Jacob Kimmel

Do I want to polarize T cells to a less inflammatory state in somebody with an autoimmune disease?

Do I want to make liver cells more functional in a patient who is suffering from certain types of metabolic syndrome, be that maybe even orthogonal to the way that they age?

Do I want to go in and change the way a neuron is functioning to a different state to treat a particular type of neurodegenerative disease?

These are all questions you can ask.

They're not the ones we're going after, but that is the more general, broader vision.

Yeah, they do.

I think the conceptual analogy is very apt.

We don't actually use RL at the moment, so I don't want to overstate the level of sophistication we've got.

But I think the general problem reduces down in a similar way.

And so you can think about, you know, your earlier question of what does the general model look like that enables you to actually have compounding returns in drug discovery?

Well, you might have something like this base model, which, as you said, just predicts this object function of how are these perturbations hitting these targets going to change which genes are turned on and off in this cell?

Then there's an entirely other task, which is, well, which genes do you want to turn on and off?

And what state do I want the cell to adopt?

Right.

Our lens on that is that across many different diseases people have, age is one of the strongest predictors of how they're going to progress, whether that disease arises.

And so in many, many circumstances, you have evidence in humans where you can say, oh, if I could make the cell younger, maybe that's not a perfect fix, but that's going to dramatically benefit not only patients who have a diagnosed disease, but it might actually help most of us stay healthier longer, even subclinically before anyone would formally say that we're sick.

Now, that's another more general function, the same way that in LLMs, you might have to create these particular RLVF environments.

You need to have places where you can state a value function of the particular task that you're trying to optimize for.

In drug discovery, you would then need to know, well, what are the cell states I want to engineer for?

That's kind of the next generation of what a target might be.