Episode
Episode 9: Mitochondria, Machine Learning, and a Few Hard Lessons
- Podcast
- From Models to Medicine
- Published
- May 20, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2623
- Processing state
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Summary
Rachel Jacobson has spent her career moving between some of the most demanding corners of life sciences before founding Powerhouse Biology. In this episode, she traces that journey and explains why, after all of it, she keeps coming back to mitochondria. We get into what it actually takes to bridge biology and machine learning inside a lab culture, why asking "stupid questions" across disciplines is a feature and not a bug, and what she had to unlearn from traditional drug development to work effectively alongside ML engineers. We also dig into data design. Rachel makes a sharp case that data passing standard biological QC is not the same as data that's ready for a machine learning model. Uneven plate layouts, cell debris, different scientists handling samples can all create batch effects that quietly break your model before it ever sees a hypothesis worth testing. She connects all of this to a bigger argument about why human biological variability needs to be built into preclinical pipelines from the start, and why ML might finally give scientists the tools to do that seriously.