AI Is Designing the Next Cancer Fighter | EP.53

What if AI could design proteins to help your immune system find and kill cancer cells? That's not a hypothetical — it's what 28 teams across 40 countries attempted in the Bits-to-Binders Challenge, an open-science competition organized by PhD students at the University of Texas at Austin.

In this episode, Ron sits down with three of the organizers — Clay Kosonocky, Daryl Barth, and Aaron Feller — to unpack how they pulled off one of the most ambitious student-led experiments at the intersection of AI and biology. Together, they submitted 12,000 AI-designed protein sequences to bind to a cancer target called CD20, then validated the results in real biological assays.

The conversation covers the 100-year history of protein folding, how AlphaFold changed everything, why AI biology can't just rely on benchmarks, what a CAR-T cell actually does, and what a 7% hit rate tells us about where the field really stands. Plus: open source science, the verification gap between digital predictions and wet lab reality, and why a global team of strangers working together might be the most hopeful signal of all.

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