What if the entire drug discovery industry has been doing preclinical testing backwards? Francisco LePort and Martin Borch Jensen, co-founders of Gordian Bio, think they've cracked the code on why so many promising therapies fail in clinical trials. Instead of testing potential drugs in simplified lab conditions, they're doing discovery directly in live animals with actual disease using a technique called pooled in vivo perturb-seq that can turn one horse into the equivalent of thousands of experiments. In this episode we discuss:

• Why aging research ignores actual aging biology—and how this kills drug development

• How to do the work of 10,000+ animal studies in a single experiment using gene therapy and single-cell sequencing

• The policy disasters strangling US biotech innovation (and why China's gaining ground)

• Why horses make better osteoarthritis models than injured young mice

• How failed clinical trials waste billions in data that never gets analyzed

This conversation dives deep into the intersection of ambitious science, broken incentives, and what it actually takes to build a company that could change how we approach age-related diseases. If you're interested in longevity, drug discovery, or just want to understand why aging is hard to innovate in, this one's for you.