YouSaid · the spoken record

Lada Nuzhna

lines on the record: 66
first: 2025-11-14
most recent: 2025-11-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“My bet is we'd make the orthogonal bets. I agree. We're big believers in new modalities, and we're big believers, and there's going to be modern infrastructure that drives, that underpins the ability to make modern drugs. And so I think there's a ton of value creation on both of those axes, and we're very, very optimistic about that feature.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the world, NVIDIA is an infrastructure company. Is it possible for there to emerge a really large and sort of fundamental infrastructure company in biotech? And so I think there's sort of questions of either going where others can't and making some Or making the sort of final arc of commoditization and building these sort of consolidated platforms that do all of discovery for sort of small molecules and antibodies as this technology matures. And so it's kind of like two different possible poles of value creation in state of bio. Biotech is dead and long-lived biotech.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is something really interesting in just this argument right now within biotech if there are hyperskillers that emerge, there's this question, there's a lot of AI and biology companies that are raising a lot of capital and some just have no aims to make drugs. And there's this continual, again, for sort of like the background cynicism or discussions in the industry. A lot of people are asking like, what is that all about? I think that there's this really interesting component where we have to believe in like net new market creation. So at one point, Illumina sold exactly zero dot zero dollars of next generation sequencing technology to the industry, right? That turned into over $10 billion of sales and independent large listed companies where their cost of goods sold were primarily going to Illumina, right? And I think there's this interesting question, right, where the largest company”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recombinant in a gifted as the first of the shelf in MRNA vaccines gifted us vaccines that we can synthesize in less than a month produced from the genomic sequence of the virus. First human monoclonal antibodies gifted us a wave of cancer precision medicines that we have now. And I think something similar has to happen for chronic multifactorial diseases. I think we are starting to see light at the end of the tunnel with gene editing and genetic editing, more tailored targeting approaches where no longer do our LMPs just go to the liver, we can now target HCCs, we can target kidney, we can target potentially brain. And yeah, I'm bullish on new modalities.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Super excited about are this composite of incredible synthetic biology and genomics tools plus modeling plus other tools on top of them that just unlock things that otherwise weren't possible. And so I'm really excited about that sort of opportunity to make things that are just net new in the industry. And I think that's where you have to go to really keep winning.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The pig believer in modalities, also. I think that if you look at the history of the industry, there is an enormous amount of value that's created from unlocking new types of medicines. So I'm really excited for the fact that you have all these new generative design tools and sequencing technologies and delivery tools that can all start to be stitched together into sort of a composite specific product. So there are these sort of waves within technology, right? Where there's specific problems that are solved and you start to bundle a bunch of different components together. And then there's new ideas that come and it sort of unbundles the stack. And this sort of happens across software, different markets. I think that in biotech, we're in this sort of moment where there's a lot of opportunity and rebundling, the types of platforms that I see that”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look back at something like human genome project, it took us several decades and several billions to sequence one human genome. And once we discovered better sequencing approaches, we can now do it daily for a few hundred bucks. I think aging in a somewhat similar space in Zahad, it's a massive multifactorial disease. And if we rely on existing modality approaches, it would just be an uphill bottle to try and treat it. If we develop modalities that allow us to go and target this complexity without much additional engineering every time we want to start a new program, I think that would be sort of a big catalyst for success.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think our take is more of a modality take. Every time I think about where the biggest breakthroughs and successes in biology came from, Must always serve from some type of technology or process or technique, and rarely from discovering a new target. So we are developing a new modalities that should make it easier to tackle aging.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Usually, you want to have some literature validation, but in both of these cases, it was either a big modality differentiator in case of humera or big contrarian take on what indication to pursue. And I think aging might be a contrarian indication to pursue for some. I think muscle is in a similar space right now where for a while people were entreated encirclopedia as a real indication because it's sort of muscle loss in elderly, but there is now a similar race to LP wants to go and develop drugs for muscle. And we'll see it succeeds.