognition, and that survive for years – the most famous example being Baby K.

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The ethical questions are equally challenging. There’s something very off-putting about the idea of headless meat sacks being grown for harvest.

That said, organ transplantation is unpleasant as is. There’s a black market for organs that is the stuff of nightmares. And, in general, sick old people are sitting around waiting for young people to have a car crashes or some other horrific accidents so that they might get an organ and live a few more years, which is a grim calculus. Beyond all of that, what we already do in terms of harvesting sentient animals for food is abhorrent, and most of us seem to deal with this just fine. It does not feel like a huge leap, at least to me, to think about taking an organ from a brainless sack to save a child or a loved one.

“I understand that this looks weird,” Rebo says. “But ultimately, it’s a system that prioritizes ethics and prioritizes something that can actually work. We can grow these things with our present technology.”

While Kind must currently grow the organs in the womb of an animal, there are futures where similar functions could take place inside of artificial wombs. We wrote earlier this year about Becoming Bio, which has developed an artificial placenta. Over the last couple of years, scientists have also made huge strides in the perfusion systems that keep organs functioning outside of the body. Bexorg does this with brains. And Science Corp. recently unveiled a whole perfusion product line.

Rebo, 47, grew up in Pennsylvania – one of those kids who built Tesla coils and lasers for fun. After obtaining his medical degree in 2010, Rebo went right into bio-tech working with embryonic stem cells and then on parabiosis, where an old animal and a young animal have their bodies fused together to share a circulatory system.

“Ever since I was very young, I thought that the wisest and best people in the world must be working on the obviously most important problem, which is to make people live longer and healthier lives,” he says.

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He started KindBio about three years ago after growing dissatisfied with the rate of progress in the longevity field. Today, the company, located in New Hampshire, has a handful of employees. Rebo declines to say how much money the company has raised or from whom.

Kind has spent much of its time researching and identifying the genes that disrupt the formation of the central nervous system and brainstem and other genes that lower the metabolic demands of the organ systems to make them easier to sustain. “They’re not small, tiny cutouts,” he says. “We’re talking about taking out multiple exons.”

Rebo says that Kind has proven out its technology in mice and will move to larger animals this year – first in pigs and then possibly sheep. The company has yet to try a transplant with the organs it has grown and does not expect to do so until the work on the larger animals begins. “The timeline in the larger systems is longer than in mice because mice grow very fast and the generation time is short,” Rebo says. “I would like to have large animal IONs in less than three years and would consider the goal of that stage of research to be a transplant and demonstrating that the organs are life-sustaining.”

The technology, if it works, will start out expensive. Rebo, though, can see a future where the price comes down enough to perhaps open the organ work up to other uses beyond transplants. It could, for one, help with animal testing of drugs. “From there, you can imagine getting to a level of scale and cost effectiveness where you could even look at ethical animal products more broadly. You could imagine a leather application or even a meat application.”

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The idea for Ulysses started when one of the four co-founders was on a surf trip and learned how much of humanity depends on a single marine plant: the humble seagrass. He spent a weekend designing a robot to plant it. Two years later, the group of Irishmen — and for diversity, a Scot — have moved well beyond ecological restoration. They’re providing services for the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and selling their drones to the U.S. Navy.

The robots are called Mako. They’re two meters long, weigh about 400 pounds, and can dive 5,000 feet for up to 72 hours at a time. They’re also modular — payloads swap in and out like Legos, so the same vehicle that plants seagrass in Australia one week can inspect a submarine cable in the Baltic the next. A base Mako costs $50,000. Most legacy underwater drones built by big defense contractors can run between $1 million and $20 million each.

On this episode of the Core Memory podcast, we’re joined by Will O’Brien and Akhil Voorakkara, co-founders of Ulysses. They build these drones out of an office in San Francisco — for conservation, for academia, for national defense. They just raised a $38 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz through its American Dynamism fund. We discuss what it actually takes to make robots for the most hostile environment on Earth, why the ocean is about to have its SpaceX moment, and the surprisingly thin line between planting seagrass and defending NATO.

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The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.

This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.

We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.

Case in point: Panthalassa, which is the subject of this week’s episode, alongside our guest Garth Sheldon-Coulson, the company’s co-founder and CEO.

