Raising Health

In this episode, Kevin Parker, cofounder and CEO of Cartography Biosciences, joins Jorge Conde, general partner at a16z Bio + Health, and Olivia Webb, editorial lead, to discuss immuno-oncology, current challenges in drug targeting, and the mechanisms Cartography and others are using to advance the field of immunotherapeutics.  This episode dives deep into the science behind immuno-oncology — but...

In this episode, Kristen Fortney, cofounder and CEO of BioAge, joins Vijay Pande, founding partner of a16z Bio + Health, and Olivia Webb, editorial lead, to discuss the biology of aging, how she started a company, and some fun things — like how long a hypothetical venture capitalist can expect to live.   Additional reading: Greg Egan, whose writing inspired Kristen, has a list of his books on his...

In this episode, Paul Keckley, the managing editor of the Keckley Report and a health policy expert, joins Julie Yoo, general partner at a16z, and Olivia Webb, editorial lead at a16z.  Together, they talk about how payors and providers are reacting to changing tailwinds,  how employers are demanding more in today's market, the opportunities and challenges for startups in a consolidated industry, a...

Jakob Uszkoreit and Vijay Pande discuss all things AI — from Jakob's time at Google Brain, to how humans (and computers) process language, to Inceptive’s belief in the promise of RNA, and how Jakob believes we’re entering inflection point territory.  You can also find a full transcript of this episode on our website. Additional reading: Attention is All You Need A Decomposable Attention Model for...

The last few months have seen dramatic—almost magical—applications of expert generative AI released to the public. (One of those applications, incidentally, was in editing the sound mix of this episode.) But what does this mean for healthcare and bio? Vijay Pande, founding partner of a16z Bio + Health, and Marc Andreessen, cofounder of a16z, sat down for a wide-ranging discussion on AI as an addit...

From initial inspiration in a sci-fi novel to the current state of “designing biology” in cultivated meat, SCiFi Foods cofounder and CEO Joshua March chats with Bio + Health general partner Vijay Pande and editorial lead Olivia Webb about company building, developing and iterating in biology, and what the future of cultivated meat could be. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz...

AI is here...so why isn't it in every clinic?  Eric Topol talks with a16z Bio + Health general partners Vijay Pande and Vineeta Agarwala and editorial lead Olivia Webb about what's taking so long, where AI can help patients and providers the most, what needs to happen to speed up adoption, and whether data or policy is more likely to be an obstacle.  Eric has written extensively about AI in health...

Perhaps no area of healthcare has undergone such a rapid shift as telehealth during the Covid pandemic. But as the world emerges from the public health emergency, it's an open question what will happen with the regulatory aspects of telehealth. Daisy Wolf, deal partner at a16z Bio + Health, talked to Sarah Thomas, general counsel at Sameday Health, about asynchronous telehealth, working with regul...

In this episode, a16z Bio+Health general partner Vineeta Agarwala spoke with Bobby Franklin, the president and CEO of the National Venture Capital Association, about whether healthcare can be a bipartisan topic, how regulation can potentially enable care models at scale, and the opportunities for collaboration between DC and startups. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com f...

What’s up with the drug channel? Julie Yoo, a general partner at a16z Bio+Health, joins Adam Fein, the CEO of Drug Channels Institute, and Olivia Webb, the editorial lead for a16z Bio+Health, to discuss this question. We talk about PBMs, the 340B drug program, some of the startups working within and around the primary drug channel, and whether there’s room for entrepreneurs to build in such a cons...

Can a game be both fun and therapeutic? Vijay Pande, the first employee at Naughty Dog Software and a current Bio+Health general partner at a16z, joins Jon Lai, a Games general partner, and Olivia Webb, the editorial lead for Bio+Health at a16z, to discuss this question. We talk about what constitutes a game, how games and bio can intersect, and what we called the “healthy dessert” problem — the c...

In Bio Eats World's Journal Club episodes, we discuss groundbreaking research articles, why they matter, what new opportunities they present, and how to take these findings from paper to practice. In this episode, Stanford Professor Carolyn Bertozzi and former Bio Eats World host Lauren Richardson discuss the article " Lysosome-targeting chimaeras for degradation of extracellular proteins"  by Ste...

