The Biorevolution Podcast

DNA nanotechnology treats DNA not primarily as a carrier of genetic information, but as a programmable material. Based on the predictability of Watson–Crick base pairing, DNA nanotechnology allows researchers to encode specific structural information. DNA origami, in particular, is an interesting approach for reproducibly folding complex two- and three-dimensional DNA nano-objects. The potential o...

From Biohacking to Healthcare- the growing pain of the Longevity Industry Shownotes the BioRevolution podcast episode 48 For most of human history, “living longer” mainly meant not dying early but this has changed drastically with significantly increased life expectancy in the 20th century. This raises a new question: how can we live longer, individually and as a society, without simply shifting t...

Nature has “gifted” us proteins that carry out a vast array of functions in cells, shaping the lives of all organisms, ecosystems, and ultimately the planet. In the age of synthetic biology, researchers are pushing beyond the catalogue of naturally evolved proteins by redesigning or even de novo designing proteins to make them more suitable for human goals—improving function, stability, specificit...

Animal models have been the mainstay for testing hypotheses about human diseases and their treatment in academic research and drug development. However, these models raise ethical concerns and are costly and time-consuming. Most importantly, animal models often have low predictive power for the behavior of novel treatments in humans. Ethically, animal testing is arguably justifiable only if it can...

In our complex world, science can be an important guiding thread for decision-making—both for policymakers and for individuals—on how to shape the health and wellbeing of society and individuals. But science often gets lost in translation, making it hard to distinguish facts from myths and to find truth within the complex picture of modern science. Good science communication is key to demystifying...

For decades, biology treated the human genome as a tidy instruction manual—genes neatly encoding proteins, surrounded by vast stretches of supposedly irrelevant DNA. As sequencing and molecular tools advanced, that picture fractured: scientists uncovered transposable elements, viral remnants, regulatory RNAs—and even unexpected, tiny non-canonical proteins, often called the “dark proteome.” Today,...

We’re living in the big data age, surrounded by personal, scientific, and societal data that could help us understand the world, make decisions, and even forecast what comes next. But complex systems don’t fit neatly into human intuition, and we can’t “see” meaning in massive datasets without help. That’s where macroscopes come in: software tools designed to make complexity interpretable, explorab...

The Rare Lens: AI-based image recognition for rare disease diagnoses There are around 6000 rare diseases, which affect over 300 million people worldwide. Rare diseases are often difficult to diagnose, and people affected by a rare disease wait an average of five years or more for a correct diagnosis, which can be a heavy burden on patients and also hinders rare disease research and drug developmen...

Cells are the basic units of life. For over a century, understanding cellular processes has been the basis for understanding human development and disease, and for deciphering the actions of novel disease treatments. But there’s a caveat: wet-lab studies in cells take time and money, they are often reductionist. To overcome those challenges of the wet lab, researchers have for some time tried to m...

Every second man and every third woman will experience a cancer diagnosis during their lives. Getting the news can be devastating and paralyzing, but making the right decisions about treatment, care, mindset and lifestyle is a crucial part of finding a cure. In her book “The 8 Essentials for Overcoming Cancer - Cancer, I can” medical doctor and pharma executive, Stefanie Walther describes her very...

This time Louise and Andreas invited the artist Annette Goessel into the show to discuss the once united forces of art and science that seem so seperate in our day and age. And: For the first time since the beginnings of the show we speak German once more (apologies to the non German speakers) In dieser Episode diskutieren wir die faszinierende Verbindung zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft. Wir erkun...

It sounds promising: AI chatbots acting as scientists, condensing the work of weeks, months, or even years of reading, debate, and hour-long lab meetings into minutes. Researchers at Stanford University and Google DeepMind have released multi-agent AI “scientist” systems. But how good are they, really, and will they overcome current limitations of large language models like OpenAI’s GPT or Google’...