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Serve to market, cert in F alpha antibody to be approved, but it was the first human monoclonal antibody, one of the first ones to be approved, and all the previous ones were antibodies from mice. So I think in both of these cases, It wasn't a biological take that was unique. The targets were pretty consensus, and I think biology is like one of the areas where you really don't want to be contrarian. You don't want to be the only company pursuing some obscure mechanism.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Each happy family is happy in its own way. And in case of JLP1s, they weren't the first smaggotite and trazepatite weren't the first LP ones to be developed or be approved jazz that in this case Lily Nova took on a very contrarian bed that obesity is actually a real market, which now seems obvious. But 10 years ago, if you were a company trying to raise for obesity as a disease, you don't probably had much success. I think many companies terminated their obesity programs because it wasn't clear that the market was there and especially it wasn't clear that people with obesity would be injecting themselves with drugs. I think Pfizer terminated their GLP1 program because internally they decided that actually like chronic disease injectables, I don't think patients want that. Humira was also not the first TNF alpha antibody out there. It was like”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like people tend to generate certain wisdoms around what it takes to develop a successful drug. Sometimes it's, oh, you have to be first in class or first to market. But I think successful drugs are.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the things that are working elsewhere and bring them here to get us back up to speed in terms of being able to run the race as quickly as other countries can. I think that would be extraordinarily promising for the industry, for society, and arguably for the world. So that is my reason to be optimistic, and that would be when I would use my magic wand for, is that's how to figure out how we can make all this innovation get to where it needs to go. So the GLP ones as a drug class are this incredible example. I've heard it be described as the most important consumer product that we've seen in the last several decades for obvious reasons, the impact it's having on societal health. What makes a drug blockbuster in your mind? Why is it that some drugs are so incredibly successful? Why don't we see more of them?”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those processes to make sure that our lap time is at least as fast as the rest of the world's lap time. Because if we do that, I think we will find that we can maintain a lot of innovation here. And one thing that is promising is at least if we look at where things stand today, the regulatory agencies, the FDA is at least signaling that they want to find ways to really innovate, to modernize. So I think that's very promising. I think when it comes to some of the other challenges we have geopolitically, whether it's with China or just in the rest of the world, what a lot of the administration is pointing to is saying, how do we incention and innovation to stay here? How do we incentivize the supply chain to stay here or to re-onshore? How can we do this in a way that our industry remains here within the United States? If I had a magic wand and could replicate all”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, look, I think if I had a magic wand, it would be a combination of figuring out how we incent, continue to incent the innovation that happens here to stay here. So a bit about what Elliot was describing, where what we know is we have this wonderfully effective pipeline where a lot of innovation happens in universities and happens in startups that get funded through investors like us. And you get a lot of incredible, novel approaches to tackling disease that comes from that. But the challenge we have is to go from that invention to an actual product. It still takes a lot of time and money. And there are a lot of hurdles there. And so I like this idea of being able to say, why don't we see what works in the rest of the world in terms of being able to run that relay race from an invention to an approved drug to run that relay race more quickly? And can we copy?”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I get that. So that's a great argument. But if you actually could address aging in a meaningful way, you could have massive societal benef And so therefore, you have to find a way to incent that because it's not happening today.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think there is a little bit of disconnect between what types of diseases affect humans and what types of diseases we approve for. If 50% of drugs are approved for rare diseases and rare diseases affect only small fraction of populations, I think that's important, but how about every disease that people are actually then for? And I think the fact that population is aging should be a big push to do something like that because age population is a less productive population and that's where US is headed now.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The original spirit of the orphan drug, of course, was to create an incentive for people to develop drugs that face small populations because maybe the market potential there. And so you'd have to. But in this case, for chronic diseases, the market potential is enormous. Excuse me. The market potential is enormous. And so, in your mind, the thing that needs the most incentive is to incent companies to go through the difficult development process because the failure rates higher.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then we had less than 40 approved orphan drugs for patients that have a population of less than 10,000 patients. And today, 50% of drugs approved in 2024 were all orphan drugs. So drugs for very, very small population. And I think we are... At the stage of biotech development We really need something like that to incentivize development of drugs for age-related diseases or for longevity itself. Right now, Age related indications have some of the highest failure rates in terms of drug development because there are no genetic drug variants. The process is much longer. The trials are way more expensive. So we need some kinds of those incentives to make sure that mobile tech companies go and develop drugs for cancer where phase ones kill half of the companies at early stages.