The Bioinformatics CRO Podcast: Jenny Yang: Computable Microbiomes

Outpost Bio Co-Founder and CEO Jenny Yang joined Grant Belgard on The Bioinformatics CRO Podcast to talk about what it takes to make human microbiology computable—and why better biological data, tighter wet lab–AI feedback loops, and scientific rigor are essential for building tools that can actually translate into R&D and human health.

The conversation covers:

• Why the microbiome may be a missing layer in understanding differences in drug response and personalized health

• How Outpost combines human-derived perturbation experiments, multi-omic measurements, and machine learning to model how microbial communities interact with drugs and food molecules

• Why Outpost’s Lab-in-the-Loop approach keeps wet lab experiments and computational models tightly connected, with each informing what the other does next

• Why causal, mechanistic insight—and not just microbiome correlations—is critical for building something R&D teams can trust and act on

• How Jenny thinks about scientific rigor, generalizability, and building foundation models for biology without assuming one model will work for every dataset, setting, or application