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Panthalassa makes an object that it calls a node and that looks like a giant lollipop. This odd contraption is meant to live out in the deep ocean and produce energy from the movement of waves. Water goes into the node where it’s funneled through a series of channels and pressurized. After that, the water is directed into a turbine that spins and connects to a generator that produces electricity.

How big is this node? Quite fucking big. It’s about 20 meters across at the top of the lollipop and then goes down about 80 meters into the water. The contraption can move and steer on its own and travel about 30 miles a day to reach the ideal spots where the waves just keep coming and coming.

There’s some universe where this thing is bobbing around in the ocean, generating electricity day and night and storing the electricity in batteries. Panthalassa, though, wants to put servers packed full of GPUs and TPUs right on board and use the electricity to fuel AI jobs. It will then send the results of the work up into space via Starlink and then back down to Earth. Simple.

We get into all of this in detail with Sheldon-Coulson.

Panthalassa has been operating in semi-secret for about ten years. This episode marks the first time that Sheldon-Coulson has discussed the company’s technology at length. We talk about his backstory, how this wild idea came to be and the engineering behind the nodes.

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The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.

This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.

We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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The company helping people move again is called Onward Medical, and it’s based in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 2023, I booked a flight to Europe and went to visit Onward and met its CEO Dave Marver, who is this week’s guest.

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During my trip, I did, in fact, witness amazing things. An Italian man named Michel was walking again with the help of a spinal implant device made by Onward. He could stand and walk and exercise daily. And a young Belgian woman named Julie used an Onward device to regulate her blood pressure. Before receiving the Onward technology, Julie had contemplated suicide because it took her hours each day to get out of bed – the result of blood pressure fluctuations that caused her to pass out. After receiving the device, she reenrolled in her PhD program. Her whole life had been turned around.

Onward has developed products that deliver electrical stimulation to the spinal cord. Some of these products work outside of the body and some require an implant. More recently, Onward has begun pairing its spinal implant technology with brain computer interface implants. This allows patients to think about their desire to move and have those thoughts translated into actions executed by the spinal implant.

In this episode, Marver walks us through the history of Onward’s technology development and how all of these products work. It’s a story of academic research being turned into life-changing technology. I would argue that no company does more to help people dealing with paralysis.

This episode will surprise you, and, I think, warm your heart.

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The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.

This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.

We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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As many of you will know, Tesla has been on a long journey to create a new line of Semi trucks capable of g…

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If you have questions, you can email me at eryneym@gmail.com, DM me on Twitter or Substack. Or put them in the comments below!

Also, none of the below constitu…

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Today, Franceschi is the co-founder and CEO of Brex, a financial technology company that was just acquired by Capital One for $5.15 billion. Franceschi is all of 29 years old now, so he’s done alright.

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Brex led a new wave of companies that brought more modern financial tools first to start-ups and then to businesses of all sizes. Over the years, it’s had some ups and downs, and Franceschi has been remarkably open about Brex’s stumbles, his mental health struggles and about the areas where he thinks Brex got things very right.

Franceschi remains a hacker at heart and has been experimenting away with AI agents. He, in fact, says he’s running Brex – and his life – with a team of AI agents that read his e-mails and Slack messages, perform job recruiting tasks and schedule his day-to-day activities.

We get into all of this on the episode, charting Franceschi’s rise from hacking phenom to running a multi-billion-dollar company and discussing where he thinks AI and money are heading.

Do we have journalistic conflicts with this episode? Yes, we do. Brex has been the top sponsor of our podcast and video series. You can learn more about the depths of our relationship and what Brex can do for your business right here.

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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About 25 years ago, Musk sold his finance tech company PayPal and left dot-com life to get into rockets with the founding of SpaceX. Hardly anyone considered this a rational choice on Musk’s part. Space, after all, was where rich people went to blow their fortunes and fail.

For his part, Bhatt co-founded the investing service Robinhood in 2013 and has now decided to get into the space business as well via a start-up called Aetherflux. The company aims to build a network of solar panel-packed satellites that suck up sunshine and then beam it down to Earth via infrared lasers. Yes. Actual space lasers. What could go wrong?

