The Present And Future Of Gene Editing - EP 54 Jennifer Doudna
28 Jan 2026 · 77 min
In this Core Memory podcast, host Ashlee Vance interviews Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna about the state of CRISPR gene‑editing. Doudna explains why viruses inspire confidence in delivery, walks through the approved sickle‑cell therapy Casgevy (a CRISPR‑based edit that re‑activates fetal hemoglobin), and the rapid, collaborative development of a base‑editor therapy for the rare metabolic disease of baby KJ Muldoon. She emphasizes that delivery—whether via lipid nanoparticles, viral‑inspired vectors, or microbiome‑targeted phages—is the current bottleneck, even as the toolbox expands from classic Cas9 cuts (V1) to base editors (V2) and prime editors (V3). The conversation turns to the Innovative Genomics Institute’s (IGI) role in funding, startup creation, and interdisciplinary research (AI, imaging, robotics). Doudna describes agricultural projects, such as methane‑reducing cows and CRISPR‑edited crops, and the divergent regulatory regimes in the US and Europe. She reflects on the fast‑moving regulatory landscape, the need for data‑sharing and AI‑driven predictive models, and the complementary strengths of US innovation versus Chinese implementation. Additionally, Doudna highlights how AI models now design antibodies, enzymes, and novel molecules, streamlining lab work, and she envisions a future of preventive gene editing where individuals could use CRISPR to tweak protective genes against diseases like Alzheimer’s or heart disease. She also discusses the vibrant Bay Area biotech culture—its creativity, funding ecosystem, and the realistic challenges that temper enthusiasm—advocating for responsible, innovative progress. Throughout, she conveys a measured, optimistic tone, acknowledging challenges while highlighting rapid progress and societal impact of CRISPR.
Chapters
One word that comes to mind when you ask what gives me confidence, and the word is viruses.
Okay.
Viruses.
Yeah.
And the reason is that this is exactly what viruses do. They target specific types of cells in the body and they don't mess with any others, and they're very good at honing in on those cells. And so when we think of, for example, everybody's probably familiar with COVID-19, of course, and that is a virus that targets the respiratory system. It doesn't target other types types of cells for the most part, right? But it's targeting those respiratory cells, and that's because it is looking at a molecule that is uniquely produced on the surface of that type of cell. And that's really how viruses work.
Welcome to the Core Memory Podcast. This is Ashlee Vance, and we have a special, special, special treat for you today. Jennifer Doudna is in, in the studio. Jennifer, thank you for coming.
Great to be here, Ashlee.
It was a true honor. I've wanted to talk to you for a very long time. I am sure most of the listeners of this podcast know who you are, but I'm going to, I'm going to introduce you awkwardly. For people who might not, um, you are a famed biochemist. Um, clearly you've got a long distinguished career doing all kinds of work, but, but I think many, many people know, um, what you did with gene editing around CRISPR and Cas9 technology. You won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work in 2020. Um, you have been Anchored at UC Berkeley for quite a while, which is also where you have the Innovative Genomics Institute, which I think is about 10 or 11 years old now?
10.
10.
It's turned 10.
Okay. And we're definitely going to talk about it and the work it does. And I mean, I could give a much, much longer introduction, but you're also co-founder of, I think, at least 6 companies that I saw. So a mix of academia, research, and entrepreneurial stuff these days. So yeah, just massive honor to have you.
Here.
Thank you so much. Um, I don't know if you know this, but we both went to Pomona College, which is— it's like rare to run into a fellow Sagehen in the world. Should we chirp? It was that chirp, chirp, chirp. I was gonna decide if I was gonna bear myself somewhere in this conversation. Yes. Yeah, yeah. I, uh, it's such a small school that you— I don't know, I've only ever run into like a handful of people who went to Pomona in my professional career. I When I was interviewing at the New York Times, I went through this gauntlet of interviews. There must have been like 14 people. And back then, Bill Keller was the editor-in-chief. And I, that was my last interview. And I was like, I was like, oh, this is amazing. Finally, I get to use my, my Pomona College, you know? And he went through the whole interview, didn't say, didn't say a single thing about it. And then I was walking out the door and Jill Abramson, who was, it was kind of his, his ran the paper with him. She's like, you know, he went to Pomona. And he was, you know, very sarcastically was like, you're hired. And, uh, that was about it. That's all I've ever been able to— Pomona tragically just, just rejected my son from early admission. So now I have to launch like a multi-part investigation. I need to decline and fall off of college.
But, but well, if it's any comfort, my son did not get into Pomona either. Yeah.
Wow. I mean, they're going hard on this, on this like, you know, uh, nepo thing or whatever. Yeah. My goodness. Okay. That somehow that makes me feel better. I, I shamefully admit, um, I also, I'm gonna stop prattling on in a second. Just one last sort of story. Right after I finished my Elon book, I wanted to write a book on you and I, I, yeah, this was probably, so this was like 2015 and I went to my editor. I was like, I was like, this CRISPR stuff is gonna be massive. I think Jennifer's this incredible person. And then I think at that time, you know, 'cause they can look up who has books coming and you were doing your own book and, you know, it was in the works, I think. And she's like, you know, this is bad 'cause she's gonna, she's gonna do her own book. And so then obviously Walter Isaacson ends up doing a book about you and then he did one about Elon. He just copies whatever I'm thinking. He's like 10 years late. But, um, but I know, um, it's an outstanding book and, and anyway. I wish I had done it.
Well, that's a very kind thought.
I wish I had the chance to propose the idea to you. There's so many different directions we could go. I was going to start a little bit broad, I think, which is trying to bring people up to speed a bit on CRISPR therapies and where the technology has come. I know I've covered technology for so long. I see these waves, right? Like something incredibly innovative comes out. Even when we first sequenced the genome, it was like people thought the next year we'd have cures for every disease. And then, you know, it takes 20, 25 years to play out and you really start to see the fruits of all this. I feel like CRISPR is going through a little bit of a sort of similar thing where it's people hear about this amazing technology, they think we're just going to be editing everything left and right immediately. And, and my general sense in biotech land is people have been both really impressed by the tech, but then a little underwhelmed by some of the companies that have started around it and how well they've done. So, but I wanted to call out like a couple things that people can anchor around and, and, and just to ground themself on where the technology is. So there's, there's CasChevy, which was, that was like 2 or 3 years ago.
End of 2023. Okay.
And then, okay. Can you just, so this is, this is a therapy. CRISPR-based therapy for sickle cell anemia, I think.
Correct.
Okay. And, and I mean, can you describe a little bit about how CRISPR works in that case and, and sort of how successful it is, it's been? All right, what do we do at Core Memory? We cover innovative, fast-moving, forward-thinking companies, which is why Core Memory is sponsored by Brex, because Brex is the intelligent finance platform for many of these companies. 30,000 companies from startups to the world's largest corporations rely on Brex's technology for their finances. They've got smart corporate cards, high-yield business banking, and expense automation tools that are fantastic. I hate doing my expenses, and Brex's AI software runs right through those expenses, figure out where we're spending money. And take care of so much stuff for you so you don't have to waste your time on it yourself. Go to brex.com/corememory to learn more and just, you know, get with the program. Let's get going. Let's get out of this archaic finance software and move toward the future. CoreMemory and Brex.
