Ex-Palantir life sciences lead Kathleen McMahon on the rising bioterrorism threat and AI-accelerated bioweapon uplift

something new. Um so yeah, happy to chat with you guys. Yeah. Awesome. I wanted to get your immediate reaction and and help us kind of contextualize the news. Yeah.

That came out yesterday or the day before, which was that two Chinese nationals have been charged by US federal authorities with conspiracy and smuggling after attempting to bring a dangerous biological pathogen, which I'm going to botch the name, into the United States.

This fungus is classified in scient scientific literature as a potential aggroterrorism weapon due to its ability to devastate key crops such as wheat, barley, corn, and rice uh causing a number of issues there.

So um I wanted to kind of get a you know uh you don't have to go into too much detail but kind of a highle background on bioteterrorism broadly kind of maybe some like prominent examples and then um even just get your immediate reaction to the news you know is this kind of thing surprising to you or are you surprised that we're not hearing more headlines about it uh all the time yeah totally so I think the to the second question first it's like a bad surprise obviously but we are absolutely entering this era of an elevated risk of bio threats.

Uh so sadly I don't think it's something that we should be that surprised about.

Um I think this story in particular and we don't know that many details on the story so I won't speak too much to it but the one it highlights how easy it is really to have any biological material pass across borders that obviously both natural or unnatural.

And then the second is that any kind of agricultural pathogen is also an enormous threat.

So I think when people think biod defense and bioteterrorism they think anthrax or small pox um which is obviously horrible but the idea that you could introduce a pathogen that would devastate one of our like primary crops that would have massive health impact but it would also completely destabilize our economy um and send us into something far worse than what we would see with COVID.

So I do think when when we and governments think about biod defense, it's very much both in terms of human health um and agricultural health. But uh to your other question on what what's the primer on biod defense? What are we worried about?

I think there's always been this um so we've always had the problem that people study the most pathogenic uh organisms in the world. They usually do it in a biosafety lab, a BSL lab. These are all over the world. Some regions are obviously more secure than others.

So there's always this threat of something natural leaking or being used maliciously. But basically two things changed recently. It made that a lot worse. One is that our ability to edit genomes and actually start changing those pathogens. There's a bunch of new tools to do that.

So like things like crisper which you hear about usually in the medical sense of editing a genome. Yeah. Are available on pathogens.

um synthesizing new nucleotides or new DNA to do that with also now commercially available like we could order uh nucleotides or you could print them out in some cases in a desktop printer.

So that made it now we're dealing with things that nature has never seen and then in the last couple years with large language models or biospecific language models we have this idea of AI uplift.

So, it means that someone um like us, not to underestimate your biological skills, but could actually be coached into how do we use these tools um guided all the way into making something that is actually way worse than anything nature has ever seen. And this isn't like science fiction.

Like, uh Anthropic talked last week, I think, about Claude 4. They did internal safety trials. they noticed an uplift that goes way beyond just oh it's easier to Google a paper about how to do this and really into that um allowing a novice to access something dangerous.

So they released Cloud 4 with you know new security standards to try to combat that but a lot of models aren't like that. Not everyone has those security standards you know. Yeah, I mean this this has happened like uh uh what is it?

Timothy McVey looked up how to build a bomb with fertilizer and built and basically blew up like a massive government building and the the the wreckage from that was insane.

Uh if you think about what it would take a terrorist to uh work in a biosafety lab, it's obviously very complex but getting easier as you can have an LLM coach you through the process essentially, right? Is that is that roughly the the the nature of the threat?

Yeah, both in terms of the actual steps to take and then what to change about a virus that would make it either evade some kind of countermeasure which is like some kind of medicine that we have for it um or be more infectious.

And I think the um the real like what has a lot of attention and weighs on people's minds is that we're not talking about like a state sponsored nuclear program that you need these like massive budgets and facilities to make something like that. Like it's a laboratory and a computer.

Um, so it's a really different dynamic of threat than what we've been dealing with in the past. And it kind of self-replicates by itself. That's like the whole goal.