The $600 billion MedTech industry is undergoing a technological transformation. From AI-powered medical imaging to smart diagnostics and remote monitoring tools, artificial intelligence and machine learning are reshaping how care is delivered — and increasingly how patients manage their own health. In this episode of the BioRevolution podcast, we are joined by our guest, idalab’s MedTech expert Ju...

Food is a topic that is both deeply personal and of global importance. What we eat affects our health and longevity, but also the lives of animals and the future of our planet. New technologies and scientific discoveries are now enabling us to transform how we produce food and personalize nutrition in entirely new ways. In this episode, Andreas Horchler and Louise von Stechow speak with food exper...

Despite great hopes for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in biotech and pharma—with investments exceeding $50 billion over the past ten years—the question of when the technology will reach maturity remains difficult to answer. How can biotech and pharma leaders navigate this complex gray area, where hype around the technology obscures the outlook and few concrete milestones provide clear signposts for...

More than 20 years after the Human Genome Project, enabled by new sequencing technologies, researchers are making progress in exploring the vast non-coding space that constitutes 98% of our genomes. This non-coding, or "dark," DNA harbors elements with important regulatory functions in health and disease. But pinpointing disease-relevant DNA elements within this massive DNA space can be like searc...

When the Swiss chemist synthesized and tested the psychedelic compound LSD in the 1930s, he knew he had found a tool to explore the human mind. Indeed, before psychedelics became illegal in the late 1960s, a mountain of evidence had been produced, showing potential benefits of psychedelic-assisted therapy for depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. After a decades-long hiatus, research on psyche...

This time on the BioRevolution podcast: science itself. While recent surveys show persistently high trust in science worldwide, certain scientific topics have become the subject of intense societal and political debate. This politicization of science puts scientists in a difficult position when they are trying to argue based on facts. The value of facts and evidence-based science seems to be incre...

In some respects, 2024 has been a record year for AI in biotech, with the $1 billion founding of the antibody-centered biotech company Xaira and the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to DeepMind researchers Demis Hassabis, John Jumper, and David Baker. However, despite years of investment and innovation, we still lack an answer to the most pressing question: Will AI revolutionize drug devel...

2025: For millions of people, the new year starts with the self-promise to improve, to quit smoking, alcohol, to get in shape, to stay young and attractive, to basically create and become a new me. While traditionally new year vows meant to relinquish, today there seem to be many helpers in the form of biohacking. Beginning with diets and not ending with technical devices. While there are real sho...

Modern humans are stressed creatures: overloaded schedules, constantly “on-call,” and social media haunting us into the late night. Part of this stress is maladaptive responses that date back to human history when stressors were about life and death and not about writing emails and making phone calls. A key player in those ancient responses is cortisol, a stress hormone that interacts with many bi...

Science can be complex and difficult to grasp, yet public understanding is crucial for navigating issues like disease risk, climate change, and pandemics. Clear, engaging science communication can help prevent misinformation and conspiracy theories, offering facts in place of myths. But how can we make science more digestible and appealing? Counterintuitively, it might be less facts and more emoti...

In the expensive and failure-prone process of drug development, artificial intelligence (AI) can serve both as an efficiency tool and as a creativity tool. Increased efficiency means shorter timelines, reduced investment, and earlier insights into success or failure. This can lead to more opportunities to bring new drugs to patients. Increased creativity means exploring new areas in drug discovery...

How will the medicine of the future look? Healthcare and medicine are on the verge of transformative change, driven by new technologies such as artificial intelligence, telemedicine, and wearable devices. Alongside the technologization and virtualization of medicine, there is a shift from reactive "fix the broken" approaches to preventative strategies and from one-size-fits-all treatments to perso...

Some 36 months after the release of ChatGPT, the verdict is still out on the role that large language models (LLMs) will play in biotech, pharma, and medicine. On paper, the range of tasks that LLMs can perform in biomedical research and healthcare is vast—excavating relevant information for drug discovery from mountains of scientific literature, designing novel proteins, transcribing doctors' not...