In this episode, Kurt Adams, CEO of Optum Financial, chats with Daisy Wolf, investment partner for a16z Bio + Health, and Marc Andrusko, investment partner for a16z focused on fintech, about Optum Financial, how consumers might interact with fintech while seeking care or participating in healthy behaviors, and what a fintech-integrated version of the healthcare experience could look like. Additional reading from us: Payvidors, Unbundled: Opportunities in Healthcare Fintech Healthtech x Fintech’s...
Mar 02, 2023•35 min•Ep. 78
In this episode, Joe Lonsdale, founder and managing partner at 8VC, joins Vijay Pande, founding partner of a16z Bio + Health, and Olivia Webb, editorial lead. Together, we talk about what factors lead to innovation vs stagnation, monopoly power in healthcare, and policy ideas to incentivize change, growth, and dynamism. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising....
Feb 23, 2023•39 min•Ep. 77
In this episode, Julie Yoo, general partner, and Jay Rughani, investment partner at a16z Bio + Health, talk to Kate Ryder, founder and CEO of Maven; Amanda Rees, cofounder and CEO of Bold Health; and Bill Porter, VP and GM, International, of Butterfly Network, about their B2C2B go-to-market motion. This episode was originally recorded in late 2021, but it's still really relevant to builders, especially those exploring the B2C2B go-to-market motion. We talked about B2C2B in-depth in the second ch...
Feb 16, 2023•35 min•Ep. 76
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 you don't necessarily have to be a scientist to follow along. You'll never look at a smoothie the sam...
Feb 09, 2023•25 min•Ep. 75
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 website Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collec...
Jan 26, 2023•34 min•Ep. 74
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, and what the next few years of health policy might bring. Additional reading: The Keckley Report Hosted...
Jan 20, 2023•28 min•Ep. 73
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 Natural Language Inference Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for informat...
Jan 11, 2023•33 min•Ep. 72
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 additive superpower…for healthcare as well as screenplays, music, and more. You can also watch the full e...
Jan 09, 2023•57 min•Ep. 71
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.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising....
Dec 15, 2022•24 min•Ep. 70
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 healthcare, including in his most recent book Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare...
Dec 01, 2022•34 min•Ep. 69
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 regulators, how counsel thinks about inducements, and more. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See...
Nov 17, 2022•26 min•Ep. 68
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 for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising....
Nov 08, 2022•18 min•Ep. 67
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 consolidated space. For additional reading, see some of Adam’s work on his blog, Drug Channels: https://...
Nov 03, 2022•36 min•Ep. 66
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 challenge of building a game that’s both fun and therapeutic. Additional reading discussed during the...
Oct 20, 2022•33 min•Ep. 65
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 Steven M. Banik, Kayvon Pedram, Simon Wisnovsky, Green Ahn, Nicholas M. Riley & Carolyn R. Bertozzi,...
Oct 06, 2022•24 min•Ep. 64
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 the prospective studies, then we talk about TREWS in context with other clinical decision support to...
Jul 21, 2022•27 min•Ep. 63
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, and are prolific biotech founders. Patrick also recently co-wrote an article on Fast Grants , one of t...
Aug 18, 2021•33 min•Ep. 62
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 ”, Jonathan Weissman, Professor of Biology at the Whitehead Institute at MIT. Jonathan talks about how they ...
Jul 22, 2021•32 min•Ep. 61
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, our body, and the environment in which we exist. But when it comes to designing artificial intellig...
Jun 30, 2021•32 min•Ep. 60
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 Athena Women’s Health Clinic, which evolved from a clinic specializing in maternity care to one of th...
Jun 22, 2021•31 min•Ep. 59
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 disease has evolved, and we now know that many (tens of thousands to even millions) small changes in our...
Jun 15, 2021•32 min•Ep. 58
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 patient and the insurer. This is where the urgent care center comes in. Urgent care centers are walk-in...
Jun 08, 2021•23 min•Ep. 57
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 understanding of a very unique kind of DNA. If you open any biology text book, it will say that the gen...
Jun 01, 2021•21 min•Ep. 56
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 must first assemble themselves to function. But how does a protein, which is produced as a linear stri...
May 25, 2021•33 min•Ep. 56
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 Richardson talks to James Zou, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University, and a1...
May 18, 2021•25 min•Ep. 55
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 — also known as its morphology. We've long appreciated that morphology can be used to discriminate c...
May 11, 2021•32 min•Ep. 54
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, Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Francisco, about her group's work showing that neur...
May 04, 2021•26 min•Ep. 53
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 goal of serving patients, but in many ways, the patient isn’t always the end customer of the system....
Apr 27, 2021•36 min•Ep. 52
In 1994, 29 bald eagles were found dead at DeGray Lake in Arkansas. This mass mortality event kicked off a search for the culprit which has last over 25 years. On this episode of the Bio Eats World Journal Club, host Lauren Richardson talks to Susan B. Wilde of the University of Georgia about her group's work finally identifying the eagle killer, and revealing a complex web of ecosystem dysfunction. Solving this mystery required a fresh point of view, a wide range of techniques and technologies,...
Apr 20, 2021•28 min•Ep. 51
Understanding how plants have adapted to natural climate change over millions of years provides a playbook of evolutionary strategies to help us prepare for and respond to man-made climate change. On this episode, host Lauren Richardson talks to Thomas Juenger, Associate Professor at the University of Texas in Austin and co-senior author of the recent article “Genomic mechanisms of climate adaptation in polyploid bioenergy switchgrass”, published in Nature. They discuss how studying native plant...
Apr 13, 2021•23 min•Ep. 50
