Tech investors are almost totally unequiped to do the necessary DD. They either therefore go for plays that are easy to understand, largely computational exercises or in the rare cases they do go for something higher risk, they back something crazy (e.g. Theranos) because they don’t do good DD.
Getting an “expert” to vet the play rarely works. Because tech VCs don’t know how to choose good experts.
So most of (all?) these plays will ultimately fail. It won’t matter much to seed round investors though, because they’ll take 10 years to fail and they will likely have at least partially exited by then...
Awesome! We've been supporting start up bio companies by offering them a fair pricing on equipment, supplies and chemicals. I think we've sold to every YC bio company except Ginkgo (doh!).
There's a huge problem in non-transparent pricing for products. For those outside the industry it's like buying used cars, dealing with sales reps and everything is a quote. Researchers are at a huge informational disadvantage when it comes pricing.
Example, acetone which is a commonly used solvent:
We commonly see 3-5x differences and up to 10x for the exact same item. This makes a huge difference when you're in the range of 500k to 1 mil from YC Bio.
The more investment and talent going into taking control of our biology and reducing disease, the better.
If using your tech skills to help battle disease in an ambitious way is interesting and you wanna learn about a new, quiet startup (top-tier funders, world-class bio folks already on board for you to partner with, rare advisors from tech/bio/pharma), ping me: kamens@gmail.com
We're hiring a couple more for our early team and specifically looking for data, infra, and ML engineers. No specific bio background required. Staying quiet for now, can share more when we talk.
Just to add a single word -- I think it is very important that investments be well-targeted. And almost all of the time, this means listening to the scientists involved to get a realistic picture of where the domain experts think the field is going and how to best support efforts that are likely to be successful.
Sometimes, we have some promising leads on disease that we can begin to chase down. Most of the time, however, we have no idea where to begin, and so a shotgun basic science approach may ultimately be more fruitful. Every subfield is different and difficult to master, which is why it is so important to engage with the people who actually do the work.
I know the tone of this sounds like I'm beating a dead horse. I'm sorry.
Great to see YC address the lab space issue and give a larger cash/equity cut for biotech focused companies.
I am wondering how early/late stage the desired biotech company should be. Right now, many biotech-y YC applications/interview participants seem to be rejected with the comment that they should come back later.
Living healthier for longer will not help the healthcare crisis if the tail-end of life has the same health distribution. I think healthspan is a more important first target that lifespan.
It's great to see some targeted support for bio, though! It seems like a harder market division to get into than a pure tech company.
Think about how complex machines fail. Reliability theory is a good tool for this, and has been used to effectively model how aging works, as failure of units in a system of redundant units.
You will see that there is no good way to compress the tail end of mortality and consequences resulting from accumulated unrepaired damage. The only cost-effective path is to postpone it indefinitely through periodic repair of that damage.
Aging is damage, and mortality/disability rises with damage. Effective treatments for aging are forms of repair of damage, of which only senolytics presently exist in any form that is available. Once you accept this model, you can start to reason about the effects of various approaches, and everything makes a lot more sense.
If people live healthier for longer, then there will be a larger share of healthy people to pay into the pool of sick people, which should help the healthcare crisis.
Don't you dare talk about QALYs in the US! What are you, a democrat? (Sorry, I couldn't suggest you're Russian anymore, since that's apparently synonymous with Republicans. And Yuri Milner, of YC fame).
Those two are connected - in particular, issues related to aging are a huge money sink, so just improving healthspan without improving lifespan would not only make a difference to people, but also free up resources in healthcare.
Here's a visualization I made of the top causes of death in the USA. We've got a lot of work to do! Fortunately, the mechanisms of aging underlie many of these illnesses.
please, please, please, please, please, please, please ensure that at YC the people with money do not try to interpret laboratory data and stay far away from making any kind of project-level decisions.
it's something they (VCs) love to do, in my experience. incorrectly. and it's a massive waste of scientists' time, to have to correct the moneymen's misunderstandings of rudimentary things. then it's a cringe session when you hear them trying to explain it to other moneymen. then it's a big tearjerker when the moneymen's childlike expectations aren't met, and the company suffers.
something about biotech VCs and business types makes them think that they understand their products and products-in-development even if they're unqualified. the reality is that the depths of their ignorance are very embarrassing.
but i digress. i hate to rain on the parade here, but my bet is that most of the early stage biopharmas at YC will fail due to one of two reasons:
1. nature isn't working in the way they need it to.
