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Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Hannah. The advent of new gene and cell therapies

are beginning to approach that holy grail of medicine, that of a possible cure. But they are

also more expensive than any medicines ever sold before. In this episode, MIT economist Andrew

Lowe and A16Z general partner on the bio fund Jorge Kande discuss how exactly

we place an economic value on a cure, the questions we still need to figure out, like who

should pay for what and how, and how we need to start thinking about handling the coming influx

of highly priced medicines like this into our health care system. Jorge and Andrew also talk

about the economics and risk

of drug discovery and development overall and how our markets might just function more like

biological systems than anything else. So what does an economist know about health care?

Yeah, that's a good question. I probably should start with a disclaimer, kind of like the

disclaimer that you find on drugs. This podcast could cause confusion, irritability, and drowsiness,

but it should all pass within a few minutes. That's the black box warning. Right, exactly. My background's

really in financial economics. I got interested in this because friends and family were dealing with cancers of various different types.

And so the more I learned about what they were going through, the more I got curious about the underlying economics of cancer drug development.

A lot of the work that you have done as an economist has been around thinking about value.

We have one approved gene therapy as the Sparks

therapeutics, gene therapy for a rare inherited form of blindness. There are many, many more in the

...