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The lasers would feed antennas and ground stations on Earth with energy. In theory, you could then direct power just about anywhere without needing to build a ton of infrastructure on the ground. Army convoys, data centers, etc. could just have electricity sent to them in remote areas.

Bhatt explains all of this in the episode and gets deep into his personal story. He also recounts starting and running Robinhood through its ups and downs, including being both beloved and despised.

Will the space lasers work? I dunno. It’s a lot. But we are fully in the era of trying new, bold ideas in Low Earth Orbit, and, well, I wrote a book predicting this very thing, and so am very much here for it.

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The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.

This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.

We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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The drone whirred above us. The loud hum combined with some precious Seattle sunshine made it easy to follow the four-armed machine as it zoomed into the distance. The drone’s creator, Blake Resnick, watched with a big grin. “This is always our most dramatic demo,” he told me, as he unfolded a clear pair of safety glasses.

We stood in the parking lot of a drone company called Brinc, founded by Resnick in 2017. They produce extra fancy hardware, like the Lemur 2 that zipped over our heads, for tactical responders in the public safety field. Firefighters can use its glass breaker to bust into a building and scope out an inferno. Police officers can flick on its thermal vision to find criminals in hiding. A SWAT team, per Brinc’s website, can prompt it to “deliver a pack of cigarettes during a negotiation.”

“We’ve seen those drones get shot, seen it stabbed, we’ve seen them flown into ceiling fans,” Resnick told me. “They go through some stuff.”

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Our drone had a far more important mission on this day: to impress a journalist. Its teleoperator was Dmitry Tarasov, an operations manager at Brinc and one of Resnick’s closest colleagues. He flipped through features as Resnick said them aloud. Show her night vision, now flip on the police lights and sirens. They played a pre-programmed message, alerting the neighborhood about a fictitious missing child. He called the drone to demonstrate its two-way communication capability. “One, two, three, four, five,” Resnick’s voice boomed through the drone.

The drone descended, navigated itself underneath some of the parked cars before Tarasov piloted it directly into a concrete wall — on purpose. Resnick rattled off words to describe each component: LiDAR, tungsten carbide, 20,000 RPM. He seemed like a proud dad listing little league trophies.

Finally, the drone approached a sheet of glass propped up nearby. With a little tap — tink, pop! — it turned to dust. “This was the first drone in the world with the glass breaching capability,” Resnick said, never losing his grin.

IF YOU weren’t already aware, I’ll tell you now — there’s a lot of drama in the drone world.

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This is the first edition of what I hope will become a staple for Core Memory. Though I’d love to comment on politics, religion, culture and dating, I think my experience is best directed toward addr…

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Paul Conyngham and his dog Rosie gained worldwide attention over the past week for breaking new medical ground. Using a variety of artificial intelligence tools, Conyngham – and some doctors and scientists in Australia – managed to create a personalized (petalized?) cancer treatment for Rosie that appears to be working.

The story resonated with the public for a couple of big reasons. First off, Conyngham has no real science or biology background. He’s a longtime AI researcher who used things like ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok to give him a plan for how to attack Rosie’s untreatable cancer and then how to craft and shape a unique mRNA shot for his pup. This exercise demonstrated the powers of AI technology to aid all of us with extra knowledge and skills and just how far bio-tech has come in terms of new cancer therapies.

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Most people have had their hearts warmed by the tale of Paul and Rosie. Dude’s dog is dying. Dude goes to great lengths to try and solve the problem. Dude and his dog seem to mark a major moment for AI and medicine.

Some other people on the internet, however, are less excited by the story. They argue that the AI tools did very little here and that the science isn’t terribly conclusive or ground-breaking. Companies like Moderna and BioNTech already have personalized cancer vaccine data in trials, and it looks good. Who cares if we did the same thing for a dog? Rosie has also been treated with chemotherapy drugs, so we don’t even know if the mRNA technology is really the thing shrinking her tumors. And so on.

You can find some of the major criticisms here and here.

Some of the pushback may be valid, although Conyngham isn’t having it – as you’ll hear in the episode. It also sort of misses the point of this story.

After talking to Conyngham, it’s clear enough to me that he used AI in some profound ways here and that what was done with Rosie is symbolic of a huge shift in medicine. Regulators better get ready because the tools now exist for people to do rather daring experimentation on their pets and themselves. People in dire circumstances and with some means are going to be pushing the boundaries of what’s possible on a regular basis.