It's really interesting, Ashlee, because CRISPR, in the format that you just mentioned, where it's being used to treat sickle cell patients, it brings together fundamental science in a fascinating way. It's not only CRISPR technology that's being used to manipulate the genome in patients, but it's also the knowledge of what gene to target. And, you know, a casual listener might say, well, wait a minute, we've known about the sickle cell gene for decades. And that's correct. However, the way Casgevy works is a little bit interesting in the sense that the target is not the sickle cell gene itself. It's actually another place in the genome that controls the production of a separate protein called fetal hemoglobin.
Okay.
Normally, fetal hemoglobin, which helps carry oxygen in our blood when we're fetuses, when we're developing, gets turned off when we're born. And at the same time, there's activation of adult hemoglobin. So what happens in sickle cell patients where they have a mutation in the adult hemoglobin protein, they start making a deficient form of that protein, which means that they become susceptible to sickle cell crises and, you know, all of the horrible phenotype that goes along with that mutation. So what happens with Casgevy and that form of CRISPR is that it's used to turn on the production of fetal hemoglobin and keep it on.
Okay.
And that means that instead of producing only this mutated form of adult hemoglobin, patients now also make fetal hemoglobin, which is perfectly functional, and it allows them to live a normal life after treatment.
Yeah, it's kind of a one-and-done thing as opposed to a medication you're taking for your whole life.
This is what's so incredible about it. It literally is a one-and-done therapy, and we call it a appears to be a, what we call a functional cure. That means that it's not actually correcting the disease-causing mutation, but what it's doing is overriding that mutation. It's making a second protein that makes those patients now not susceptible to their disease.
And then, and I'm kind of building somewhere because we're going to talk about baby KJ Muldoon in a second as well, but just for some context, I mean, so it's amazing. It's this this one-shot cure. And but there is— it is expensive and it is— it's quite a difficult therapy to administer.
It's a difficult procedure, right? Yeah. You're alluding to the fact that it's administered by taking blood stem cells from patients into the lab, doing the manipulation with CRISPR in the lab, and then transplanting the edited cells back into the patient using a bone marrow transplant. So it's a You know, it's an arduous procedure. It may take many weeks. It's very expensive. Not ideal.
Yeah. Yeah. And so, I mean, in some ways it's a stupid question, but like, net-net, then how do we— how do we feel about it? I mean, amazing, miraculous on one level. And then— but you ideally want this to be simpler, cheaper, broader in some sense.
Oh, 100%. But, you know, Ashlee, I think— I think this is the way that technologies often roll out, isn't it? You know, what happens is that, you know, there's an initial breakthrough with a new technology. People get very excited. They start thinking about how it can be used to solve real problems. That's what happened with CRISPR in the case of sickle cell. I mean, sickle cell anemia has been known for so long, and so many people suffer from it without any effective treatments. And so with CRISPR, we now have a, you know, a tool, a technology that we now know can actually provide this kind of a therapy to patients. It's just that, you know, we're now at the point where, okay, we know it works, but we got to get better at how we deliver it and we got to get better at how we manufacture it so that we can reduce costs. I think those two things are the biggest ticket aspects of the technology, the cost of making the molecule and the cost and time of delivering it into the patient. And those are two areas where we're, as we'll probably get into, we're very actively working working on both of those things at the Innovative Genomics Institute.
Okay, yeah. And I, I am— this— I 100% want to get into this. And then I want to give just people a state of play on, on where we're at. So we— so, so that was, that was kind of the first— most people hold that up as the first blockbuster kind of CRISPR therapy. Is that fair?
Or— yeah, oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
And can I just say a couple more things about it? Yeah. Because I think, I think You know, one thing to keep in mind is that I think it's, it was a really a watershed moment when that drug was approved by the FDA and by other agencies in the UK, because it showed everybody that this is now a real thing. It's not a fantasy. It's not a sometime in the future, maybe we'll have a, you know, therapy. We have one and it works and it's approved. So that's important.
Yeah.
And I think it also was a moment for me, at least when, you know, as you have pointed out, it's, it's not, we're not done and there's a lot more work to do, but it makes it very concrete. You can see the result. You, I've met patients that have received this therapy, namely the most prominent one probably is Victoria Gray.
Okay. And, and about how old would she be?
Well, let's see. So Victoria Gray received the therapy in 2019. She was 33 at that time.
Okay, and so, I mean, this is somebody who's had to live with this condition for many, many years, and then gets kind of like a new lease on life.
Right, and the story she tells is so moving. She's a mother. She mentioned that one of the motivations for her to get the therapy, even though it was high risk at the time, she was the first US patient to receive the CRISPR therapeutic, she was motivated by her son who wanted to be able to spend more time with her, you know? And she wanted to not have to go through these sickle cell crises that required hospitalization every few weeks. And it's really exciting to talk to her because she explains very well how her life changed completely with this therapy. And it makes me, and I think anyone that, you know, thinks about it or interacts with somebody like that, you think, gosh, I wanna, I want to make that possible for everybody who could benefit from it. So that's, it's very motivating. It really gave her a new take on her life. It allowed her to go back to work. It allowed her to, play with her kids and be engaged in their lives in a way that wasn't possible before. And she's also become quite a spokesperson for the therapy because she, like me, she wants other people to know about it and to be able to get access to it.
And when we say it's a one-time therapy, how do we know how enduring it really is to what's happening in the body? I mean, I, I probably just don't understand the mechanisms well enough, but, but You're kind of asking your DNA to do this new thing, right?
And you are. And so the thing to understand about— and I get this question a lot and it's a really good one— is that, you know, does this mean we're editing every cell in the bloodstream? No, the answer is no. The way the therapy works is that the editing occurs initially in blood stem cells. What are those? Well, they're cells that are immature, but they give rise to adult blood cells and fully, you know, fully developed cells that can carry oxygen in the blood. And so when the editing happens in the lab, those cells are now capable of going on and developing into their mature form, but they now are producing fetal hemoglobin. And that's a permanent change to the DNA. Permanent. And so they get transplanted into the body. They start dividing and replicating and developing. And it's interesting because they are healthier, than the cells that are only making the fetal— the not, not fetal, but the— that are only making the sickle cell form of hemoglobin. They ultimately take over the blood supply. And so it's a— it's an interesting case where there's actually sort of competition going on in between blood cells in the body and the healthier ones prevail.
Okay. And are there— are there like— have we seen side effects or this is kind of side effect Free.
Have not seen side effects. No. So it's, it's, it's really interesting. And, and now dozens of patients have, you know, if you count all the folks that have been through the various trials that have happened, have received this therapy. And, uh, it looks like it's a, you know, like I said, a functional cure.
