Podcast: Computable Microbes

Apr 21, 2026

Outpost Bio Co-Founder and CEO Jenny Yang sat down with Grant Belgard and Grace Ratley at The Bioinformatics CRO Podcast to talk about the gap between what microbiome research publishes and what R&D teams can actually use.

The conversation covers:

Why most microbiome papers find correlations but miss causal mechanisms
How Outpost's Lab-in-the-Loop architecture turns wet lab experiments into a training signal for frontier AI models
What R&D teams need before advancing compounds when microbiome-mediated metabolism is in play
The thesis behind Outpost's $3.5M pre-seed and the Boston and London team

The conversation covers:

Why most microbiome papers find correlations but miss causal mechanisms
How Outpost's Lab-in-the-Loop architecture turns wet lab experiments into a training signal for frontier AI models
What R&D teams need before advancing compounds when microbiome-mediated metabolism is in play
The thesis behind Outpost's $3.5M pre-seed and the Boston and London team

Blog

Mar 29, 2026

Can Transformers Learn the Language of the Microbiome?

Drugs that you take interact with a complex microbial ecosystem in your gut. Trillions of microorganisms call the human digestive tract home and interact with one another and with their human host. This microbial world can directly modify drug structure1–4, influence host immune responses5,65,6, and alter pharmacokinetics4,7. Currently, most drug development programs choose to ignore the gut microbiome because a reliable method to predict how it impacts drugs does not exist.

Blog

Mar 29, 2026

Can Transformers Learn the Language of the Microbiome?

Press

3/2/26

Exclusive: Inside Outpost Bio ’s $3.5M mission to turn the microbiome into predictive AI infrastructure

Outpost Bio, a deep-tech startup with teams in London and Boston, wants to make human microbiology easier to understand through computation. Their Lab-in-the-Loop platform that fuses machine learning with automated experiments, creating a constant feedback loop between data and discovery.

Press

3/2/26

Exclusive: Inside Outpost Bio ’s $3.5M mission to turn the microbiome into predictive AI infrastructure

Blog

3/2/26

In conversation with Outpost's founders

There’s a lot of attention on how AI can help model our genomes, proteins, and cells. But much of what shapes real-world health outcomes happens outside of our DNA, and rather within the trillions of microbes living in our bodies. Today, that layer remains one of the most complex and most under-modeled systems in human biology. That’s what Outpost Bio is tackling: building frontier models at this interaction layer.