Paul and Rosie hit a nerve because their journey bundled up some massive technological and societal shifts into a tidy narrative.

Anyway, come listen to Paul and have a peek at Rosie.

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The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.

This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.

We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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The brain, insulated in a cooler, came in through the back door of a start-up called Bexorg located in New Haven, Connecticut. It then went into the hands of Josip Butkovic, a Croatian-born surgeon, who carried the package to a prep table in Bexorg’s basement. Next, Butkovic removed the brain and placed it in a metal bowl. Gelatinous and shiny, the brain spread out to push against the bowl’s edges.

Butkovic, dressed in scrubs, spent a half-hour inspecting the brain and repairing some of its vasculature. He also began inserting tubes and valves into the organ. Shortly thereafter, he placed the brain onto a cart and transported it upstairs into a room that looked part laboratory and part hospital. It had computers and various types of testing equipment throughout and then several large, rectangular pods that were enclosed in plexiglass and plastic to protect them from things floating in the air and that were filled with medical equipment. Butkovic brought the brain into one of these pods and started to attach it to a machine of Bexorg’s invention – a hardware system that could advance brain science and drug development in astonishing ways.

The machine is what’s known as a perfusion device, meaning that it perfuses or passes fluids and gases through an organ to keep it functional. Doctors use something similar – a heart-lung bypass machine - during open heart surgery to replicate the work of the heart and the lungs and circulate oxygenated blood through the body. No one, though, has created an equivalent machine for the brain - except for Bexorg. The start-up’s scientists, after many years of research, have developed a way to keep a human brain going outside of the body for up to a day.

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This is the part of the story where some of you will be wondering if/fearing that the brains have been reanimated and are perhaps once again alive in a thinking or feeling sense. To which, Bexorg’s co-founders - Zvonimir Vrselja and Nenad Sestan - would say, “No.” The brains come from donors and, by the time they arrive at Bexorg, they’ve been dead for several hours. They have no electrical activity. The neurons inside are not firing. What Bexorg is doing is reviving the brains on a molecular level and restoring their base, biological function like metabolizing oxygen and glucose.

The brains Bexorg receives often come from people who were afflicted with conditions like dementia and Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. Bexorg connects these brains to its perfusion system so that it can test new therapies on the organs and then measure the results. And this is a very big deal because we currently lack a good way to test drugs on the brains of humans. People, after all, don’t like their brains to be experimented on while they’re alive nor is there a convenient means of sampling from a living brain to see what’s happening inside of it.

For these reasons, most new brain therapies are tested first on rodents and then sometimes primates but with abysmal results. By the time a drug gets near a clinical trial in humans, a pharma company might have spent a decade and a $1 billion or more. And, at that point, its drug will likely still fail. Drugs aimed at central nervous system conditions have a failure rate that hovers around 95 percent, while therapies meant to slow or reverse Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s fail about 99 percent of the time.

Bexorg’s hope, then, is to give researchers a way to test their drugs much earlier on real human brains and to see what works and what doesn’t before tons of money has been spent. “We are not doing this as a research project,” says Vrselja, Bexorg’s CEO. “I want to see therapies for Alzheimer’s and for Parkinson’s. There are people waiting for those drugs, and we want to push as quickly as possible to get those drugs and those cures to them.”

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These cells with a clunky name hold the promise of being able to reverse the aging process across our bodies. Put rather bluntly, your old, wine-soaked liver could become like your twenty-something, Jell-O-shot-soaked liver. Your aging neurons could fire like they once did. And your tired heart could be fresh and loving again.

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Billions of dollars have been funneled toward trying to figure out how to push iPSCs into our organs safely and effectively. We have not cracked the code yet, but there are signs that scientists are getting closer.

Nabiha Saklayen, the co-founder and CEO of Cellino Bio, is an iPSC whiz and joined the podcast this week to bring us all up to speed on the technology. She covers how iPSCs work, their history and the state of iPSC treatments around the world.

Her company is trying to take iPSCs, which have largely been made by hand, and mass produce them to accelerate experimentation and hopefully therapies and to reduce costs around this fascinating technology.

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This podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.

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