Okay. Okay. And, and then, okay, so, and then there's more recently, um, this, this young boy who was born, if not in Philadelphia, near Philadelphia, and, and He was known as Baby KJ, as KJ Muldoon. You know, and so he's, he's had this rare genomic disease. I've reported on these things for years. I mean, you know, individually, not many people are sometimes affected by these things where it can be a single gene or a group of genes kind of gone wrong. But collectively, there's many rare genomic diseases. It's been historically not that advantageous for pharma companies to work on these types of things because the population isn't, isn't big enough. And so, so Baby KJ. I mean, it was this massive story this year. Was it this year or last year? Now my memory is— it was this year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, and, and we did a story on this. Partly, I think one reason you're sitting in this chair is, is I think IGI, maybe we didn't give as much credit to in our story as we should have. So, so here's our chance to kind of like set the record straight. A lot of people worked on this, this therapy for this, this young child. Um, yeah, do you mind describing it just a little bit, his, his particular case and what happened?
Well, you know, Ashlee, I'll just start by pointing out that I was flipping through Nature magazine recently, and they have their Nature 10 in 2025. So they, you know, every year they point out the 10 scientists who they think are making the biggest impact in science, or people who are making the biggest impact in science. Number 3 on the list was Baby KJ.
Yeah.
It's probably the first time a 1-year-old has been on their list, I would wager. And it was so exciting to see that for me, because I think it, again, it really captures the enthusiasm, the excitement, the passion that his story was met with, you know, by so many people that I've talked to across the, you know, the spectrum, not just scientists, of course, but many others. Why is that? Well, you know, as you said, KJ was born with a rare metabolic disease so severe that he could not digest protein. And if you can't digest protein, especially as a baby, then you can't grow very well. And so he was extremely sick. He was in the ICU. He had a terrible prognosis, you know, not much that could be done. Fortunately, his clinical team at CHOP, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, recognized that he had a mutation in a gene that was potentially correctable using CRISPR.
And so they— So a single gene, monogenetic.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Single mutation. And so they worked with a large team of people spread out across the U.S. that included the Innovative Genomics Institute, also included the Broad Institute, also included the company called Aldeveron that makes molecules, included the FDA, of course, in terms of getting the right approvals to use this clinically. And that led to very rapid development of a CRISPR modality, a form of CRISPR that could be delivered in very rapid order into this patient after appropriate laboratory and animal testing, showing that they could correct this mutation. And they're using a format of CRISPR that was developed in David Liu's lab at the Broad, as you reported. And, but it was, you know, I would call it an off-the-shelf technology these days. It's well-published, well-vetted, and tested in many labs. So that form of CRISPR called a base editor was used together with another well-established therapy for delivery to the liver, which is the organ that was appropriate for this particular baby's situation. And that together, those, the delivery and the CRISPR technologies could be deployed very rapidly, in this case, in a matter of months into this patient. And again, apparently, you know, this appears to be a functional cure in the sense that this This boy received 3 injections of the CRISPR therapy to ensure that he had sufficient numbers of cells in his liver that were corrected. And then he was, you know, sent home and he turned 1 and, you know, he looks very healthy.
And I mean, you were highlighting before with the previous therapy, this was remarkable because the FDA and British regulators were approving this. In this case, a very similar thing. And I mean, it's the speed speed at which this went through the regulatory process, because you've got this young child, he's— he needs to hit these developmental milestones. You know, time is of the essence, right, to have the most normal life moving forward. And so, I mean, what— this is the story we wrote was that, I mean, this felt like a very big moment in terms of the FDA feeling like this technology had matured enough and that IGI and others were doing the necessary work to prove the safety of this all and that you guys know what you're doing. Right.
You know, I think that's right. And it was very exciting. Again, it was sort of like the— like, it felt like the Caskevy moment to me, but in the sense that it was another watershed example of how CRISPR can be leveraged to cure a rare genetic disease in real time, in a timeframe that was meaningful for that patient. It wasn't, you know, done much later than would have actually helped him. It was actually done in a time frame that was useful clinically. And again, like the Caskevy case, it's incredibly motivating because on the one hand, you can see how possible it is now to do this type of thing for rare disease, to diagnose it, to create the CRISPR therapy quickly, to test it in appropriate settings quickly, and then to work with regulators to make sure that it can be brought to to the clinic in a timeframe that made sense for the patient. But it was expensive to do it, and it was a, you know, I would say very, you know, what's the word, hodgepodge, you know, effort, right? I mean, it required pulling together many different players, and there was a lot of serendipity involved. And it would be great to be able to make that process cheaper, faster, easier to deploy. I mean, that's really, I think, where again, we hope we can play a role as at the IGI is to make it easier, streamline that process in the future. And that was a big motivator for setting up this Center for Rare Disease at UC San Francisco that is just opening. And we hope to treat our first patient in April.
Okay. Okay. Okay. And then, yeah, I mean, I want to give people some kind of— I mean, I've seen I was telling you, I was just at Strand Therapeutics, which is this startup in Boston that's doing some mRNA delivery of cancer therapies at the moment. But, you know, Jake Becraft, the CEO, he was really harping to me that he felt, I guess we have to unpack this a little bit, but that the last 10 years or so, there's been so much money and effort that's gone into these editors, these base editors, these prime editors. I'm going to try to explain it. Please have help fix the mistakes I made. But, you know, in the early days of CRISPR, I think we would do more damaging, dramatic edits to the DNA. And so the idea with some of these new techniques is maybe you change a letter here and there, and it's a bit more surface layer. So you're not sort of affecting really the deep structure of the DNA. And that's what the base editors and then the prime editors, I think, allow you just to do longer sequences of DNA without about, again, trying to cause as much damage. And so you have, you have startups that have been chasing this. You've got researchers that have been chasing this. Jake's big argument was that these are kind of like amazing technology. He compared them to sort of Ferraris. Each one is this expensive, wonderful machine, but that we're still struggling to aim them in the body where you really want them to go. So the delivery mechanism is where we're struggling. And yeah, you're nodding. And I've seen you say, I've seen you say yes. Is that— I just I just wanted to set this up. I mean, is, so delivery, so is it the case that we have great editors at this point and delivery of how you kind of get it to where you want it to go in the body is the big hangup or do we still have plenty of work to do on the editors as well?
