Can Bittensor AI Discover New Drugs? MetaNova CEO Micaela Bazo on NOVA

Can decentralized AI help discover the next generation of medicines?

MetaNova Labs CEO Micaela Bazo joins Alex Richardson at Exploit Summit to explain how the company is using Bittensor subnet 68, NOVA, to accelerate AI-powered drug discovery.

Bazo explains how NOVA operates as a 24/7 decentralized competition, where miners search massive molecular spaces, build chemical search algorithms, and compete to identify promising therapeutic candidates.

She also shares early lab results from winning submissions, including compounds that matched the properties MetaNova was targeting at this stage of development.

The conversation explores how decentralized competition can bring unexpected ideas into biotech, why successful miners do not always need traditional pharmaceutical expertise, and how AI-generated predictions move from computational models into real-world laboratory testing.

They also discuss MetaNova's broader vision for "agency therapeutics" and what Bittensor could unlock for scientific research.

In this episode:

• How Bittensor subnet 68, NOVA, works
• Why MetaNova uses decentralized competition for drug discovery
• How miners search huge molecular spaces
• Turning AI predictions into lab-tested compounds
• Early results from NOVA's winning submissions
• Why outsiders can sometimes outperform domain experts
• Nanobodies and emerging therapeutic approaches
• MetaNova's vision for agency therapeutics

Can decentralized AI compete with traditional pharmaceutical research?

Chapters:

00:00 Highlights

00:51 Introducing MetaNova Labs and NOVA

01:21 Three drug-discovery competitions

03:00 First laboratory results

03:52 How decentralized miners drive innovation

05:48 AI agents, human guidance and miner expertise

07:11 Turning predictions into lab-tested compounds

09:05 Agency therapeutics and self-regulation

10:56 Bridging biotech and decentralized science

12:13 Licensing drugs and funding development

13:41 Clinical trials and reducing costs

14:39 Who owns the intellectual property?

16:03 Future research and other biotech companies

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