It's an interesting story to me because obviously over the weekend there was the Ukraine story around operation spiderweb and that was relatively asymmetric and that you know whatever the cost of the operation the trucks and the drones just you know even if it was hundred million dollars which seems really really high right even if it was taking you know huge teams it destroyed you know a billion dollars plus of of assets on the other side and then when you talk about bow warfare and bioteterrorism It's like, okay, one or two people with access to a lab could potentially do billions and billions of dollars of of damage.

Do you think this is a wakeup call or this will be a wakeup call for the government broadly?

How do you expect um you know, what are the different kind of uh ways in which the United States can defend itself from these types of um you know, obviously this wasn't whatever is being reported isn't a direct attack, but a but a potential uh threat in the future.

Yeah, the I mean the good news is uh DoD here, MOD in the UK, there's a lot of defense organizations already thinking about this and really trying to get ahead of it. Uh it means that we have way more to do, but at least it's on the agenda.

And I think it comes down to so you're like the best defense would be to prevent this from happening. So putting better safeguards on models, putting really strong um regulation on synthesis. So who can synthesize what? How do we track that? that's great.

There's actually some legislation in the works on both of those things. But the that works domestically and it works to contain an accident, but if we're actually talking about international collaboration, like those kinds of regulations are not really enough.

So the way then we get into thinking how do you deter something like this to your point like what is the the defense against this? And there's really like three pillars that go into it. The first is how quickly can you detect that something happened?

So in this case or in future cases do we immediately know that something new is circulating that it's uh high risk to us that it maybe will evade any kind of countermeasure that we have and can we know that before it's an outbreak and you know we're sampling from a hospital and then that leads into the second one which is how fast can we design or update a countermeasure so like an antibbody or some kind of biologic to combat that.

Um, and that is really like if we can diagnose and develop as fast as possible, then these weapons are much less powerful because you're not talking about billions of damages. You're talking about a couple cases that are quickly contained. And the last part of course is attribution.

So if you can actually say where did this come from? Did it come from nature? Did it come from engineering? Did it, you know, uh, did it come from a nation state? That lets you bring the rest of the DoD and the State Department and our allies towards preventing something in the future.

And if you can get get that cycle down to hours really in terms of detecting, stopping, and then attributing, then you actually have a really robust profile for defense. And there's a bunch of new tech that's going to help make that better. So this is scary, but it also is there's good news on the horizon, too.

Can you talk a little bit about the bio practice at Palunteer? I mean, uh there's been a lot of uh potentially like misunderstanding or misinformation about how Palunteer works.

uh you know I think most people who understand the company at this point understand that it is a it is an ontology platform that s is on top of a large database but I think what I'm struggling with is I understand if you're using like the Airbus uh case study you have a database with all the different parts of the airplane and then Palunteer understands helps you understand how the different pieces and lead times for you know this screw and this seat seat belt and this engine part fits all together.

So if you're demand planning or figuring out how to manufacture airplanes, that's a very helpful tool to understand your supply chain, that makes sense to me in the very concrete widgets business that is airplane manufacturing, although it is obviously very complex.

In the bio or pharmaceutical space, I don't really understand the nature of how large these data sets are. Are we talking about trial data or manufacturing? Is it all of these above? Like how does how does all that fit together?

um when you're thinking about applications of of understanding large data sets in just the bio world broadly. Yeah, definitely. Um so the some of it is more similar to what you're you described with Airbus where we're talking about manufacturing.

We're talking about something that's like it's a process with a lot of moving parts. How do you s make these all synchronous and update uh when you need to? There's also obviously biologics manufacturing. Um, some of it is more in the logistics end, which Palenter also talks about quite a bit.

So, when you're running a trial, making sure that patients and the medicine that they need are in the right place at the right time with the right support staff. That's actually looks pretty similar to coordinating flight routes or staffing a hospital.

Um, the part that so those parts are super similar to the rest of Palunteer. The part that's probably most unique is when we're actually talking about that trial data or talking about patient level information.

And there it really gets back to some of the the core concepts of Palunteer is how do you work with multimodal data and see patterns across it.

So if we're looking back historically on all trials that we've run and we want to start trying to identify what kind of patients have the best response to this or what are potential side effects, can you start linking together data that's from like a medical record with samples from a lab with sequencing data if you have it?

Um, and can you do that in a way that is completely secure, completely auditable, and complies with all the regulation in the space? Um, and that's really the the niche that Palunteer maybe it's not always well understood to fit into, but uh that is what that platform was built for.