Well, I think there's both honestly. Now we have some great editors and as these examples we're discussing just demonstrated, but yeah, the big challenge right now is I would say the biggest bottleneck, in my mind is the delivery. How do we get these tools into the cells, tissues, organs where they can be effective in the body, or frankly, in any organism? I mean, we may talk a little bit about plants, I'm assuming, and that delivery is a challenge there as well. So this is a kind of a universal challenge. How do we get editors into cells where they can do their work? And, but on the, let me just, before we leave the, the tool part of it, the, you know, the CRISPR part of it, I think there's still a lot of creative work happening in that space too, because as you mentioned, you know, we had sort of CRISPR V1.0 maybe where, you know, you could cut DNA, you could induce cells to repair it with the introduction of a small change that could disrupt a gene. That's how the Casgevy form of CRISPR is working for sickle cell patients. Sequence. Then there are base editors that make a chemical change to a single letter of the DNA, which is maybe V2.0, right? And then prime editors, maybe going, you know, maybe we would call that V3.0, where now we're actually rewriting little specific snippets of sequence and making targeted changes. And these are all great. They're not, I don't, in my view, I don't think that particularly that prime editing is a technology that's yet at the point where it's clinically useful because it's, you know, it's a big molecule, it's a bit unwieldy. Talk about delivery challenges, that's a big one right there. And controlling it the way people might like and improving its efficiency, I think, is still to be done. So that's, you know, it's still, I would say it's still very much a developing area of the field. And then of course, there are other approaches that are coming along as well for being able to introduce new snippets of DNA into genes to make corrections. And people are also thinking creatively about how you could design CRISPR entities that would be able to make wholesale changes to genes that would correct whole families of mutations. Because in many cases, you have diseases that involve a gene, but if we look deeply at what particular mutations are causing that disease, there's a whole collection of them. So it's— we're going to need either many forms CRISPR to, depending on the patient's mutation, or we're going to need a form of CRISPR that's able to cover them all. And so that's still, I think, very much being worked on. And so there's a lot of research going on and lots and lots of publications and preprints that are coming out all the time with new clever iterations on those themes. But that being said, and I'm very confident that, you know, that whole toolbox for manipulating genes is is developing very rapidly and it's a very exciting area. But even if we have the best tools in the world for manipulating DNA, if we can't deliver them, then they're not very useful.
Yeah.
And I mean, that's the challenge.
Since day one, the Core Memory Podcast has been supported by the fine people at E1 Ventures. They are a young and ambitious VC firm in Silicon Valley investing in young and ambitious companies and people. People. Thank you so much to E1 Ventures for all your support. And the way it's been explained to me is, and I know this isn't universally true, but for the most part, these are, it's, you're delivering these therapies through lipid nanoparticles, small globs of fat, I guess, that, that, that go in your bloodstream. And then, and then we always just hear about the liver. Every time I look on somebody's pipeline, there's some drug for the liver first because the liver absorbs all this stuff the best. And, and this has been the struggle is getting outside of the liver to treat other things. So what, what gives you confidence that we will actually find other delivery mechanisms? How hard is this going to be? Like, how do we know this is— or how— why do we believe this is a solvable—
Well, there's one, one, one word that comes to mind when you ask what gives me confidence, and the word is viruses. Okay, viruses. And the reason is that this is exactly what viruses do. They target specific types of cells in the body, and they don't don't mess with any others, and they're very good at honing in on those cells. And so when we think of, for example, everybody's probably familiar with COVID-19, of course, and that is a virus that targets the respiratory system. It doesn't target other types of cells for the most part, right? But it's targeting those respiratory cells, and that's because it is looking at a molecule that is uniquely produced on the surface of that type of cell. And that's really how viruses work. If we think about another virus that probably lots of— most people are aware of, have heard of, is HIV. And so HIV is a virus that infects immune cells. And again, it doesn't affect random immune cells. It's infecting human T cells in the immune system. And that's because, again, it's looking at a very particular molecule or collection of molecules that are made on the surface of those cells. And so knowing that, I think one alternative to lipid nanoparticles that's also developing rapidly, and multiple parties are, you know, exploring this, is using the strategies of viruses but to deliver molecules that we want, not viral genomes for infection, but in fact molecules for editing, for example. And that's an approach that is, you know, targetable and programmable. And so the exciting thing there is that once you understand how viruses take over and infect certain cells, then you can take that same mechanism but use it for the purpose of delivery of other kinds of molecules.
Why was it that the delivery kind of lagged the editing? Is it— is there something about editing that's sexier and seems more promising?
No, it's because delivery is a really hard problem, and it's a problem that affects all aspects of pharmaceutical development. It doesn't matter if we're talking about editors or small molecule drugs or antibody drugs, right? We could be talking about any kind, or peptides, you know, any kind of, you know, RNAi for people that know about that. Any of those kinds of entities face the same challenge. And so it's an old problem and it's a super hard problem. And so lots of companies of course, you know, been interested in this and interested in solving it. The thing is that I think that it, you know, for many companies, they need to focus on their disease areas of interest. They need to get things done in a timeframe that's meaningful to investors. And so in a way, they really are not usually in a position to do long-term investigation of new delivery approaches and methods and understanding the, you know, chemistry and biology underneath underscoring these types of methods. And so as a result, there's been a bit of a hodgepodge in that. I said, I think I said that earlier in this same word, but you know, it's sort of a, you know, there's a collection of different kinds of delivery strategies that are for the most part either targeting the liver, which is, you know, as you mentioned, is a tissue tissue that's particularly adept at taking up molecules, which makes it wonderful in that regard. But if you want to deliver somewhere else, it's actually problematic because you don't really want all of your molecules trafficking to that tissue and not to the tissue that you're, you're trying to target. So I believe strongly, I've come to feel very strongly, that this is actually an area where nonprofits like the Innovative Genomics Institute really be working because what we can do in a way, in an interesting way, uniquely that I think companies for the most part can't, is that we have a very long timeline. We can harness the creativity of student trainees who come in who are very motivated by these kinds of problems. They want to apply their smart intuition and their creativity to solving these kinds of real-world challenges. And they're not afraid to take a risk and they're not afraid to try things that really might pan out. But boy, if they do, they would be huge. And I love doing that kind of science. It's the kind of science I've always tried to do in myself and in my own lab. And so I'm now excited to be enabling others that are coming to our institute to look at problems like delivery and be really creative about it and recognize that they could have a huge impact if they can solve this challenge, and that we really need their intuition and their willingness to take a big risk to do it.
And is there any part of you— is there any part of you that just has doubts that over the long term, CRISPR-based technologies end up being as useful to human healthcare as we had hoped? I mean, obviously, you're you're co-founder of some companies that are working in areas that we've just talked about, and, and IGI is doing work there as well.
So you must believe in the, in the early days of CRISPR, I, I wondered about it, right? Because I, you know, I really didn't know how long it might take to take something that was published in an academic journal, was clearly exciting to a few academic scientists, a few, but, you know, it really wasn't clear what the timeline would be to going from that point to having something that was safe and effective in a human for curing a disease. And we're there now, and we're not there now with just one thing, right? We're there with multiple things. And so the fact that it's still expensive and hard to deliver, et cetera, no. Am I worried about it now? No, I'm not. I think it's gonna be solved. And the reason is that there's so many brilliant people brilliant people of all ranks and from, you know, globally now working in this area of science that, you know, if it can be done, it will be done. It's hard to— it's always hard to predict the timelines for these things, you know, but I certainly think that nobody would have imagined— I certainly wouldn't have imagined that within 10 years of that original publication about CRISPR that we published in 2012, this is with our collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, that within just over 10 years from that point, that we would have an approved therapy for a rare disease with CRISPR. Stunning. I don't think there's another example, at least in the biotech world, of a technology that's moved that fast from fundamental discovery to, you know, actual practical approved therapeutic. So now it's not just not can it be done, it's just how to do it faster, better, cheaper.
