Hello, I'm Lauren Richardson, and this is the A16Z Journal Club.

Our podcast where we cover recent scientific advances, why they matter, and how to take them

from proof of principle to practice.

For this special holiday weekend edition,

we've got something a little bit different.

In this snack size episode, A16Z general partners,

Vije, and Jorge Conde, join me to discuss an opinion piece published in Nature

Review's Drug Discovery called Breaking Erem's Law.

Erem's Law is Moore's Law spelled backwards, whereas Moore's Law describes technologies becoming exponentially faster and cheaper over time,

E-R-R-M's law describes the trend of drug development becoming exponentially more and more expensive overtime.

In breaking Eram's law, the authors analyze the data since 2010

and find that costs appear to have stabilized over the last 10 years.

But what has contributed to this critical and exciting trend shift?

In our conversation, Jorge and VJ discuss their views on the technologies and policies impacting

this trend and their opinion on whether Erem's law is

broken for good. We start by discussing the three possible factors for this shift

cited in the breaking Erem's law article with the first being quote better information in my mind there are sort of three

vectors that are converging that I think become increasingly important when it comes to impacting productivity and therefore E-rooms law.

The first one is the fact that we can generate increasingly broad array of data across the

various ways in which biology transmits information.

So we can do genomics, transcriptomics, we can do proteomics,

all of these things at increasing scale.

...