OM DENNE EPISODE
For this episode, we sit down with Kristeen Pareja-Navarro, co-CEO of Engram Bio, whose path from a farming family in the Philippines to peptide engineering for Alzheimer's disease at the Buck Institute is one of the more remarkable stories we've heard on the show. Kristeen walks us through her work trimming the KIBRA protein into a small functional peptide that rescues memory impairment in mice, and how tools like AlphaFold 3 and ESMFold have compressed years of structural biology work into days.
But she's equally candid about where AI falls short. Intrinsically disordered proteins still break the models. AI summaries miss the nuances buried in figures and methods. And no amount of compute can answer the question the field is still wrestling with: how does memory persist when every cell in your body eventually turns over. A grounded, honest conversation about what AI is genuinely changing in early-stage drug development and what it isn't.
Show Notes:
