Episode
Pranam Chatterjee: Programming Life with AI
- Podcast
- Galaxy Balance
- Published
- Mar 30, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3660
- Processing state
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Summary
What if biology could be engineered the way we engineer software? In this episode of Galaxy Balance, I'm joined by Pranam Chatterjee, Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and leader of the Programmable Biology Group, working at the intersection of AI, synthetic biology, and next-generation therapeutics. Pranam's work is shaping a future where generative models can design peptides and biologics from sequence data alone, enabling a new era of programmable medicine. We explore how Pranam went from studying religion and philosophy to transferring into MIT and building cutting-edge computational tools for biology. We dive into his time in George Church's lab, where early computational strategies helped spark the origins of Gameto, and how that work evolved into today's iPSC-derived ovarian support cell technologies now entering clinical trials. From there, we go deep into the frontier of AI-driven molecular design: • Do we actually need protein structure to design effective therapeutics? • How do we optimize binding, toxicity, permeability, and immunogenicity simultaneously? • What does "virtual cell" really mean, and why does mapping cell states matter? • How close are we to "vibe coding biology," where natural language becomes the interface to biological engineering? We also discuss the future of automation, robotics, and agentic AI in biology, as well as the ethical risks of democratized generative models in biotech. This conversation is a window into the net phase of human capability: not just ready biology, but designing it. 00:00 - Introduction to AI-driven therapeutic peptide design 01:05 - Background of Pranam Chatterjee's journey from religion to science 02:50 - The evolution of AI models in synthetic biology 05:17 - Key milestones: from modeling t…