Yeah. Okay. And this is a tangential question. I am going to get to IGI in a second, but, um, yeah, I was doing all this research about you the last couple days. I mean, sort of a stupid question, but I mean this from a genuine place. Um, you know, you helped shepherd this incredibly exciting technology into the world, um, and then I was just looking at everything you do. I was seeing all these interviews you do where you have to like explain CRISPR to the Atlantic conference, you know? I mean, in some sense it's like, gosh, this is this woman's, you know, genius leader in this field. You're making her explain just the basics of this technology. I don't know. Is there— did you— is it okay that your life has become all consumed by this thing? I mean, you could have gone on a very different different journey. And I just wondered if you— I mean, it must be very exciting because it's one of the most exciting things to work on in the world, but then it is all-consuming as well.
Well, I often think of my life BC, before CRISPR. Yeah.
Yeah.
And after, you know, it really, it really did change. It was almost like a step function for me, you know, and it happened really almost immediately when we published published the paper in the summer of 2012, because it was clear immediately that I knew when we hit submit on that paper that, you know, it would, it would mean that a lot of people would read it and recognize that it would be very easy to test this technology for making edits in their cell type or gene of interest. And that's exactly what happened, right? Lots of people then quickly started to deploy it and test it. And even before the end of 2012, even though it wasn't published yet at the time, I was getting emails from people who were starting to use it, not just in cells, but in whole organisms like zebrafish, you know, for editing, right? And so it was clear that it was going to really change the way we did biology, the way we did research. And of course, you know, we were all imagining at the time that, you know, there would be opportunities for practical applications, although as we just discussed, wasn't known, and nobody could really predict how fast that would move forward. So yeah, I just got— I got— I had to really grapple with it. And it sounds— I know it might sound a little bit strange, but I, you know, I had a lot of anxieties in the beginning about CRISPR, partly because of the clear implications of the technology for things like germline editing, which is different than what we've been discussing because it means making heritable changes in the genome that are, you know, passed on to future generations. So that's a, in my book, kind of a different, I'd put that kind of in a different bucket. And then there were, of course, all of the opportunities that we haven't yet discussed in other kinds of organisms, not just in humans, but in plants, in microbes, in organisms that affect our health, including, you know, fungal systems and of course all kinds of bacteria. And so it seemed to me that there was just so much to do. And so I had to really ask myself, first of all, do, you know, how do I want to be involved in that? And it was never a question of, am I going to be involved? It was just really how, how does a biochemist who's always done very fundamental research, how do I do this? And so I really had to, you know, make a decision about how to focus my own efforts and energy And honestly, that was one of the motivations for starting the Innovative Genomics Institute, was that I realized it was much, much bigger than me or my lab or even all of the other researchers that I knew at the time that were getting involved in it. It was just bigger than that, you know, and it was going to be bigger. And if we wanted to really have a lasting impact that was global, we had to figure out how to build an organization that would invite in scientists. We had to be, you know, we're a big public university, University of California, Berkeley. And so we have lots of undergraduates that are wanting to learn how to do research. We have lots of graduate students and postdoctoral trainees that come through our labs. And so the question was how to help all of them get engaged with this field and figure out how they could contribute to it. That's what I really wanted to do. And I wanted to make sure that University of California was at the forefront of guiding kind of what was going to come with this technology. And I was also a big believer that companies had to be, had to be involved, obviously, in terms of scaling what would happen, but that there had to be a partnership between those companies and their investors and their teams and a nonprofit or nonprofits like ours that, that are focused on innovation, that are focused on very early-stage discovery that's high risk, but when it works, really high payoff. And that's where I always like to be myself, is kind of at that bleeding edge.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, all of that makes sense. And then I just— I've been working on, on AI stuff a lot in a new book on OpenAI. And, and, you know, I mean, there's many people in the AI field sometimes— for at least a period of time, Sam Altman became this kind of like public face of this new technology, sort of by choice. And sort of was forced. And I was just, I was thinking about you in this context a bit because even though there were a handful of people at the beginning of CRISPR and then obviously many, many working on it now, you know, people turn to you as sort of this voice for this entire technology. It's a technology that comes with tons of promise. And then also, as you mentioned, some controversy and possible nefarious uses. And then it's just a lot of pressure, I would feel like, to be be the voice. I noticed, um, if I feel like this is fair to say, you're quite measured and exact when you talk about some of the more controversial things. It struck me that you, you like get the sense of place that you have and that people are gonna, um, you know, sort of take your view on this very, very, very seriously. Things like germline editing, um, obviously there's people working on doing massive edits to animals to bring them, you know, back from extinction, and then, and then all kinds of doing weird longevity things and stuff like that. So, I mean, am I right? You, you seem to be like— I watched you at the Atlantic conference and they were trying to push you a bit on stuff like China, germline. It looked to me like that was maybe not your favorite thing to talk about and that you, you had your view and then, and then we were off to something else. Is that fair?
I guess that's fair. I really want to You know, I wanna make sure that people understand the technology. I like to think that they can, you know, come to me or to our organization with a sense of trust, that they can trust what we're doing and what we're saying, and that we're scholars first and foremost, and we're educators, right? And that's what we do. And so we're really all about understanding the science, communicating the science, science, thinking clearly, we hope, about where it's headed, but not overpromising, not getting ahead of ourselves, not getting over our skis too far, always thinking about what's possible and what could happen, both in terms of the positive, but also, you know, thinking about the potential negatives and risks, and moving forward in a thoughtful fashion. So that's really what I try to do. That's the kind of leadership I want to provide at the IGI, and that's what I encourage. That's the way encourage our students and our trainees to approach their work.
Did you go back? Did you read, like, I don't know, about Oppenheimer or something like that? Like, how did you— I was kind of curious how you came to this in such an impressive, measured way. I mean, you know, because it's a similar thing. It's a technology that could go a bunch of different ways. And not that you're, like, individually responsible for it, but you helped all of this happen. Yeah. I mean, did you look for any lessons or this just came to you naturally?
No, I definitely look for lessons, and I've been fortunate that I've had a lot of colleagues that have been helpful in my thinking. So I'm thinking here of a few people pop to my mind. Janet Rossant, who has worked for a long time on understanding very early human development and in vitro fertilization and was very supportive of my thinking as we were navigating those very early days of CRISPR and thinking about where it could go in terms of understanding human biology, but also impacting and altering it. So she was very helpful. George Daley at Harvard Medical School, same thing, very helpful. And there were many others. But, you know, I think that I'm a, you know, I'm fascinated by science. I love I love learning new things. I'm— I've been so, I guess, honored that I've found myself, you know, these are the cards I've been dealt, right? I mean, in a way. And so I, you know, I'm playing the hand I was dealt. And part of that involves just meeting and interacting with so many people that I'm sure I would have never had opportunities to meet and talk to and work with if it hadn't been for CRISPR.
Yeah.
So in a way, I feel like I'm just trying to embrace those opportunities and you're right, sometimes that comes along with some, some angst and some difficulty. There's no, no question, but it's part of the journey.
Okay. Okay. I am going to ask you about a couple of these things at the end, but I want it so, so to help people understand IGI. I mean, it's funded. You've got universities coming together to work on this. You've got donors. I saw Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and other kind of obviously wealthy people who are into science backing it. I mean, so that's how it's funded, is this mix of public funding and donors?
