Renata Lopes Kramer

Surprise 1: Anthropic acquired a one-person biotech . . . Surprise 2: that person is me Surprise 3: I’m here to tell you all about it Yes, this is what you think it is; after 6 yrs of increasingly loose anonymity: the Professor Oak reveal post …and yes, it has gotten so boring around here that I’m literally doxxing myself to spice up the timeline ------- Ok, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cody Tranbarger. I mostly tweet, but occasionally find time to dabble in drug dev & starting/building biotechs. My past lives span the VC, crossover, startup continuum; Prof Oak has been my way of keeping a digital foot in those worlds, despite having my physical feet planted elsewhere. The past 18 mo, ‘elsewhere’ was Mithril Medicine, a co. I founded to develop bsAbs for LAMA2-CMD & other ECM-related genetic diseases. Mithril was born out of hands-on building with @MikeNGladstone, @JasonPaulRhodes, @LifeSciVC, & team @atlasventure. Somehow, I made enough half-decent calls along the way (even a broken clock is right twice a day, eh?) to convince them Mithril/I warranted a small seed. While I can hardly rationalize such an outrageously cavalier bet, I’m grateful for it, & I'd partner with Atlas again in a heartbeat. In typical AV fashion, Mithril’s primordial form was virtual, decentralized, & ultra-lean. This stage tends to be short-lived, but for Mithril, it worked surprisingly well, for surprisingly long, thanks in part to the rapid maturation of the AI tools I used liberally. Eventually, Mithril became a bit of an experiment itself - to find the upper bound of how far it could scale as a single operator + a bunch of Claude (+ a stellar bench of part-time consultants). In parallel, I started spending time with @nc_frey, @an1lam, & @CoefficientBio team; and promptly experienced, for the 1st time, AI at the frontier. Soon thereafter, Mithril stopped looking like an experiment, & started looking like a preview of an entirely new operating model. From that spark came “Pipeline-in-a-Person.” The idea immediately resonated when we shared it here back in April; and it was central to the shared vision that led to Anthropic’s acquisition of Mithril, & my joining the team. Why join Anthropic? Three reasons. (1) For Mithril, the programs continue, with more resources & infrastructure behind them, and as much Claude as I can put to work. (2) For me, the chance to start several more programs, & find out how many one person can actually run in parallel - an almost unprecedented luxury for a curious drug hunter. (3) For our mission, a path to institutionalize & scale this new way of working, then put it in the hands of all of biopharma, all over the world - which, candidly, I find the most energizing. Will AI x Bio cure diseases? Unequivocally yes, imo… but not by the route that gets the most airtime. Rather than timeline acceleration & compression, I see orchestration & parallelization as today's low-hanging fruit. Most drug hunters see a handful of go/no-go calls in a career, & spend entirely too much of the rest trading emails (my inbox can attest). Give them the bandwidth to run several programs at once, and the time to focus on scientific judgment, and I’m willing to bet they’ll make better calls. And at scale, better calls translate to more drugs, higher hit rates, broader patient impact, & likely, a disease or 10 or 100 cured. I couldn't be more excited to build toward that future @AnthropicAI. Finally, a heartfelt thank you to BioTwitter/X. The end of anonymity is bittersweet, but if anyone’s earned a proper introduction, you all have. It’s difficult to overstate how much this app has done for me: a decade of education, plenty of friends, many job opportunities, several mentors, a few investors, even a co-founder (fmr). It was the generosity of this community that inspired me to start posting 6 years ago, after just as many years lurking. I hope I’ve been able to pay it forward, in my own small way. But, to be clear, Prof Oak isn’t going anywhere. Same beat, same themes, and now, a front-row seat to drug development at the frontier. Stay tuned for dispatches from the trenches; and remember... Gotta Cure 'Em All

BREAKING: Microsoft, $MSFT, is offering buyouts to 60,000 workers as part of the company’s efforts to cut costs amid AI adoption, per Bloomberg. Personnel on select teams in the US, Canada, India, and the UK at a vice president level and below will be eligible. This reflects ~27% of Microsoft's total workforce.

Former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt: "traditional programming is over, and i'm mourning the identity i built around it" Programmers don't write code anymore — they wake up, assign objectives to AI agents, go to lunch, and let them run overnight For anyone still coding the old way: "stop. it's over"

Psilocybin made human cells live 50% longer. A new study has uncovered surprising anti-aging potential in psilocin—the active metabolite produced when the body breaks down psilocybin, the psychoactive compound found in magic mushrooms. In laboratory experiments, researchers exposed two human cell lines (skin fibroblasts and fetal lung fibroblasts) to a 100 μM concentration of psilocin. The results were striking: lung cells took 57% longer to reach replicative senescence (the point at which cells permanently stop dividing and accumulate damage), while skin fibroblasts extended their replicative lifespan by 51%. These findings suggest psilocin may slow fundamental cellular aging processes, possibly by lowering oxidative stress, enhancing DNA-repair pathways, supporting mitochondrial health, or dampening chronic inflammation—mechanisms that overlap with those targeted by leading experimental longevity drugs. The benefits extended beyond cell culture. In aged female mice (19 months old at the start, equivalent to approximately 60–65 human years), a single monthly dose of psilocybin dramatically improved outcomes. After 10 months of treatment, 80% of the psilocybin-treated animals remained alive, compared with only 50% of untreated controls. Treated mice also displayed markedly fewer visible signs of aging, including reduced fur loss and graying. This research marks the first direct demonstration that psilocybin/psilocin can influence biological aging itself, rather than solely producing psychological effects. The authors emphasize that the study used relatively conservative dosing and are now advocating for follow-up work with higher or more frequent administration, detailed assessments of immune, metabolic, and cognitive function, and investigations into whether the extended lifespan corresponds to genuine improvements in healthspan and quality of life. ["Psilocybin treatment extends cellular lifespan and improves survival of aged mice." npj Aging, 2025]