How AI is Unlocking the Human Microbiome

Outpost Bio Co-Founder and CEO Jenny Yang joined Brian Chee on HumanifAI HealthTech to talk about why the microbiome may be a missing layer in understanding why patients respond differently to drugs—and how combining human-derived microbiome experiments with AI could help make drug development more predictive and personalized.

The conversation covers:

• Why clinical trial failure rates remain stubbornly high despite decades of progress in genomics and drug discovery

• How the gut microbiome adds biological diversity that human DNA alone cannot explain

• How Outpost’s Lab-in-the-Loop platform combines wet lab experiments with machine learning to generate causal data on microbiome–compound interactions

• Why modeling drug metabolism across diverse microbial communities could help predict efficacy and side effects before costly clinical trials

• How Jenny’s background in clinical machine learning, algorithmic fairness, and bias mitigation shapes Outpost’s approach to building more reliable biological models