Hi and welcome to the A16C podcast. I'm Hannah. The federal agency known as the FDA, or the Food and Drug Administration, was born over 100 years ago at the turn of the Industrial Revolution in a time of enormous upheaval and change and rapidly emerging technology. All of those things could be said to be just as true today. From CRISPR to synthetic biology to using

AI and medicine, our health care system is undergoing massive amounts of innovation and change.

This wide-ranging conversation between principal commissioner of the FDA, Amy Abernathy, and Vijay

Ponday, general partner at A16Z, took place at A16Z's annual summit in 2019 and covers everything from gene

editing your dog to tracking the next foodborne outbreak, how advances in bioengineering are

transforming health care, clinical trials, and drug development, and how the federal agency is

evolving to keep pace with the scientific breakthroughs coming while staying true to its core mission

of assessing safety and effectiveness for consumers

in the world of food and medicine.

So thank you so much for joining us.

Terrific to be here.

Hello.

So, you know, in thinking about how to start this,

I was thinking about the origins of the FDA.

So the FDA started in 1906, 113 years ago.

And it's an interesting thing about that time, because it's turn of the previous century,

a time of a lot of tumult, innovation, technical change, an industrial revolution, things

actually really were the driving forces to

create the FDA? And like, here we are another turn of the century, another industrial revolution,

another amount of tumultuous change. You know, what are the needs of the FDA right now?

And, you know, is its core mission really still relevant?

Is the FDA still relevant?

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