That's right. We're about 70% funded by donors, right?
Okay.
Yeah.
And then— and some of the numbers are crazy. I mean, I had it in my notes. It's not right in front of me now. I think it's like 30 startups have come out.
30 startups.
And then you're responsible for— I think it was like 15 of Berkeley's IP patents every year. I mean, yeah, so that's, that's all quite dramatic. And so is— so you mentioned earlier, I mean, part of the mission is to be able to fund research that might not yet make sense for a startup, or it might be expensive for, for some other group to chase, but you think is important to do. And then obviously if you're spinning out these startups, I mean, there is this encouragement of these like commercial applications of this, and everything, everything is kind of like CRISPR-related on some level?
Yeah, on some level. Uh, you know, a lot, a lot of what we do is, um, work at the intersection of technologies. So CRISPR is there, but, you know, we're also increasingly using AI, as so many others are. We're also using imaging technologies, robotic technologies. I mean, these are, these are all kind of really exciting areas of development that when you look at the intersection, you can do things that just recently weren't possible.
So it's kind of like backing some of the tools that you're going to need for this stuff.
That's right. Okay.
And I, you know, you mentioned earlier agriculture and some of the examples there are amazing. And I have a broad question about this, but I wanted to go specific. It's hard to pick. You guys have a bunch of really interesting things. I mean, there's cows that we're starting, we're trying to burp less methane. We're trying to like make better cacao, I think, that's resilient to disease. Like rice and sorghum that removes carbon. Can we pick your personal favorites or one or two of these just to dive into?
Well, let's start with the cow.
Okay.
I mean, I think that's one that, you know, boy, ask me if something that I never thought I'd be involved in working on, that's it. But it's so exciting because when I learned that not only is methane one of the worst greenhouse gases, but it's also one that is— a lot of it is produced annually by human activities. A big one is agriculture. And so it's cattle farming, it's also rice farming. Both of those things, you know, release a lot of methane around the world every year. And so, you know, when I first started mentioning to people that the IGI had a big effort in agriculture, I got a a lot of, you know, strange looks like, "What does CRISPR have to do with that? What does CRISPR have to do with climate change?" And the answer is, well, it's a technology that is cross-cutting. It allows us to manipulate DNA of any kind of cell or organism. And that means that when we think about the challenge of methane emissions and we look at cattle, for example, well, where's that methane coming from? It's coming from microbes in the cow rumen, and it's coming from microbes that have particular metabolic pathways that produce methane. And so it gets burped out, it gets farted out, but mostly burped, I'm told. And so—
We've chirped and burped, so we've got it all.
Yeah, we're doing it all here today. And so it means that CRISPR can come into play because we can use it not only as a research tool to figure out which genes could be manipulated to reduce methane emissions, but then we can actually do it in a, we hope, permanent way in cattle. And so the idea would be to be able to modify the cow microbiome essentially at birth in calves once, kind of again, a one-and-done manipulation of their microbiome that would be maintained through diet and/or, you know, the way that they're raised by farmers such that they now are methane-free. And by the way, that also means that, instead of that carbon getting released as methane, it's actually deployed in other metabolic pathways that lead to increased milk and meat production by about between 2 and 5% has been demonstrated by our team up at UC Davis.
Like, do you guys, this is theoretical or you already have cows doing this?
No, no, no, we have cows doing this.
Okay, where are the cows at Davis?
Yeah, they're up at UC Davis.
Okay, okay.
So we, the IGI now has 24 cows that have been born newborn, where they are, their microbiomes are being manipulated, and we are monitoring their growth, their, you know, how much weight they're gaining, et cetera, and also how much methane they're emitting. And the purpose of this is to ultimately come up with a strategy that could be deployed inexpensively and sustainably to farmers and farms around the world. And we hope that farmers will be excited about it because if they understand found that not only are their cattle methane-free, which, you know, they may or may not care about that in the— at the end of the day, but they probably really care about having cattle that are 2 to 5% more productive. Yeah, so that's great.
I might be making a fool of myself here, but I— when you talk about changing the microbiome, you're editing the, the bacteria in the cow's stomach as opposed to sort of the cow's DNA itself, right?
That's right.
How is that type of therapy being administered? Administered?
Yeah, so we're administering it using— we can administer it using viruses that only infect those kinds of bacteria, and they take the CRISPR molecules into the bugs.
And is that like a one-and-done thing, or that, that you continue that?
We want it to be a one-and-done thing.
Okay, okay.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, and then on the, the cacao example, um, as far as I was reading last night, I mean, you, you've got diseases affect these crops and, and and huge swaths being wiped out. Very problematic. And then, I mean, there's this other part of this though where you were— I wanted you to explain this to me because everything I was reading was saying, okay, if we make these changes and we make it more resilient, um, obviously in Europe and elsewhere there's more caution around GMO, genetically modified organisms, but that, that like if you're doing it with CRISPR is like maybe not a GMO thing because you've— is this correct or Am I— was I reading too fast?
No, you were not. But this is a— this is a, you know, it's one of those fascinating aspects of CRISPR that's evolving in real time because I think regulators around the world are grappling with this technology. How do they think about it? How do they regulate it? How do we make sure that it's used safely? But in my opinion, that it's used. I don't think we want to say, well, we're not going to use this ever. I think we need to figure out how to use it and how to use it appropriately. And so you may have read that in here in the United States, our US Department of Agriculture, the USDA, which regulates our agricultural products, they have decided that they've ruled that technologies like CRISPR that manipulate genes in plants that could be manipulated by traditional plant breeding if we waited long enough, but we now have a technology that doesn't require us to wait maybe 15 or 20 years of crossbreeding. We can actually just go in and, you know, manipulate regulated gene directly, if that can be done with a technology instead of traditional plant breeding, but it's ultimately otherwise the same kind of change to a gene, it's not regulated and it's not called a modified, you know, a genetically modified plant. Whereas in Europe, that exact same manipulation is considered genetically modified because a technology was used to do it. And so I think that this is an area where there's still, of course, very active discussion, groups in different countries trying to figure out what's the right way to proceed. But I'm pretty confident that in the long run, I think that, I'm hopeful anyway, that, you know, that, that these regulators will recognize that, you know, if you're making a change in a plant that is a natural variation that could be achieved, quote, naturally with plant breeding, although we could argue about whether that's natural either, but you know, but, but. But, you know, whether you do it with that approach or you use CRISPR, if you get to the same end product, then it's not a genetic modification in the way that people have called GMOs.
And like, okay, two questions. One person who's very smart, who was sending me some questions to ask you, I mean, they were wondering, you know, I mean, I assume it must be easier to run some of these tests on agriculture over humans. And I mean, like 20 years from now, do you think the story of CRISPR over that 20-year period will be the most dramatic in agriculture, or do you think it's more dramatic in therapies for disease?
