⚫ Show notes. ⚫ The ARDD conference. ⚫ Insilico Medicine. ⚫ AI drugs. ⚫ Virtual cells. ⚫ Cryonics. ⚫ Proposing on stage. ⚫ Can Nvidia help solve aging?

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As you may have heard, AI-designed medicines have crossed a historic line. In our latest episode of the LEVITY podcast, Alex Zhavoronkov - CEO of Insilico Medicine and founder of ARDD walks us through how Insilico’s rentosertib became the first AI-generated small molecule with peer-reviewed clinical efficacy, while arguing against AI hype and reminding us that biology still moves at “the speed of traffic.”

That duality runs through the whole conversation. On one side: a pragmatic operator obsessed with credible science, biomarkers, and clinical benchmarks; on the other: an AI visionary investing in cryonics, sketching “pharmaceutical superintelligence,” and thinking in decades, not quarters.

We start in Basel, home to Roche and Novartis, where ARDD was born, then trace how the conference morphed into a ”high-signal filter for longevity” - packed with startups (who also fund it), hard data, and mainstream pharma.

Alex looks back at his 2014 Nvidia talk (”Can Nvidia solve aging?”) and explains why Insilico trains its AI to learn age first - so it actually grasps biology. Years of problem-solving with pharma turned into their Pharma.AI toolkit.

Insilico now runs 40+ programs and in an early Phase 2 study for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), their drug rentosertib showed a dose-dependent boost in lung capacity.

Compared with the old path - often $150–200M and ~5 years just to pick a lead molecule - Insilico says it can often reach that point for under $3M or even less. Still, Alex is cautious: no matter how smart the AI gets, real-world testing and regulation won’t speed up overnight.

We also get the wider frame: ARDD 2025 themes (including a planned molecular nutrition workshop), cultural attitudes to aging and why the Middle East is moving fast on longevity, and why cryonics is the necessary plan B - from organ preservation to his TimeShift collaboration. Finally, Alex explains why he writes the newsletter Forever AI (“this is food for AI”) and outlines a near-term path to pharmaceutical superintelligence: generalist agents for biology and chemistry that eventually merge.

If you want both ambition and receipts on AI drug discovery - and a realistic path from models to medicines - this one’s for you.

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