meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
The a16z Show

Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg

The a16z Show

a16z

Science, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Culture, Disruption, Software Eating The World, Technology

4.41.1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Two venture capitalists dissect why biotech burns billions while China runs trials in weeks—and why the next Genentech won't look anything like the last one. Elliot Hershberg reveals the "three horsemen" strangling drug development as costs explode to $2.5 billion per approval, while Lada Nuzhna exposes how investigator-initiated trials in Shanghai are rewriting the competitive playbook faster than American founders can file INDs. When the infrastructure that built monoclonal antibodies becomes the commodity threatening to hollow out an entire industry, the only path forward demands inventing medicines that are literally impossible to make without tools that don't exist yet—and they're betting everything on which approach survives.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Since the birth of this industry, we only had increasing regulation over time.

0:05.5

I think there was only one time in history of biotech where we made it easier to develop an appropriate drug.

0:11.4

So when George Yonkopoulos started Regeneron, it cost about $10,000 per patient in trial.

0:17.1

That's ballooned to $500,000.

0:19.5

There is no law of physics that requires it to be $500,000 in terms of complexity and cost to dose a patient in a trial.

0:26.8

Everyone will be using AI in biotech industry five years from now.

0:29.6

Can it take $2.5 billion to cover with drug and make it into $500 million?

0:35.7

Can it make it like 4x more efficient in terms of Thailand to To answer that question, we really should go back and look where most of that money is centric now. We had this enormous wave of access. And now we're sitting on the other side of that. We have an enormous amount of EV negative public companies. There was a stretch of seven to eight months where there were no biotech IPOs.

0:55.1

And so I'm really excited about that sort of opportunity to make things that are just net

0:58.1

new in the industry. And that's where we have to go to really keep winning. The biotech paradox.

1:03.9

One fifth of public biotech companies are trading below their cash balances. C. Brown's had hit

1:08.6

record lows. The industry spends $2 billion per approved drug,

1:12.3

and that number keeps climbing. And yet, we're designing antibodies from scratch with AI,

1:17.1

we have drugs that are bending the carbon aging. The science has never been better. So why is the

1:21.8

business of biotech collapsing while the technology is exploding? Today's guests have spent

1:26.6

years studying this contradiction.

1:28.6

Laude Nuzana found in general control,

1:30.7

a startup tackling aging after writing the definitive analysis

1:33.4

of why there are no trillion-dollar biotechs.

1:36.1

Elliot Hirshberg is a partner at Amplify,

1:38.3

betting on the next wave of platform companies

1:40.2

while watching American biotech companies flee to China and Australia

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from a16z, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of a16z and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.