Is The Era Of AI-Designed Drugs Actually Here? - EP 50 Josh Meier and Jack Dent

**Josh Meier** (0:00)
I always wanted to find some way to bring these things back together, right? I loved programming, I loved biochemistry, how are we going to bring things together? And language modeling seems to be the solution. I was sitting at OpenAI, you've seen these language modeling results. I was like, if a computer can understand how you and I communicate, why can't it understand how cells communicate, right? Proteins, DNA, what if we just feed all of that into a language model? Something's interesting is bound to happen.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:39)
We are here today to talk AI and Science and Health with Josh Meier and Jack Dent from Chai Discovery. Hello, gentlemen.

**Josh Meier** (0:48)
Hi. Thanks for having us.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:49)
Thank you. I know you had a, dragged you through Bay Area traffic to get here.

**Josh Meier** (0:55)
Someone's gotta solve that problem someday.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:59)
I'm told people are working on this. We'll get tunnels, lucky how I'm promised. Yeah, well, thank you guys so much for coming.
I was texting Jack. My inbox these days seems inundated with companies telling me they are breaking new ground in AI, in science and medicines are being discovered left and right. It's gotten to the point where it's impossible for me to have any bearing on ascertaining, what is real, what's not, what's actually going on. But I had the luxury of meeting you guys a couple of months ago, and then I have tons of people I respect who said, so you guys do, you're legit, and you're doing some groundbreaking work here. So I just thought this would be a chance to tell the world where we're at with AI and medicine and discovering all these molecules just to get updated on where we're at. So why don't you, does one of you want to do the honor of trying to explain just first off to give people a baseline of what you do?

**Jack Dent** (2:10)
Go for it.

**Josh Meier** (2:11)
Well, at Chai Discovery, our mission is to make biology look less like science and more like engineering. So we start with that with pretty much everything we do. That comes out to the way we do our work, the way we present our work, and the kinds of challenges that we're going after.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:25)
Okay. The baseline on some level is that you're applying AI to biology, I guess, also across everything you guys do.

**Josh Meier** (2:39)
As you might imagine, AI is a really good tool in working on that mission.

**Jack Dent** (2:43)
Yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:44)
And then I would say, you had two very large announcements over the last, what, three, four months, and they were in particular around using AI to discover things like antibodies, like new molecules. Is that fair?

**Jack Dent** (3:02)
That's right. Yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:03)
Okay. And then, so, all right. Let's get into the backstory a little bit because you guys have known each other for a long time. I like the journey of how you even got interested in this.
Josh, for you, you've been doing biology work since high school. I think you were in this strange position of having a stem cell lab at your high school, and that's like what first drew you into this.

**Josh Meier** (3:31)
That's how I got into this space. Like Jack, I grew up as a programmer, so I was coding since I was a kid, and I went to this high school because of the math team. But a couple of weeks into freshman year of high school, I learned that we had a stem cell lab in our school, and I was like, how am I not spending all my time here? So I got hooked on biology early on.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:48)
It was like a public school too.

**Josh Meier** (3:50)
It was, yeah. It was a magnet school. You had to take a test to get in, but completely free public school and people from all kinds of demographics. It was a really interesting place to grow up.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:00)
In New Jersey? New Jersey, yeah. Okay. Then were you 17 when you first started working at Stripe?

**Jack Dent** (4:10)
I think I first-

**Ashlee Vance** (4:12)
Is that legal?

**Jack Dent** (4:15)
It was not legal because I actually couldn't get a visa. For the first time, I wanted to work at Stripe, but ended up going to Stripe the summer of my freshman year of college, having first applied out of high school. I was always considering college, not college, because so much was happening in Silicon Valley, but ended up working there as an intern at the age of 18, and thinking about dropping out for a good few years, but finally went back there when I graduated.