Michael Florea is the co-founder and CEO of Olden Labs, an SF-based company developing and shipping AI smart and low cost cages for animal studies. Michael has had a long term vision to advance human longevity since he was a teenager. After his PhD in biology at Harvard Medical School, where he worked on whole body gene delivery systems, he choose to accelerate biotechnology by building Olden Labs. In just one month after launching, they’ve got over 100 labs, companies, and institutions to sign up for their cages. As of February 2025, they’ve shipped close to 40.
In this episode, we talk about the state of longevity, the state of the art in animal monitoring, how the Olden Labs smart cage works (watch YouTube video below for that), why animals are still relevant in a world of virtual biology and organoids, how the data they collect can further improve research, and my personal take on longevity.
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Timestamps
02:18 Upbringing and early interest in biology and longevity as a teen
7:15 PhD work in whole body gene delivery
13:02 State of the art and challenges of animal cages in research
18:40 Design of Olden Labs cages
27:40 Other companies in the space and vision
29:14 Cloud Lab vision for the next 5-10 years
31:58 Why we still need animals despite advancements in organoids and simulations
35:19 Capturing data for biomedical research
37:02 Longevity questions and discussion
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