On this episode, we discuss three recent papers out in Nature Medicine this week, all examining the deployment of Bayesian Health's AI platform in a clinical setting: Two prospective studies focused on clinician adoption and patient outcomes , and one interview-based study focused on clinical experiences with Bayesian’s AI platform, TREWS.  First, we get into detail about the design and results of...

On this episode, we are taking a pulse-check on the state of the intersection between biology, healthcare, and technology with two scientists that sit at another intersection, that of academia and industry: Alexander Marson and Patrick Hsu, who are professors at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley, respectively, who both use cutting edge gene editing technology to create next generation therapies, an...

On today’s episode we are discussing the results and implications of a recent study that describes the creation of a new set of tools to turn off or on any region in the genome with high specificity. Host Lauren Richardson and a16z general partner Vijay Pande are joined by the senior author of the article, “ Genome-wide programmable transcriptional memory by CRISPR-based epigenome editing ”, Jonat...

On today’s episode, we are making the full arc from the theoretical and borderline philosophical to the applied. Let’s start with the theory: embodied intelligence posits that the body, or the physical form, plays an active and significant role in shaping an agent's mind and cognitive capacities. For example, human intelligence is not just the function of our brain, but a combination of our brain,...

Today’s episode is all about the history and future of infusing tech into healthcare with the goals of improving outcomes and lowering costs, and features one of the leading voices in this field, Jonathan Bush. Jonathan, aka JB, started his career in healthcare as an ambulance driver and army medic, and then met Todd Park, another Bio Eats World guest , while at Booz Allen. Together they founded A...

Genetic testing is on the cusp of a major revolution, which has the potential to shift not just how we understand our risk for disease, but how we practice healthcare. In the clinic today, genetic testing is used only in cases where we know that mutations have big impact on physiology (BRCA mutations in breast cancer, for example). But our knowledge of how our genetics influences our risk for dise...

When it comes to healthcare, the topic of how expensive it is and what we can do to lower costs is always top of mind. One area with particularly steep costs is the emergency department. These are hospital departments that can take care of pretty much anything from a cut to a car wreck. But going to an emergency department for something as simple as a cut can result in a high bill for both the pat...

If there is one rule in biology, it is that there is an exception to every rule. This includes even the basic biochemistry of DNA, which was once thought to be universal. On this episode, host Lauren Richardson and Judy Savitskaya (a16z bio deal team member and synthetic biology expert), discuss the results and implications three related articles co-published in Science , which all advance our und...

This episode was recorded in March of 2019 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Folding at Home, the distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, and originally aired on The a16z Podcast . Folding at Home is run on millions of devices, is the world’s largest supercomputer, and tackles some of biology’s toughest problems, including COVID-19. Proteins are molecular machines that mu...

On the path from scientific discovery to new drug, the clinical trial is a huge — and critical — hurdle. Clinical trials are themselves experiments, and to make sure that they are doing the best possible job at determining the safety and efficacy of the new drug, we need to be able to do experiments on those experiments. But how do you do that in such a highly regulated space?  Host Lauren Richard...

They say you should never judge a book by its cover, but can you judge a cell by its shape? On this episode, host Lauren Richardson is joined by Maddison Masaeli (CEO and cofounder of Deepcell), and a16z general partner Vijay Pande (whose lab at Stanford focused on the development of novel computational methods for simulating biology), to discuss what we can learn by characterizing a  cell's shape...

Neuroscientists have long been trying to determine what happens in the brain during sleep, but to date, they have overlooked a key player: astrocytes. These star-shaped cells were once thought to be the glue that held the brain together, but we are now beginning to appreciate their importance in a variety of brain functions. In this episode, host Lauren Richardson talks to Kira Poskanzer, Assistan...

Today we are re-running an episode exploring a question that seems super straightforward, but that on closer examination reveals incredible complexity, and that is "how do we put the patient at the center of the healthcare system?” It almost seems counterintuitive, since aren’t patients always the center of healthcare? But healthcare is a strange industry, in that it is built with the fundamental...