2. the people with money don't stay out of the way enough and make stupid decisions that they don't understand.
i've seen a few biotechs fail to reason 1-- always tragic, but nature always has another trick that mankind will figure out some other day.
i've also seen a few fail to reason 2. it's very predictable, and saddening every time. non-technical types in leadership positions need to stay far away from biotech, especially at an early stage... they ruin things by cutting funding at the wrong time; they ruin things by forcing idiotic focuses; and they ruin things by believing that manipulating nature is similar to making a faster horse.
i have plenty of ideas on how to make biotech startups work better when they receive funding, however. they are, shall we say, politically incorrect-- both to the society of the scientists as well as the society of the VCs. perhaps i will share them on some other evening.
Looks like a great opportunity from YC and a field I wish I knew more about - especially implantable tech and wetware/biohacking.
In the embedded/IoT industry, the majority of medical device innovation is centered around home monitoring/care for older patients in nursing homes, or for preventative/medicine.
Can anyone with experience in the bio/chem/pharma startup world point to good resources where we can get up to date on the most exciting/promising new bio tech/startups of the past 20 years or so? Also related - has anything come out of Alphabet Calico [1]?
I wrote a blog about this earlier in the week. The focus is on the opportunity in biopharma generally but i touch on some of the key technologies of the last 15 years or so
Short answer: there is a "perfect storm" of innovation right now in bio. Tech from the 2000s genomic bubble is entering the mature phase of the hype cycle and ushering in a new era of potential curative therapy (gene therapy, cell therapy, personalized medicine). Avexis, a company treating a devastating neurological disease affecting infants using gene therapy, is ky favorite example to this
There is also the more widely hyped tech, AI, wearables, synthetic bio, etc, with massive potential, but these techs haven't had much impact on patients yet
No-one in the field is particularly impressed with Calico at this point in time. Calico is the second coming of the Ellison Medical Foundation, which is to say they're just analyzing the details of aging and expanding on the NIH budget. Nothing they are known to be doing is likely to have the slightest impact on the progression of rejuvenation therapies.
E.g. some resources in which people are less than complimentary:
Armchair opinion, probably gene editing. Not in people or animals, but I'd put money on it becoming "easy" in plants before much longer, as CRISPR gets more accurate and people apply it to already-understood micropropagation cloning strategies.
There was a startup trying to make autoluminescent plants with jellyfish genes before CRISPR even existed, just using ordinary plasmid creation and transfection techniques.[1] That particular effort failed commercially, but I believe they recently reincorporated as 'GLEAUX'.
Anyways, Biology is messy and difficult, but I really think that we are getting to a reasonably solid understanding of genetically engineering plants. And once someone turns that into a '1, 2, 3' process...well I don't think you need more than a 5-figure investment for equipment/space.
There needs to be more of a narrowing of the gap between biology and tech. I feel like right now the giants in both fields are still very much experts of their own biology or technology domains.
The perspective one takes on the biological system in question is vastly different depending on where you are coming from. Biologist understands bigger picture ideas about the system and can narrow down potential solutions. Tech injects more rigor and organization into how data is collected and analyzed. The skills are very complementary.
I am optimistic because I am seeing more people coming up in the field who are trying to do both molecular biology and data science.
You don't. You have to travel here to participate in events that take place in the bay area, but you don't have to move here. Founders with labs set up elsewhere have sometimes participated by traveling back and forth.
Biopharma startups are about as different from tech startups as you can get. The traditional tech incubator approach doesn't really work for biopharma. It can work for some life sci stuff but not pure biopharma (which is where most of the opportunity is)
That said, they said they've learned some lessons and they are providing more capital, and I'm sure if any organization can fix the biopharma seed exosystem it's them
The most important thing for them will be to get the right group of mentors. If you go off on the wrong scientific direction at the start of the company, it's much harder to salvage things with a pivot, so you need good eyes on all details of your experiments before you deploy capital
I was really disappointed to see YC involved with 'glowing plants' a few years back, which predictably failed (non-science founders, among other reasons). Color me skeptical.