Well, I guess it depends on how you define dramatic. I think if you define dramatic by more people directly impacted, oh yeah, agriculture for sure, right? For sure. It will be much more impactful in that regard. If you're defining dramatic as attention-grabbing, headline-creating, you know, that kind of thing, like the baby KJ story, then probably it'll be in healthcare if I had to place a bet, because I do think we're going to continue to see really exciting advances with CRISPR for treating diseases of various types. There's also, as you may be aware, companies that are excited and academic groups too about, about about preventive care with CRISPR, right? Could you prevent somebody from getting cardiovascular disease or a neurological, especially a neurodegenerative disorder? Could you prevent that before it ever starts by making an appropriate tweak to their genome? And so that's something that I do think is also potentially coming in the world of gene, cell and gene therapy with CRISPR that we'll see in the next, yeah, maybe 10 to 20 years that also could have very big impact. It's just that it's harder to predict the rollout of something like that.
So, you know, when I was doing all this space reporting, I mean, it was interesting because for so long all the aerospace was dominated by governments. Things moved at a certain speed. And as SpaceX year by year got better and better at what it was doing, you know, somewhere around like 2015, 2016, 2016, all these things flipped very quickly and SpaceX started lapping literally the entire world in the number of launches. But this created like these knock-on effects where, um, you know, the FAA was just not used to having somebody launch this many times per year. It used to be like once a month and now they were going once every couple days. And there's just this paperwork that has to get done. There's people who have to watch this stuff and make sure it's safe. And then on top of SpaceX, then you had other companies coming and, and I follow this so closely, like you could feel that the government had, you know, it's not really a criticism. Things changed so fast, was just not at all equipped for like the new world that was, was coming upon it. When I think about Baby KJ and the speed at which you guys did that, and I see so many startups doing interesting things, I mean, you're probably in a tough spot where maybe, I don't know, I'm sure you have to keep a nice relationship with the FDA in these regular regulators, but are we like entering this era? I mean, is, you know, do you feel like you want this to be safe, obviously, but we're in this very exciting moment of experimentation. Do you feel like the world has moved at the speed that the technology is now at?
No, I think there's a continual catch-up game going on. It's similar to what you described in terms of rocketry or, or certainly AI. And, and I think, you know, that's probably true for a lot of technologies where there's a, you know, there's a rapid development and then a struggle for agencies to, and regulators certainly to, to catch up and then stay abreast of what's happening in the, in the world of CRISPR. I think for in terms of regulating it and ensuring that it's used safely and effectively, but also that it's used in a timeline that, you know, is sensible regarding especially rare diseases that are quite severe and where there's no other option right now for patients. I think that's where, you know, there's a very interesting opportunity right now for regulators to be a little bit bold, which is probably not something they typically want to do for obvious reasons, perhaps. But I think there's an opportunity to think differently about the way that a therapy for a rare disease like that will be created, tested, and deployed. If we can come up with a streamlined strategy that probably increasingly does take advantage of AI, in the sense that I think as we have more and more data that point to the effectiveness of particular CRISPR modalities, let's say, for how they, you know, how they work in different kinds of cells and targeting different genes, with using— we didn't get into the weeds of how the CRISPR technology works, but it's a programmable molecule. That means that a small piece of it can be changed and it can be directed to different genes. And so it may eventually be possible to predict very accurately how those programmed changes to CRISPR affect its accuracy and its effectiveness. And when we can do that, then you could imagine at some point at least being willing to forego a lot of the experimental work that's currently required because you would say, well, I trust this prediction and I know it's correct, so I don't actually have to go in and test it. Instead, I can move on to, you know, the final steps perhaps of deploying it into a patient. And so I think that's coming. I really do. And again, it's hard. It's always hard to predict timelines. Currently, one of the things that's on my mind a lot is the— is how do we get the kind of data accumulated that we can use for training models like that? Because if you're going to have accurate models, models that predict things accurately, you've got to have good data to train on. And so that's something that I'm in very deep conversations with both companies and academic groups right now about how to do that, how to organize that better than we typically have in our field, and how to make those kinds of data available to many people who are developing interesting creative models and approaches. I would like to see, you know, deployment of those data widely so that we get the best chance of getting really predictive models in the future.
And I want to ask you a couple AI questions just super quick. My sense from some of your other interviews was that China and some of the more risky things it does is maybe not your favorite topic. On this particular thing that you're talking about, I just keep hearing from so many friends, it's like, oh, it's cheaper to do a human study in China than it is to do a primate study. Definitely. Right. Definitely.
Yeah.
So if you're talking about about trying to accumulate this data. I know there's different ways you could do this, but one way you could obviously do this is through a human study. Are we— is the U.S. just like, just like hopelessly disadvantaged for the foreseeable future, um, in, in that type of competition, I guess?
Well, my, my take on that situation, and I'm not— I feel like I'm not the most knowledgeable in a way, because many others have actually been to China, been to these hospitals and companies that are working together to rapid clinical testing. I'm just hearing about it from those folks that have traveled there, but I haven't been there myself. I want to just put out that disclaimer. But my sense from, from many, many conversations, and of course lots of people are discussing this right now, is what's going to happen to the US biotech industry and to investments in that industry as China continues its rapid advance in the space. And the bottom line for me is that I really I really care about patients. I really wanna see these therapies developed safely and quickly to help people. And so I wanna see that done however and wherever it can, wherever it can happen. And China is clearly a really big and really important player in that space. So I think that I'd like to see better coordination because I think there are things that happen, again, this is just my opinion. I think that there are things that happen better currently in the US. I think the US is still really good, maybe number one at innovation in the, you know, in the bio and other areas for a variety of reasons. But I think we're just, it's our culture partly. We're just really, really good at innovation. China is really, really good at implementation. And so, you know, right? And so those are in— you could view those as competitive, but you could also view them as complementary. And so I'd like to see increased coordination there. Of course, that's not the direction that our politics are going right now, but I can tell you that on the ground, among scientists, among even companies, you know, there's a lot of really interesting effort to improve that coordination. So I think if that is successful, then maybe it's going to turn out to win-win.
This is my naive, uh, this is a spot where I really hope China and the US could, could come together. It feels like we could in this particular moment in time go so fast with, with such important stuff. Um, and anyway, well, we'll see. Um, on the, on AI, I mean, if I'm not wrong, and I'm going to do a terrible job explaining this, I think when you were doing some of your original CRISPR discovery work, Were you not— you were kind of somewhat manually going over biological databases. Okay, you're nodding yes. And today, even though people seem to think maybe we're hitting some kind of AI wall in the biotech world, the stuff I see, unless people are just lying to me, is fascinating. I mean, antibodies being churned out by these models. And I did a story on on sort of like understanding how embryos form using, you know, just like remarkable things. Same thing. I'm sorry to pick like 20 years' time or something like that, but do you imagine there's going to be, you know, a professor like you doing these manual hunts and that most of our, most of our discoveries will come from nature as they have for so many years in 20 years' time? Or do you imagine that like most new discoveries will be plucked out of some AI system?
