Current work

I’m developing a new Alzheimer’s drug by myself.

Over the past year, I used AI to design several thousand new small molecule drugs. I then taught myself synthetic chemistry, built a chem lab in my garage, and synthesized a hundred of them. I’m now testing these compounds in cell lines and mice.

My approach is heavily inspired by the 1960s golden age of drug discovery. Paul Janssen, the most prolific drug developer of that era, led a small chemistry team that developed 80 new drugs over the course of his career. His methods were very different from what people do today, emphasizing cheap, rapid synthesis of analogs of existing drugs, rapid animal testing, and disease mechanism selection based on intuition. The track record speaks for itself. I’m applying the same principles as Janssen, augmented with modern biotech tools.

I’m currently funding this entire project with my savings from graduate school. Drug developers typically spend tens of millions of dollars generating pre-clinical efficacy evidence for a new drug. My approach can do this at 1/1000 the cost.

Stay tuned!

Past work

Compressed Perturb-seq

I invented a new genomics assay called “compressed Perturb-seq.” This is a ten-fold cheaper version of standard “Perturb-seq,” which involves modifying the DNA of cells using CRISPR then reading out changes in the mRNA expression levels of all ~20,000 expressed genes for each cell using single-cell RNA-sequencing.
Original publication: Yao et al. 2023, Nature Biotechnology.
Editorial highlights of the technology in Nature Biotechnology and Nature Genetics.
Blog post, Twitter thread, and video (credit to Julia Bauman) that summarize the paper in non-technical terms.

Mediated expression score regression

I invented a new statistical framework and inference method to quantify how much genetic effect on a given disease “flows” through gene expression measurements in large human populations.
Original publication: Yao et al. 2020, Nature Genetics.
Technical blog post, non-technical blog post, and Twitter thread that summarize the paper.

Other

I wrote this paper on cancer genomics when I was an undergrad: Yao et al. 2019, Scientific Reports.