Biology is a very different field; stuff that is wonderfully promising can get help up for years based on trivial mistakes or simple strategic errors. And on top of that, 95% of the stuff that sounds great won't amount to anything, and you can't tell until a few years have passed.
Our understanding of molecular biology isn't nearly as plug-and-play as many would like it to be.
Much of what we learn in biology comes from happy accidents. Targeted research for financial gain is very, very difficult. Moreover, much of what we need to learn will come observing biologic mechanisms that have evolved over eons in life in places like the rain forests of Brazil that are being destroyed with all the knowledge and medicines that can be developed from the research of the species that live there. Sadly, your interest is money but for the human race investing in protecting rain forests as a whole would be a greater investment.
Is this going to expand the funding that goes to the SENS program? There's a lot of basic Science that is yet to be done, and it appears (from Aubrey de Grey's talks) that a lot of it is still rather underfunded. See this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6ARUQ5LoUo
How is enabling people to live longer going to address a healthcare crisis that is primarily about the cost of care? If people live longer they are going to end up paying more for care, especially for whatever treatment any of these companies comes up with that enables them to live longer.
Life extension research does this by focusing on "healthspan" - that is, the amount of time you spend living in full health. The idea isn't to let you live 200+ years as 80-year-old person. The idea is to let you live up to 80 as if you're 30-40 - that is, to extend the time you're fully able to function and enjoy life - and push it out from there, keeping the tail-end small and extending the total lifespan. This happens to both offer huge potential healthcare savings, and meshes nicely with the idea that everything happening to your health past ~40 is part of the disease of aging.
Curious how the healthcare industry will try to monetize fasting i.e. this free, unlimited thing that anyone can do that has proven time and time again to not only increase lifespan but increase the number of healthy years in the last years of life.
I wish I could somehow make sense of my both biological and software proficiencies, and I try to follow what's happening in the Biotech world, but nowhere do I feel like an ideal fit. So I enjoy doing both separately for the moment !
there has been an amazing amount of innovation in bio the last 5 years, but the biggest bottleneck to making more progress is lack of seed funding and shortage of entrepreneurs. So this is great to see
I wrote about the opportunity in bio earlier this week and run a program connecting top tier scientists with life sci VCs. If you are interested in bio and don't have a science background, this is the best time ever to get involved: http://newbio.tech/blog.html
I am cheering for you guys, but.... I fear YC is moving way out of its center of competence. Startup mantras like "build something people want" and "move fast and break things" are probably wildly inappropriate for the biotech world. Even the setup of the the YC course, where you hack intensely for three months and then present something cool at Demo Day, seems totally misconfigured for doing bio research.
Yes, life sciences is very different. We've been funding life sciences companies for several years now, so we've learned how to adapt our advice. We've also made tweaks to the YC batch cycle to fit companies with longer development cycles.
It's still not perfect, though, so the things we're trying in this experiment, like providing lab space for companies, are the next step.
Color me skeptical. I have a form of cystic fibrosis. I have gotten myself mostly well when that is not supposed to be possible. I was a homemaker for a long time. Eating right and germ control are a very large part of what I do and it isn't rocket science, as they say.
I also can see no means to turn it into a business model or income stream, nor even get anyone interested in benefiting from what I know for free. It isn't the magic bullet people are looking for. A spartan life, eating better and lots of walking is not an answer people want. It also isn't an answer that investors will fund.
Meanwhile, hey, lung transplants and $300k/year new drugs for CF are all the rage. That makes headlines and apparently makes money.
A business model for healthcare seems to produce Frankensteinian outcomes. Things that are actually health promoting, like having a full-time parent to care for the kids and primary breadwinner, eating right, exercise etc are boring and don't make VCs rich. They are actually quite challenging to promote at all.
As a physician, you're absolutely right. There is a HUGE range of problems that can be made better by proper diet and regular exercise. Although there are a few efforts here and there, nobody has figured out a reliable way of changing human behavior when the initial action is hard but the rewards are far away. We seem only to be good at short-circuiting dopamine reward pathways so people log in to Facebook more often.
I'm not claiming to do better: my "give a motivational speech when I see you in clinic twice a year" approach certainly isn't worth shit.