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reality is that even if you run your travel in China, you still have to come back to the ES. Even for Chinese companies that run their travels in China, they all come back to the US because that's the biggest market. And even if Chinese population will continue to grow, US will still remain the biggest market for biotech companies to exit at. There is no Chinese pharma that people are selling to. All the farmers that are buying Chinese assets are US farmers, European farmers that would then go and run those travels here. So yeah, I don't think we need to solve that question because eventually everyone will be running trellis here either way. My magic wand, I would cast as well and ask for something that be a version of orphan drug designation, but for common diseases, orphan drug act, I think was enacted around 1980s.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say, let's win on regulatory innovation. Let's be really creative in terms of the way that we actually regulate this industry. We should still be the beacon of where people do their clinical development and where trials are approved”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think sort of two being the cost per patient per trial, that should almost be a stat that the FDA cares about. So when George Yoncopoulos started. That's ballooned to $500,000. 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. If we want to see the next regeneron, we want to meaningfully care about that as sort of a KPI for regulation for industry. I also think like we talked about earlier, it should not be accepted as the default that innovative American companies go to other geographies to run their first in human studies. There is low hanging fruit when you think about the regulation that's in place for in Australia, in Asia, and Carl June, who's the early developer of CAR-T therapy, was asking this in a workshop recently with the FDA. Why do we not have investigator initiative trials for Selene therapy in the US? If there is this distinction of them being the engineering state and us being the lawyer state, we should actually sort of...”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cancer right now is just an ethical question if for our fairly barbaric approaches to cancer care, that's actually a meaningful ROI. Whereas if we had different types of medicines, that would be pre-phenominal for longevity and health.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's like the 140 year old lady who's like, it's just one cigarette a day and like one piece of chocolate. No, I think it seems to be the case that caloric restriction is important, right? You know moving, we're a very sedentary society, so I think there's just a lot of benefits in just being active. And it's interesting just seeing the level of personal health monitoring like downstream of whatever Brian Johnson's sort of cultural movement is, of people actually doing a lot of longitudinal self-measurement, doing blood blood work, being more proactive in their care. And then I think even being more proactive in cancer care, right? Early stage screening and having types of medicines that have the right risk profile to actually dose people with if you are able to detect extremely early stage.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Removes that people would start leaving to 75, maybe 80. I think a good benchmark is Japan because in Japan people don't dive heart attacks. They die of cancer. And I think as a median lifespan there is close to 80. So that's plus 10 years to lifespan. I think most of the science would be the science that are already approved. GLP1s is obviously a big, big one. Like the only documented effect for lifespan that we have in monkeys is Color Restriction. We know that we can add about two and a half years to 25 year medium lifespan in one case by calorically restricting them. It really depends on the controls that you use in your study. I think there were like two big studies that were run. One of them used one case on Haifa diet is controlled. The other one used healthy monkeys. And if you compare it to healthy monkeys, color restriction doesn't add that much, but I think if you live in the United States, you're likely monkey on the Western diet.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does seem like we kind of hit a point where actually our generation shouldn't die of heart attacks. It seems like we have everything to prevent high cholesterol in people from, like you can take antibodies, SRNAs, small molecules, sung gene editors. We have full stack for that. And heart attacks is, I think, the primary cause of death in the United States. It's like people die around 72.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And maybe it's not that far out for our program, the first aging drug for humans. I think we would be able to treat agents before we understand how to measure it or what it is or why it happens. And the way I really view sort of the future reveling of lifespan drug is it should come in several waves where the first wave is sort of small effect sizes, very established therapeutic modalities, small molecules. If it's preventative medicine and it has to be squeaky clean, very safe because if you're preventing some future disease, there is no room for Side effects after that, we would have more exciting therapeutic modalities, maybe epigenetic editors, gene editors, maybe gene therapies. As we progress, it will only get, I think, the variance of medicine and therapeutic methodologies that we apply to aging will increase over time.