My guest this week, Johnny Yu, has seen firsthand how the new code-writing capabilities of LLMs has widened horizons for the use of AI in biology. Tahoe Bio, a company he cofounded, has built its own AI agents, which are helping it rethink how to use AI in drug discovery and development.
We discuss two other recent agentic AI developments from recent weeks. A publication in Science from Jure Leskovec's Stanford University Lab on Biomni, a multi-purpose, general intelligence that he hopes will help researchers get more out of their efforts.
“What if every biomedical scientist had a tireless expert collaborator?," he said. "One that could actually go read literature, one that could actually go run the analysis, understand the data, design the experiments across any area of biology?”
Started in 2024 and put up as an open-source project in 2025, Biomni — already being commercialized by a startup, Phylo — heralds a new wave of technologies that stand on the shoulders of the large language models behind products like Google Gemini and Anthropic's Claude.
Just last week, Anthropic launched Claude Science, another wide-ranging research aide that is also based on AI agents. And a recent leap in Claude’s ability to write code means even more are likely on the way.
Researchers are already lining up to try them out. According to Leskovec and his Phylo cofounders Kexin Huang and Jerry Qu, more than 10,000 people have already started using Biomni.
For more, check out the post on iongenomics.bio.