But just because one approach is important does not mean others are snake oil. CF has a clear biological basis, and there are randomized, controlled trials proving that secretion management (e.g. DNase), glucose control, timely antibiotics and anti-inflammatory meds, and chest physiotherapy work. These trials also establish an average effect size (whereas your anecdote only tells me about you; I have also had patients who took similar measures but still died young). The average person with CF died at age 25 in 1986 -- today it's above 40.
I relate to your sentiment, but it seems to me that promoting healthy lifestyles and inventing new cures doesn't have to be in opposition.
Like you, I spend a lot of time figuring out how to live better. But also grateful for the medicine I got for illnesses when they do arise.
I use and apply free health advice. Then again, I also use gym and supplements, which may have made VCs rich. Likewise, in cures, I appreciate that they are available in the low probability I get seriously ill. I am sure many suffering from alzheimer, cancer or other age-related diseases, would want there to be cures.
In the goal increasing healthspan, can't one favour the all-of-the-above approach? Primarily rely on healthy living like you suggest, yet support people developing cures for diseases.
PS. Almost all cures come from the US, 57 % of them, and 13 % from Switzerland. While this health care system is dysfunctional in many ways, it also is the market new cures are being developed for. In Europe, where I am from, most drugs are purchased by a single large purchaser, which has negotiation power to buy a drug at close to marginal cost. This makes drugs cheaper, but also makes less people try to invent new cures. So, it's a bit of a trade-off between the present and the future.
Every disease is a different beast, and biology is very hard to tame. We've thrown probably trillions of dollars at cancer over the past few decades, and only in the past few years, with immuno-oncology, has there been any real hope of progress toward broad cures (there was a heady moment after Gleevec, too, but that turned out to be the exception rather than the rule).
There was just a huge wave of Alzheimer's treatments that people were so hopeful might make any dent in the disease. They all failed, apparently because the breakthrough we thought we had made in understanding the disease turned out to be specious. Had the drugs made ANY improvement they'd be on the market and we'd all be bitching about how pharma "likes to make bandaids rather than cures," and that would have been a disservice to the years of toil people put into these drugs.
Not every pharma actor is a good actor. But overall the space is mostly filled with scientists and doctors trying to make people healthier, and mostly failing.
You've effectively hit the nail on the head, but it is actually within the purview of what YC is specifically focused on regarding diseases of aging.
Aging biology is all about understanding how diseases develop to begin with, and lifestyle interventions are definitely part of that umbrella of research. Those of us who obsess over aging biology tend to prefer thinking about preventative strategies first, and rejuvenation as a fallback.
Don't, you're mostly right. The model is broken. I think the US is in a giant bubble right now, in 100 years will be like most of Europe is today. That is...better.
> Things that are actually health promoting, like having a full-time parent to care for the kids and primary breadwinner, eating right, exercise etc are boring and don't make VCs rich.
Fair enough, but there are also plenty of conditions for which these things don’t work adequately, and we absolutely do need to encourage research. I think this is a great move from YC.
Are you saying that it is going to make as much revenue as coal? That would make sense, but the amount of jobs created is going to be lower I would guess.
Why focus on age-related disease when massive racial and economic disparities still prevent a large proportion of the population from even reaching an advanced age?
"Why work on this burning city when this earthquake-ridden city is in shambles!"
a) There's no obligation to work on earthquake-ridden cities over any other issue.
b) Mythical Man Month problem; firefighters might be good at extinguishing flame but not repairing earthquake issues, and there's only so many civil engineers to go around.
c) Your comment is proof that no good deed goes unpunished.
You'd be surprised. Heart disease, for example, is one of the deadliest age-related diseases, but it's by no means exclusive to the wealthy. See for example the World Health Organization's statistics[0]; they report that three quarters of deaths from cardiovascular disease occur in low-income and middle-income countries.
indescions_2018|8 years ago
For those brainstorming startup ideas some relatively recently funded companies include:
eGenesis - Dr. George Church's company that uses edited porcine stem lines for human xenotransplantation
Twist Bio - synthetic bio for applications ranging from novel materials to data storage
Denali - focus on age related neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s
Benchling - molecular bio and gene editing design software
Synthego - free gene knockout kits
But of all the breakthroughs last year. The one that may be most impactful. Editing human genes in the embryo to remove hereditary disease.
