Comment by easytiger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by easytiger | Hacker News Reader

An interesting area investment wise. Really don't know what to make of it as I do see a great deal of risk in these companies personally, that somehow others are happy with.

No real products, no real roadmap. Jim has also made some very bad pharma calls in the past and had some very clueless people running his pharma companies. That said he looks to have done some real research.

> The primary game plan at Juvenescence, explains Bailey, is to come up with various operations engaged in developing new anti-aging drugs

> Juvenescence Bio will be charged with building the pipeline, says Bailey, in part with the molecules that will be identified through the AI venture.

To me that's a warning sign. I like the ambition. This is Elon Musk level stuff. But he isn't crazy enough to deal in unproven potential outcomes. He knew rockets can go to space, he knew electric cars can drive, he knew batteries can store energy/money. He knew what he could sell when he solved the issues

Here i'm not sure they know what they will have in the end and that would scare me off.

this is the difference between basic and applied research - Musk is doing great work in the applied research space. taking proven models and bringing them to market, bringing down costs, etc.

anti-aging research is still in the basic phase - it might be decades before techniques can be applied with any sort of scale. in that sense you really do need huge institutions (or in this case, billionaires) to fund it all. retail investors like you (assuming) and I really can't get involved at the scale or timelines these sorts of ventures require.

Indeed. Very pleased of course someone is willing to take risks.

This is how we ended up with railways, undersea telegraph, commercial commodotised flight and so on.

The old quest of pharmaceutical industry of one small molecule for each disease is largely over. There are perhaps different kind of strategies. For example having a symbiote organism in our body. A very simple one, the baker's yeast, which is used since centuries by women to have a good look, can generate precursors of nicotinamide riboside, and mammalian cells can take up extracellular NAD+ from their surroundings [0]. It is far from being a silver bullet, but it works. There is a long record of modifying Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome, so designing a much more effective S. Cerevisiae is not an unreasonable bet. After that it is a question of customer education, about what they can expect and not expect from a product.

[0] https://umm.edu/health/medical/altmed/supplement/brewers-yea...

I don't feel that ambition and risk is a bad thing. Elon Musk is crazier than you give him credit for. He started Neuralink, which is even more of a moonshot biotech company. I think that starting a new car/rocket company was riskier, back in 2003, for economic and political reasons.

However, I agree that Juvenescence has too much hype and not enough detail. Musk talks big but gives detailed arguments about why he can succeed. Here they seem to just want to get their name out. I'm particularly concerned that Mellon is running a biotech VC fund, juvenescence.life, which incentives PR over substance.

All I've read so far is that they want to apply ML to improve the drug pipeline and discover better drugs. It's not a new idea. There is existing research on using neural networks to predict drug effects, and more broadly many are working on high throughout screening for drug candidates, fully robotic wet labs, etc. But aspects of drug discovery are poorly suited for AI: it's a complex, heterogeneous process requiring logical reasoning and modeling on top of immense structured domain knowledge. The burden is on Juvenescence to make a convincing pitch.

Tiny nitpick; Musk didn't start Tesla Motors (now Tesla Inc.) He joined in an early funding round. He did some work with the Roadster and took more control during(?) the recession. Maybe just prior to it, I don't recall the dates.

Err... I was an early investor, not long after their IPO. So, I've paid a little attention.

Scare you off from what? From reading about it?

investing hard won £

I can see why a billionaire would need your help on that. I guess he needs to up his game.

The theoretical rewards though...

Indeed. And he has the money to spend and he knows how to get "friends and family" involved.

Furthermore, only one or two of the ideas have to be marketable to make a valuable pharma property. I wish i was able to burn ten,twenty million finding out if I was right or not!

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