I suspect it'll be a combination. I think we will continue to be inspired by nature for sure, because let's face it, nature has been experimenting for a lot longer than any of us. And the AI, the data that AI are trained on is coming from from our own experimentation and, you know, kind of the collections of data that we're feeding to these models. So ultimately, if we want to take, you know, tap into nature, you know, tap into the largest set of data in the biological world that we could imagine or that we have access to on this planet anyway, it's evolutionary data, right? So it's really coming from nature and all of the experimentation that's happened over time. And of course, we're only aware of some of it because, you know, we don't see all the failed experiments, right? A lot of those things never panned out and we don't see evidence of them now. But to the extent that we can look at, this is where frankly, this is why I'm fascinated by viruses and by the relationships between viruses and the cells they infect. Infect, because I think that more than anything else in a way is a very deep, very ancient record of the kinds of experimentation that these systems have gone through as they try to reproduce and they get challenged and they have to come up with other strategies or they have to fight off an invader. This is a really powerful driver of evolution on basically every level as far as I can tell. And so that's a really interesting area. That's a really interesting type of data to be mining.
It is, but like on these antibody things, it seems like they're doing at least the equivalent of like years of lab work in one run of this model. And then, I mean, I totally understand what you're saying, but it also feels like they're fast-forwarding evolution or, you know, in some ways by just being able to mine through all this stuff so quickly.
They are, but again, you know—
Do you get as excited about this stuff or do you—
No, I do, I do. I mean, I'll give you an example from our own lab. Our own work currently. So, um, you mentioned antibodies, and that's, that's one area, but, you know, these kinds of models are being used to design all kinds of molecules now. And so, you know, we've been working recently on, you know, trying to identify and, and isolate molecules from bacteria that have new kinds of activities, new functions. And the way we're doing it is we're using AI models that can design design from kind of from scratch. Of course, it's based on what they're trained on, but they can design molecules that will interact with something that we tell it to look for. And it works, right? It's quite astounding. And so that is really enabling. And so it means that increasingly we don't have to do a lot of, you know, bushwhacking in the lab. We can just go directly to molecules that we're pretty confident from the get-go are going to be useful for the thing that we want them to do, and just get going on kind of the next step. And so what I tell my students is that I feel like as AI continues to advance and gets trained on better and better datasets for various kinds of tasks, that increasingly we're going to— it's going to streamline what we do in the lab. We are not going to have to do nearly as many experiments because we will be able to predict which one ones to do and which ones are most likely to work and which ones are frankly a waste of time.
Okay. Um, she's looking at the clock. I think I only have time for one or two more questions. Um, the— a couple people sent this. I'm going to rapid-fire you. Sure, try to. Um, a couple people sent this in. Um, you know, is there some advance or something you see on the horizon that people are not paying enough attention to that that you think is gonna be big?
Again, I guess I do think that this idea of preventive medicine is very interesting. I do think that the opportunity to protect ourselves from disease before we become sick is really exciting. It's a different way, you know, of course, I'm not sure our healthcare system actually wants that, but it would be transformative if it could be done.
I was gonna ask you about this. None of the way pharma companies are set up, they don't want one-and-done drugs, do they?
Probably they don't, if we're honest, right? And so this is a big challenge in the field right now. It's, you know, it's, I don't know how it'll get resolved. Nonetheless, imagine that, you know, imagine that you could perhaps in the not too distant future, you could have access to your genetic information, which many people do already, and you could interpret that information, which increasingly is, you know, we're confident in the way that that's being done, and you could deploy CRISPR safely to tweak a few genes that would be protective against Alzheimer's or heart attacks or even infectious disease, this would be absolutely transformative. And if it could be done quickly be safely, accessibly, again, transformative for health. So that's something I'm very excited about. I don't think a lot of people are— that that's not maybe top of mind when they think of cell and gene therapies, but I do think it's an interesting direction to pay attention to in the future.
Okay. Okay. Last question, and it's probably not the best one to end on. I don't know. I, you know, we were talking about this before we started recording. I get excited by all the bio biotech madness happening in the Bay Area, just because I do like new ideas and I like people pushing the limits. I do see people doing things that, you know, seem quite risky. I mean, you have been pretty outspoken about when we talk about germline editing, that's kind of around editing an embryo. You know, there's— I don't know that they're real efforts yet, but there's people even in the United States now, there's startups who are like, we're doing this, we're heading this direction, you know, and and then clearly people doing massive edits to animals. And, but, you know, and then we were talking about also all these 20-something-year-olds kind of trying to upregulate or downregulate different bits of genes to help with, you know, not storing fat and all these things. I don't know. I mean, do you find this moment in time when you see all of that in the Bay Area in particular has, you know, likes to push the limits of things? Yeah. I mean, are you excited or are you, are you starting to get a a little nervous about how this is playing out, particularly here. Yeah, I feel like AI, the money, this technology, it's all kind of feeding on each other and people are now starting to really push up against the boundaries.
They are. But, you know, I'm a realist. I mean, I, you know, I've been around long enough to know that, you know, biology's hard, biology's complicated and it's hard and it's harder than people think. And you layer that, you layer on top of that drugs that can actually be effective for things. And that's incredibly hard. And so I think that, look, I welcome creativity. I love the fact that young people are excited in this area. People who are just starting out in their careers want to, want to, you know, make a difference. That, that's great. I want to encourage that. At the same time, I suspect that, you know, reality being what it is, a lot of those efforts will will encounter challenges that, you know, they're going to be hard to overcome. I certainly hope that people continue to explore. I think that's where new breakthroughs and innovations come from. Frankly, this is something I have loved about being a scientist working and living here in the Bay Area, because I do feel that we have a unique culture here. That, you know, I've worked in other parts of the US, and I've traveled all over the world meeting scientists, scientists at various institutions. And I think there's something quite unique and special about the Bay Area. And I love the fact that we have increasing opportunities to bring different kinds of science and technology together. So I love the fact that AI, which is, you know, in many ways kind of centered here in San Francisco, that we're able to bring that together with things like CRISPR so that we can do things that have never been possible in the So that's, that's where I get really excited.
I agree. And it's an awesome time. I mean, you've got IGI, you've got Ark Institute, you've got so many interesting people funding science in new ways. And so much of it revolves around CRISPR, this amazing thing that you helped start in such a big way. And so, yeah, I mean, for me, I know people obsess about AI and that AI is involved in all this, but the biotech stuff is for me is just the most gripping. Um, it's the most fun thing to cover. It's just, it's an awesome time.
Preaching to the choir. To be alive.
So, um, uh, well, Pomona College should be ashamed for doing us both dirty. I'm sure our kids will be fine. Um, I, and, um, just, just, I've wanted, I wanted, I think I've talked to you on the phone a couple times. I'm sure you don't remember. It was for a couple stories. Um, but it was such an honor, um, and just tremendous pleasure to get to meet you in person and spend this much time with you. So thank you so much.
Thanks so much, Ashlee. Really fun conversation.
The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance. It is produced by David Nicholson and me. Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland, and the show is edited by the John Sortland. Thanks as always to Brex and A1 Ventures for making this possible. Please visit our Substack, YouTube, and podcast channels to get more of what Core Memory makes. Thanks, y'all.