Correction of a pathogenic gene mutation in human embryos
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23305
comstock|8 years ago
Tech investors are almost totally unequiped to do the necessary DD. They either therefore go for plays that are easy to understand, largely computational exercises or in the rare cases they do go for something higher risk, they back something crazy (e.g. Theranos) because they don’t do good DD.
Getting an “expert” to vet the play rarely works. Because tech VCs don’t know how to choose good experts.
So most of (all?) these plays will ultimately fail. It won’t matter much to seed round investors though, because they’ll take 10 years to fail and they will likely have at least partially exited by then...
jforman|8 years ago
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-00335-8
Maybe the first startup YC should fund is one to mutate the enzyme to avoid immunoreactivity while preserving function...
senatorobama|8 years ago
kayhi|8 years ago
There's a huge problem in non-transparent pricing for products. For those outside the industry it's like buying used cars, dealing with sales reps and everything is a quote. Researchers are at a huge informational disadvantage when it comes pricing.
Example, acetone which is a commonly used solvent:
https://i.imgur.com/QyJ1Tj5.png
https://i.imgur.com/mJyfFfX.png
$900 vs. $300
Another example, IPTG:
https://i.imgur.com/tvnVAqO.png
We commonly see 3-5x differences and up to 10x for the exact same item. This makes a huge difference when you're in the range of 500k to 1 mil from YC Bio.
danieltillett|8 years ago
lsc|8 years ago
Interestingly, servers seem to be only 1.5x, and if you buy your servers in parts, the variance is even smaller.
unknownkadath|8 years ago
braja|8 years ago
kamens|8 years ago
If using your tech skills to help battle disease in an ambitious way is interesting and you wanna learn about a new, quiet startup (top-tier funders, world-class bio folks already on board for you to partner with, rare advisors from tech/bio/pharma), ping me: kamens@gmail.com
We're hiring a couple more for our early team and specifically looking for data, infra, and ML engineers. No specific bio background required. Staying quiet for now, can share more when we talk.
forgotpwagain|8 years ago
Sometimes, we have some promising leads on disease that we can begin to chase down. Most of the time, however, we have no idea where to begin, and so a shotgun basic science approach may ultimately be more fruitful. Every subfield is different and difficult to master, which is why it is so important to engage with the people who actually do the work.
I know the tone of this sounds like I'm beating a dead horse. I'm sorry.
wuschel|8 years ago
Great to see YC address the lab space issue and give a larger cash/equity cut for biotech focused companies.
I am wondering how early/late stage the desired biotech company should be. Right now, many biotech-y YC applications/interview participants seem to be rejected with the comment that they should come back later.
dbmikus|8 years ago
It's great to see some targeted support for bio, though! It seems like a harder market division to get into than a pure tech company.
reasonattlm|8 years ago
https://doi.org/10.1006/jtbi.2001.2430
You will see that there is no good way to compress the tail end of mortality and consequences resulting from accumulated unrepaired damage. The only cost-effective path is to postpone it indefinitely through periodic repair of that damage.
Aging is damage, and mortality/disability rises with damage. Effective treatments for aging are forms of repair of damage, of which only senolytics presently exist in any form that is available. Once you accept this model, you can start to reason about the effects of various approaches, and everything makes a lot more sense.
tomjen3|8 years ago
killjoywashere|8 years ago
d33k4y|8 years ago
It seems to me a great deal more people face a very different question, "how can I afford to live longer?"
TeMPOraL|8 years ago
subcosmos|8 years ago
https://www.infino.me/mortality/usmap
2pointsomone|8 years ago
cryoshon|8 years ago
please, please, please, please, please, please, please ensure that at YC the people with money do not try to interpret laboratory data and stay far away from making any kind of project-level decisions.
it's something they (VCs) love to do, in my experience. incorrectly. and it's a massive waste of scientists' time, to have to correct the moneymen's misunderstandings of rudimentary things. then it's a cringe session when you hear them trying to explain it to other moneymen. then it's a big tearjerker when the moneymen's childlike expectations aren't met, and the company suffers.
something about biotech VCs and business types makes them think that they understand their products and products-in-development even if they're unqualified. the reality is that the depths of their ignorance are very embarrassing.
but i digress. i hate to rain on the parade here, but my bet is that most of the early stage biopharmas at YC will fail due to one of two reasons:
1. nature isn't working in the way they need it to.
