?? The next frontier in bioengineering

On this week’s episode of Exponential View podcast, I spoke to Vijay Pande, venture capital investor, pioneering scientist and a partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he focuses on investments in biopharma and healthcare. As the founding investor of a16z’s Bio Fund, Pande leads the firm’s investments at the cross section of biology and computer science, including applications in computation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in healthcare; digital therapeutics; diagnostics; and other novel transformative scientific advances applied to industry that take bio beyond healthcare.

We had a wide-ranging conversation, touching on the next industrial revolution, the future of biotech startups, and our long term health. You can listen to our conversation in full here.

Azeem Azhar: "When you look at the structure of venture returns, it's highly asymmetric and there are a handful of absolutely staggering winners, whether it is Facebook or Amazon or Apple, Cisco, and so on. Do you think that we have, in this new wave, identified the front runners for who will be those staggering industry-defining winners?

Vijay Pande: "It's still early. It's like asking that question about the internet in '96. The internet company that's selling books online, I don't know if anyone would've thought that'd be a trillion dollar company and whether Jeff had the vision but to become a trillion dollar company is a whole other thing. My guess is – they look like search engines and internet book companies right now. They don't look like juggernauts. Can they do something that seems almost magical now – that becomes just everyday life? If they can contribute to the world in that way, then the revenues will come. What we're looking at is the opportunity, the potential – all of that is right there, the venture capital, the technology, it's almost time for the bat signal for founders to come and figure out how to put all these Legos together to build this new generation of companies.”

?? If you enjoy listening to my podcast, please support our work by voting for Exponential View in the British Podcast Awards here. Thank you!

Azeem Azhar: "From the first papers that were written about what was then called the "novel coronavirus" in mid-January this year, we've exceeded more than 25,000 papers. One very interesting race is humanity's race to find a vaccine for this nasty disease. How have the technologies that we've been discussing contributed to that? And why does that make the search different to other vaccines?"

Vijay Pande: "Being a venture investor means getting to see the future. Moderna is a great example of something where they've built out an engineering infrastructure for biology that is analogous to a lot of other tech-like infrastructures. They're right on the front lines for very rapidly developing a vaccine. 

We're seeing technologies such as CRISPR for prophylactic therapeutics. Once you have the CRISPR hardware, if you could use that analogy in place, the software is just finding what sequence you want to cut or replace.

We are seeing the inklings of these results right now, but it's not like this is a revolution that happened ten years ago and we're all ready for it. It's more like the internet in 2000 where it's just starting – we're seeing some value of it, but there's a long way to go before you're buying shoes online.”

Azeem Azhar: "I'm definitely old enough to remember when Craig Venter had the breakthrough with the first human sequence, and then there was an attempt by one of the companies to patent that and say, "Well, this is ours." There may be a sense that these codes of life aren't for private enclosure, for the private profit of individual firms. How do you think about the intellectual property question?"

Vijay Pande: “Intellectual property is a critical concept for our civilization and pushing things forward. With that said, I think if something is purely natural and it's just merely discovered, and courts have ruled on this, then I could see how that could not be individual intellectual property. But if you re-engineered a protein to do something that it couldn't do before, that's fundamentally different. Engineering and intellectual property go hand in hand.”

Listen to our full conversation here.