Can you talk a little bit more about uh the I don't know like the long-term future of what you're building? I know that you can't go into it too much, but uh uh like there are a bunch of different vectors and opportunities around um what we're building in bio and what we're trying to prevent?

There's almost like a uh like like there's a little bit of game theory going on here.

So, um, what would you like to see the United States, uh, really really dominate going forward and where are the biggest opportunities, uh, to both increase biocurity and then also help accelerate the the developments that we need, the good stuff and that is what I'm most excited about.

All of these technologies that are really scary when we're talking about them like this actually do have the potential to give us this enormous global advantage and our bioeconomy and how we respond to these threats and make medicine too. It's two sides of the same coin.

Um I think the two areas that we're most excited about. Um one is on that detection pillar. So right now a lot of the ways that we understand what's going on around us is super analog. We have like a list of pathogens we're looking for. we test and we get a yes or a no if those exist and not much more than that.

We've already seen a shift in this space towards sequencing. So actually getting the DNA sequence from anything that's in the environment or any sample.

So that both broadens the scope of what we're looking at rather than just having tunnel vision on the pathogens we know about which means that we can start detecting unknown unknowns and things that we've never seen and make a risk assessment.

Also, using sequence data lets you have this much deeper level of insight into what the risk is rather than just there's a virus here.

You could say these mutations make it more adapted to this type of host or make it more dangerous or make it evade a certain type of medicine that we already have and then you can take all that information that you get on this more robust detection layer and use it to drive countermeasure design.

So we now have like every biotech that you guys talk to probably talks about programmable therapeutics where we're moving to this era where you can update um based on how the targets update and if we have this deep level of intelligence we can also start thinking about rather than have a stale stockpile of medicines that were made 10 years ago can we actually see a threat immediately change the countermeasure um and then start deploying that immediately.

So, I think getting that cycle down really tight, that's what um the future is hopefully. Are we testing enough? I know when I go through TSA at LAX, someone who was doing uh research uh maybe for the CDC I talked to uh was saying that like they basically just focus on LAX because that's like the biggest hub of virus.

It's going to freak everyone out who flies. Uh it's like if you're going to get sick, like if you go to LAX, that's where it all starts. It's like a petri dish. Um, I know that they swab my hands for I think it's like bomb making materials, but should they be swabbing my hands for new pathogens?

Should we be doing more in the in the detection? Should we be sequencing random farmland to see if there's new invasive pathogens that could be targeting our crops? Uh, like like how and then like how do we even pay for that?

Is that something that the the government should put the bill or or uh corporations should be incentivized to pay for? Uh what does the actual like upping the amount of data that we're ingesting look like? Yeah, I mean I'm I'm always gonna say more data is better. Yeah.

But but the question is like yeah, how do we how do we get more data? How do we incentivize more data? Buy more data uh you know test for more data. Yeah, absolutely.

So I think there of course we should collect more the type of sequencing actually helps drive down you the cost because you can target a wider range of things you might worry about rather than setting up individualized programs for specific pathogens when maybe that's not a threat.

But I actually think the with the caveat of more data is always better. We actually do collect a lot of this data today. You don't necessarily see it because some of it is in wastewater or environmental samples like you're saying. um we don't always extract that much intelligence from the data that we do collect.

So we we know that a sequence exists. We might not necessarily know what that means in terms of health or the impact of that variant or that mutation. Um so I do think there's there is benefit and there's like cost-effective benefit for collecting more but a big piece is just on of the data that does come in.

How do we build the right models and the right software to interpret that? Makes sense. Makes a lot of sense. Uh, I think that covers it for now. I would love to have you come back on when you're ready to talk more about uh specifics on on what you're building.

And I feel grateful that you and the team are doing what you're doing and just work a little bit faster, please. Um, but uh, thank you for coming on and and giving us some insight here and uh, congrats on uh, on starting the the founder path. Thanks very much, guys. Great chatting and hope to chat soon. Cheers.

Thank you. Next up, we have Roy from Cluey coming back for an update. He's hired 50 interns, I think, or something close to it. He said they're bringing every intern on. They're bringing every intern on. We got every intern coming in. Well, welcome to the studio, Roy. How are you doing? Oh my. Let's go.