2. the people with money don't stay out of the way enough and make stupid decisions that they don't understand.
i've seen a few biotechs fail to reason 1-- always tragic, but nature always has another trick that mankind will figure out some other day.
i've also seen a few fail to reason 2. it's very predictable, and saddening every time. non-technical types in leadership positions need to stay far away from biotech, especially at an early stage... they ruin things by cutting funding at the wrong time; they ruin things by forcing idiotic focuses; and they ruin things by believing that manipulating nature is similar to making a faster horse.
i have plenty of ideas on how to make biotech startups work better when they receive funding, however. they are, shall we say, politically incorrect-- both to the society of the scientists as well as the society of the VCs. perhaps i will share them on some other evening.
uptownfunk|8 years ago
roymurdock|8 years ago
In the embedded/IoT industry, the majority of medical device innovation is centered around home monitoring/care for older patients in nursing homes, or for preventative/medicine.
Can anyone with experience in the bio/chem/pharma startup world point to good resources where we can get up to date on the most exciting/promising new bio tech/startups of the past 20 years or so? Also related - has anything come out of Alphabet Calico [1]?
[1] https://www.calicolabs.com/
aaavl2821|8 years ago
Short answer: there is a "perfect storm" of innovation right now in bio. Tech from the 2000s genomic bubble is entering the mature phase of the hype cycle and ushering in a new era of potential curative therapy (gene therapy, cell therapy, personalized medicine). Avexis, a company treating a devastating neurological disease affecting infants using gene therapy, is ky favorite example to this
There is also the more widely hyped tech, AI, wearables, synthetic bio, etc, with massive potential, but these techs haven't had much impact on patients yet
Post here: http://newbio.tech/blog.html
reasonattlm|8 years ago
E.g. some resources in which people are less than complimentary:
http://www.sens.org/research/research-blog/question-month-16...
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603087/googles-long-stran...
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/4/27/15409672/go...
There are plenty of others if you want to go look for them.
leggomylibro|8 years ago
There was a startup trying to make autoluminescent plants with jellyfish genes before CRISPR even existed, just using ordinary plasmid creation and transfection techniques.[1] That particular effort failed commercially, but I believe they recently reincorporated as 'GLEAUX'.
Anyways, Biology is messy and difficult, but I really think that we are getting to a reasonably solid understanding of genetically engineering plants. And once someone turns that into a '1, 2, 3' process...well I don't think you need more than a 5-figure investment for equipment/space.
[1]: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
daemonk|8 years ago
The perspective one takes on the biological system in question is vastly different depending on where you are coming from. Biologist understands bigger picture ideas about the system and can narrow down potential solutions. Tech injects more rigor and organization into how data is collected and analyzed. The skills are very complementary.
I am optimistic because I am seeing more people coming up in the field who are trying to do both molecular biology and data science.
timrpeterson|8 years ago
I'm a professor at WashU and am interested, but I live in St. Louis.
snowmaker|8 years ago
asimpletune|8 years ago
zitterbewegung|8 years ago
firloop|8 years ago
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/14/gingko-bioworks-secures-27...
aaavl2821|8 years ago
That said, they said they've learned some lessons and they are providing more capital, and I'm sure if any organization can fix the biopharma seed exosystem it's them
The most important thing for them will be to get the right group of mentors. If you go off on the wrong scientific direction at the start of the company, it's much harder to salvage things with a pivot, so you need good eyes on all details of your experiments before you deploy capital
Obi_Juan_Kenobi|8 years ago
Biology is a very different field; stuff that is wonderfully promising can get help up for years based on trivial mistakes or simple strategic errors. And on top of that, 95% of the stuff that sounds great won't amount to anything, and you can't tell until a few years have passed.
Our understanding of molecular biology isn't nearly as plug-and-play as many would like it to be.
zappo2938|8 years ago
poppingtonic|8 years ago
beatpanda|8 years ago
TeMPOraL|8 years ago
snowmaker|8 years ago
That said, it's true that we do also need to address healthcare costs - that is a huge problem and we would love to fund companies working on it.
dawhizkid|8 years ago
tejtm|8 years ago
hycaria|8 years ago
aaavl2821|8 years ago
I wrote about the opportunity in bio earlier this week and run a program connecting top tier scientists with life sci VCs. If you are interested in bio and don't have a science background, this is the best time ever to get involved: http://newbio.tech/blog.html
unknown|8 years ago
[deleted]
d_burfoot|8 years ago
snowmaker|8 years ago
It's still not perfect, though, so the things we're trying in this experiment, like providing lab space for companies, are the next step.
