YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeremy K. S. Kahn

lines on the record: 54
first: 2016-10-18
most recent: 2016-10-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That is actually pretty good encapsulation of what's going on. There's an entire field called systems biology that's been created around understanding how genes interact with each other. And yes, there are the A, Cs, Gs, and Ts. That's the basic code of life that creates a lot of these genes. And any changes in that code could affect cellular function and therefore physiology level function. But we realize that it's often a concerted change that results in a serious disease as opposed to a single change that can cause propagation down to the physiology level. You know, there's an irony here, which is that in the old days, people used to do things physiologically. You'd look at tissue and that it was a major advance of molecular biology would go from tissue to an individual protein or an individual gene and would go after that. And only now that we're having this nuanced view that actually the physiological approach actually makes sense.”
2016-10-18 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: On the Genomics of Disease, From Science to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, like, just for a very simplified analogy, if you think of the letters of the alphabet and just like words are created by a combination of letters, you now have to actually hone in on a more overlapping set of variables. Is that overly simplified?”
2016-10-18 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: On the Genomics of Disease, From Science to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. I think in the 80s, 90s, you could get an entire PhD studying a single gene. The simplest way of understanding genetic diseases is a point mutation in a single gene that causes a certain disease. And Huntington's is a great example of that where a single mutation can cause a tremendous amount of neurodegeneration at a certain age. But most diseases we found out weren't like that. And in fact, most diseases were so complicated that we didn't necessarily know the root cause of it, genetically speaking”
2016-10-18 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: On the Genomics of Disease, From Science to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, one place to start is that ever since the Human Genome Project, people have been talking about all these great cures and things that will come from it and what is different now? Why are we expecting to see something now? I think one of the biggest realizations of the Human Genome Project is that the human body and the genome is much more complicated than we thought. Everyone thought we would know the cause of all diseases and therefore we would be able to cure all diseases as soon as we realized that 20,000 genes just were not enough to explain why all these diseases occurred. It gave life to all sorts of new fields of biology that have been built around understanding the genome. What's different now as opposed to what was happening in 2000 is finally the technology, the machine learning techniques as well as the hardware supporting that has matured to a point where we don't have to try to manually figure this complicated system out by ourselves. We can”
2016-10-18 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: On the Genomics of Disease, From Science to Business · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source