‘Insulin for muscle’ and the AI platform behind it, with Hanadie Yousef

Digital
Interview at BIO 2025 with Hanadie Yousef

The scientific implications of the current wave of innovation in incretin therapies go well beyond diabetes and obesity.

At BIO 2025, pharmaphorum Editor in Chief spoke with Hanadie Yousef, CEO of Juvena Therapeutics, a biotech focused on discovering and developing tissue-restorative biologics for chronic age-related diseases – focused initially on muscle and metabolic diseases.

In this interview, Yousef describes her company’s promising “insulin for muscle” therapy as well as the AI-driven platform the company used to discover it. She also talks about Juvena’s recently-announced partnership with Eli Lilly to leverage AI-driven platform that maps proteins secreted by stem cells to identify novel proteins and their targets, which could be used to enhance the company’s GLP-1 drugs.

Check out the video for all that, plus some of the difficulties in securing biotech investment and how Juvena is thinking about AI as a powerful, multifaceted tool, not an end in itself.