DoreenMichele|8 years ago
I also can see no means to turn it into a business model or income stream, nor even get anyone interested in benefiting from what I know for free. It isn't the magic bullet people are looking for. A spartan life, eating better and lots of walking is not an answer people want. It also isn't an answer that investors will fund.
Meanwhile, hey, lung transplants and $300k/year new drugs for CF are all the rage. That makes headlines and apparently makes money.
A business model for healthcare seems to produce Frankensteinian outcomes. Things that are actually health promoting, like having a full-time parent to care for the kids and primary breadwinner, eating right, exercise etc are boring and don't make VCs rich. They are actually quite challenging to promote at all.
I wish I saw it differently.
dokein|8 years ago
I'm not claiming to do better: my "give a motivational speech when I see you in clinic twice a year" approach certainly isn't worth shit.
But just because one approach is important does not mean others are snake oil. CF has a clear biological basis, and there are randomized, controlled trials proving that secretion management (e.g. DNase), glucose control, timely antibiotics and anti-inflammatory meds, and chest physiotherapy work. These trials also establish an average effect size (whereas your anecdote only tells me about you; I have also had patients who took similar measures but still died young). The average person with CF died at age 25 in 1986 -- today it's above 40.
SRasch|8 years ago
Like you, I spend a lot of time figuring out how to live better. But also grateful for the medicine I got for illnesses when they do arise.
I use and apply free health advice. Then again, I also use gym and supplements, which may have made VCs rich. Likewise, in cures, I appreciate that they are available in the low probability I get seriously ill. I am sure many suffering from alzheimer, cancer or other age-related diseases, would want there to be cures.
In the goal increasing healthspan, can't one favour the all-of-the-above approach? Primarily rely on healthy living like you suggest, yet support people developing cures for diseases.
PS. Almost all cures come from the US, 57 % of them, and 13 % from Switzerland. While this health care system is dysfunctional in many ways, it also is the market new cures are being developed for. In Europe, where I am from, most drugs are purchased by a single large purchaser, which has negotiation power to buy a drug at close to marginal cost. This makes drugs cheaper, but also makes less people try to invent new cures. So, it's a bit of a trade-off between the present and the future.
jforman|8 years ago
There was just a huge wave of Alzheimer's treatments that people were so hopeful might make any dent in the disease. They all failed, apparently because the breakthrough we thought we had made in understanding the disease turned out to be specious. Had the drugs made ANY improvement they'd be on the market and we'd all be bitching about how pharma "likes to make bandaids rather than cures," and that would have been a disservice to the years of toil people put into these drugs.
Not every pharma actor is a good actor. But overall the space is mostly filled with scientists and doctors trying to make people healthier, and mostly failing.
blintz|8 years ago
Are families with two working parents actually less healthy? Do you have a source for that?
subcosmos|8 years ago
Aging biology is all about understanding how diseases develop to begin with, and lifestyle interventions are definitely part of that umbrella of research. Those of us who obsess over aging biology tend to prefer thinking about preventative strategies first, and rejuvenation as a fallback.
feistypharit|8 years ago
Lxr|8 years ago
Fair enough, but there are also plenty of conditions for which these things don’t work adequately, and we absolutely do need to encourage research. I think this is a great move from YC.
ryanx435|8 years ago
They have all kinds of great food to choose from
logicallee|8 years ago
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peter_retief|8 years ago
ovrdrv3|8 years ago
psychometry|8 years ago
icelancer|8 years ago
a) There's no obligation to work on earthquake-ridden cities over any other issue.
b) Mythical Man Month problem; firefighters might be good at extinguishing flame but not repairing earthquake issues, and there's only so many civil engineers to go around.
c) Your comment is proof that no good deed goes unpunished.
Techowl|8 years ago
[0] http://www.who.int/cardiovascular_diseases/en/
bpicolo|8 years ago
snowmaker|8 years ago