Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Hannah and we're here today for the first time ever with the bio team all together to take a pulse on where we are on the intersection of bio and engineering and what it makes possible.

The conversation includes general partners Vijay Pande and Jorge Condi and Malinka Wallaliyade, interviewed by Jeffrey Lowe, and covers everything from what the shift away from

empirical science towards engineering means for bio to what we're looking for in entrepreneurs

now that we've announced our second bio fund.

Today, we're going to talk about what we've seen at the intersection of biology and computer

science and how engineering and biology is changing how we think about bioinvestments.

Let's start out with computational biomedicine.

Vijay, how do we think about this at the start of the first bio fund?

Actually, this was very much inspiration for the first fund in the first place, that we saw

the existence of companies that are really tech companies at their heart, but that can be

built in the biology and healthcare space. And that

machine learning was a key means towards that end. And what have we seen over these past two years?

One way to divide medicine up, a traditional way is between diagnostics and therapeutics. In the diagnostic

space, here there's a very natural trend that you take some new data source, whether that would be

genomics or wearables or other new technologies,

and then you marry that with artificial intelligence or machine learning, some means to go through

all this data and to gain insight faster and higher accuracy with continued learning in a way

that we really couldn't do before. And then finally, towards some ends that is actionable.

So a great example of this is something like Freenome, where you take genomics and the data from

what the DNA in your blood tells you about your immune system. But, you know, we don't understand

the immune system. So we use AI to be able to sort of tell us what this means with high accuracy,

and then it's very actionable that you would get the appropriate cancer's procedure done, especially if you could catch cancer early.

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