Talk BIO to Me

Luke McKay is CTO and co-founder of synbi.bio, a company giving the biomanufacturing industry something it's been missing: real-time visibility into the biology actually doing the work inside industrial bioreactors. Most companies monitoring fermentation and production systems are tracking chemical byproducts — pH, temperature, metabolites — but flying blind on the microbes themselves. Luke and hi...

We all know how unpopular data centers are, especially when it comes to energy consumption and environmental concerns. As AI and cloud computing continue to explode, the problem is only getting worse. But what if the solution to the energy crisis was hiding in.. biology?! Specifically DNA.  In this episode, Flo sits down with Anagha Rajesh founder of Biocompute, at SynBioBeta, to explore how DNA c...

(Recently featured in The New York Times .) What happens when you train an AI model not on the internet, but on millions of genomes? Samuel King, a PhD candidate at Stanford, working at the intersection of AI and bioengineering, joins host Flo Lumsden to unpack it — including how his team used AI to generate the first fully functional bacteriophage genome from scratch, and why that could mean far...

This one's a joyride. Flo catches Adrian Woolfson , CEO and co-founder of Genyro , and his co-founder Kaihang Wang at SynBioBeta for a conversation that starts with genome writing and ends somewhere between Doctor Who and a custom unicorn order form. Along the way, the two break down how bringing the humble "page number" from publishing into DNA assembly made their process a million times more acc...

What happens when a renowned wet lab biologist and Google brain machine learning engineers get together to work on biotech? You get Cradle ! In this episode, co-founder Elise de Reus joins host Flo Lumsden to break down how Cradle turns protein design into a genuine back-and-forth between scientists and machine learning models. Elise explains why the real magic isn't the model alone — it's the loo...

Join host Flo Lumsden as she sits down with John Cumbers , CEO and founder of SynBioBeta , at the world's largest synthetic biology conference this past May. In this conversation, John shares how AI is fundamentally reshaping the field of biology — from large language models designing novel enzymes and antibodies to full-stack scientific innovation. Discover the most exciting breakthroughs happeni...

For years, AI has helped scientists organize data and streamline research, but it's now beginning to tackle biology's toughest scientific challenges. In this episode, Flo sits down with Nicholas, Head of AI at Benchling, to discuss why the physical world has been AI's biggest blind spot—and why that's finally changing. From generative protein design to the future of drug discovery and diagnostics,...

Ever wonder what separates a billion-dollar TechBio unicorn from a well-funded experiment? Krish Ramadurai of AIX Ventures does—and he's backed some of the coolest ones. We dive into why understanding the actual science matters, why mice are terrible at predicting human outcomes (sorry, lab mice), and how the next generation of drug discovery is being built by teams brave enough to let AI nerds an...

In this episode, Flo sits down with Dr. Michael Köpke , Chief Innovation Officer at LanzaTech , to explore how specialized microbes are literally eating industrial emissions and transforming them into valuable products (Michael's cool Jacket!). From sustainable aviation fuels to the jacket Michael is wearing—which started its life as emissions from a steel plant—LanzaTech's carbon-fixing microbes...

Meet Chris Kantrowitz, founder of Quorum Earth , who's literally making fungal spores that eat bugs—and he's weirdly charming about it. In this first episode of Talk Bio to Me, Chris breaks down how specialized fungal spores are taking on invasive species without any CRISPR or GMO shenanigans, just pure fungal magic. 

Welcome to Talk BIO to Me! The show where we sit down with the people building the future of biology. This year, we headed to SynBioBeta, the world's largest conference for synthetic biology. This mini-series (or mini-pod) features interviews with some of the most fascinating founders, scientists, researchers, investors, and AI innovators shaping the future of biotech. Subscribe to get the first t...