It is possible that they are licensing technology that was developed in academic science and are raising money to scale it up and get it ultra-standarized for commercial scale.
I agree that the modern Silicon Valley model of VC funding has been spoiled by SaaS startups, where the capital expense is smaller, the timeline to exit is shorter, and pivots are easier. It is not great for deeptech innovation because those require more capital, time, and are more technology-constrained than software. Ironically, modern VC was developed to support semiconductor startups (1970s-90s), but has drifted from that technology-heavy origin.
Indeed, now is the moment to step on the gas in biotech. The past 15 years have been nothing short of extraordinary in the field. We finally have the tools needed to effectively measure biology, manipulate biology, and increasingly predict biology. More recently, we have been able to turn more and more problems into computational problems.
With all of this coming together, we should be accelerating both public and private investment in biotechnology because we're getting closer and closer to transformative therapies. But...we're failing to rise to the occasion and meet the moment.
The entire class of "biologics" drugs only came about in the past 15 years thanks to advances in sequencing and biotech. They are the mainstays of treatment for dozens of serious dermatologic, rheumatologic, and GI diseases, not to mention they directly cured multiple cancers.
Not op, but I’m in the field and can give you some things to read about:
- CAR-T
- CRISPR
- PRIME editing
- Base editing
- Modified mRNA
- PD-1 inhibitors
- On the cusp of personalized cancer vaccines
- ADCs
- Structure correctors
- Targeted protein degraders
- siRNAs
These have all really hit their stride in the past 15 years. Guess where all of them initially came from? Random ass government-funded academic research. Sure, you can split hairs with me on the 15 years and NIH/NSF etc funding, but it’s basically true. We are killing the golden goose…
Delivery vectors for nucleic acid have really progressed too. Peptide design and screening (also high throughput tools in general) have developed and led to great advances in peptide conjugates, such as peptide radioligands.
Sorry, I am not involved with biotech. Genuinely curious.
Edit. My impression of bio tech is that upfront costs are high and timeline for commercialization is long, and the only real biotech firm that I am aware of is Theranos. So I am probably coming from a place of ignorance.
It is worth mentioning that China is heavily investing in biotechnology and they are getting genuinely good at the more commodified parts of the industry. This blog post [1] is long and aimed at a biotech expert audience, but one summary line that stands out is that "the drug industry is having its own DeepSeek Moment" [2].
To that end, I believe that this is the time to invest in the US biotechnology ecosystem so that we remain competitive with China. The ongoing crisis at the NIH is antithetical to this goal, as Derek Lowe's blog posts describe.
Honestly it's odd and out-of-touch to be motivated by being "competitive with China". Who cares? If you are a normal US resident, you care about improving the lives of you and your community, not competing against some far-away nebulous group of people whom you have never met and will never interact with. All while big brother is telling you that those far-away strangers are somehow your enemies. It makes sense as a rhetorical way to motivate action, but it's rather simple, short-sighted, manipulative, and divorced from reality for 99% of people.
I also reject the notion that progress is a zero-sum game, that we have to "compete" at all, that there needs to be a winner and a loser here. We could just as well work with others to improve the lives of us and our communities. Why isn't the notion "cooperate with China to uplift all"? Perhaps releasing your models under a MIT license is actually the right move here that is in everyone's best interest, perhaps the US should be following their lead?
How does the "competition is good" crowd around here come to the conclusion that spurring a competitive mindset is wrong when it comes to international affairs?
Is it a slippery slope argument with apocalypse war at the end of it? Or something else?
Sounds good, but in the end possession of sovereign territory is a zero-sum game. Perhaps you could convince the Chinese Communist Party to stop trying to seize it from our allies? Because allowing China to dominate the Indo-Pacific Region certainly won't benefit normal US residents in the long run.
You've shifted the goalposts dramatically from economic cooperation, but my point is that your "allies" and your "enemies" are genuinely not your allies or your enemies in any real sense, nor are they for the vast majority of US residents. They are shifting designations fed to you by powerful people. But if you want to talk about respect for territorial self-determination, wait until you hear about the US and its disregard for the sovereignty of El Salvador, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Cuba, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, Philippines, Vietnam, Iran, Egypt, Korea, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Palestine, Hungary. And more recently, Greenland, Panama, Mexico, Canada. The US and its residents don't have a leg to stand on here.
Nonsense. Economic cooperation simply cannot exist when there is a conflict over sovereign territory. As a US citizen I claim no moral high ground but our interests don't align with China's. That is the reality regardless of your paranoid fantasies about powerful people.
It's really not hard to understand, just look at how US approval ratings of Ukraine have dropped dramatically in the last 3 months. Shifting designations led by powerful people.
1) Creative projects beget creative projects. When you start working on one project, you'll have ideas for a dozen more, and probably one of those might actually be a good project idea to continue exploring and refining and shaping into a reasonable problem. It's really hard to come up with things if you're just staring at a blank sheet of paper, but working on anything at all gets this virtuous cycle started.
2) Talk to people! Bounce your ideas/areas of excitement off of other people, and see what gets reflected back at you. That signal can be very helpful to see when you've stumbled across an idea or problem that might be useful to more people than just yourself, i.e. a more important area of investigation.
3) Read, read, read. And take notes on random ideas you have while reading, and things that papers missed or didn't look into. If you do this enough and take some time to reflect on it, you can start to find gaps in knowledge that could be addressed.
I am pretty sure that the CGP Grey video was the core inspiration for this article. Nearly every image in the article was featured in the YouTube video, which predates the article by ~4 years.
Have you looked into Nebula Genomics? They will do 30X coverage WGS for $299, and will give you the underlying data so you can analyze it on your own (in addition to their analyses).
I would recommend the edX Introduction to Biology course [0].
It is a simplified version of the introductory biology course at MIT, that doesn't _focus_ on naming/defining things in biology. Instead, it uses the lenses of genetics and biochemistry to explore how the core machinery of life works, and how we got to our current understanding. That said, there is some amount of memorization that is unavoidable.
And an Editorial piece (more technical than the NYT): https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2505721