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say we know what agent is or even how to measure it because if we had a way to measure it, we would have clinical trials run based on SORCID endpoints and maybe we would have multiple agent clinical trials run in parallel. Right now the way we approve or like move in this direction of approving agent medicines is we run multiple trials for multiple diseases the way we are doing OGLP ones. And then we are sort of deriving the conclusion that well maybe if it delays on setup multiple diseases at the same time maybe it's an aging drug. I do think regulation is lagging behind science. I think we have multiple drugs that extend lifespan in mice and monkeys that never have been tested for lifespan indications in humans. I think some companies do very exciting regulatory groundwork. Companies like Loyal where maybe for the first time we would have an agent drug approved for dog.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where this sort of arc of our business model, I did not expect this year to have John Merrick Honore talking about a direct to consumer biotech company, but that's kind of where the vibes are right now, which is actually exciting.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, Alex Telford's written a great piece on this of the sort of cyclicality of trends of what produces a blockbuster, right? Where you had like the Lipitor era of these enormous pills for big indications that were phenomenal products. And then we sort of moved into this era of specialty medicines, the birth of biologics, very, very big focus on rare diseases. So sort of making up for smaller population sizes with larger price tags. And I think in terms of the general pressure on pricing plus the sort of carrot of the success of GLP1, there is this big swing back into big indications and potentially there's such big indications that you have to take being a direct to consumer business really seriously. Where you think of Lily Direct where these are so big that you would actually break the pair system if you were distributing something for weight and metabolism for eight.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a good, I mean, it's a great argument that JLP wants to have really achieved two important things. It's potentially giving us ways to treat some of the most endemic, challenging conditions that affect society, whether it's metabolism and obesity and other factors. And the second one is at some level, it's given the industry its mojo back, right? To go after big problems, to go after the big indications, to find the act twos, because you're absolutely right. You're going to have to replace at some point this product with the next big idea.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you think there's one interesting component of incentives where it's like a commercial better than the Beatles, where once you have such an enormous revenue in sort of sales generation from a product, you're going to fight like hell to have something in your pipeline that could potentially replace that? And so it does have this property of sort of driving and sort of pulling on the ambitions of the industry, where it's people are honestly thinking it at Lillian Novo, like what is it going to take to actually fill the path window? What's the Act two? What's Act two? And I think that, you know, there is a component where it's these, it has to be something that is a large enough indication to take that vision seriously.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of it would be downstream of fixing how we pay for aging drugs, how we pay for preventative care. I don't know if we have a way to do that now, not for chronic medicines, especially not for one and done solutions to age-related diseases. I am very excited about GLP1s. I'm probably not the first person in agent space to say that maybe GLP1s would be one of the first agent drugs. I think this month Lily is reading out their semaglotite and Alzheimer's trial, which is to me is a real test of whether it's an agent drug or not, because it's well outside of the metabolic spectrum of diseases. Yeah, at the same time, Medicare refused to cover JLP1s for obesity care. So can we cover JLP1s for agient diseases? It's not super clear to me.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think unfortunately the incentive to develop aging drugs is still not quite there because if you look at the US payer system Pair that pays the most for. Diseases of age population as Medicare, which kicks in after 65 before then, we have a multiplayer system where patients tend to rotate their insurance every few years. And so there's really not much incentive for someone to cover preventative medicine early in life. And once you hit 65, it's no longer preventative medicine. treating the disease itself.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so speaking of indication bases, big indications, you talked about GOP ones. Obviously, one of the most extraordinary drugs in terms of the impact it's had on the broader society that we've seen in a very, very long time. It's also a drug that, you know, if we talk about health span, longevity, all of these things, it might actually be bending the trend, right? in terms of some of these chronic diseases, whether it's metabolic disorders, obesity, and the like. You in your piece on the where the trillion dollar biotech talk a little bit about, well, where will the next big wins for the industry come from? And you talk about finding diseases based on genetic basis, rare diseases where you can have a big impact. You have a couple of other examples, but really, if I've read your conclusion correctly, where you land is the real big nut to crack for the industry is to go after the”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Limit. And so one of the really exciting things is like if you have a fundamentally generative platform that is the product, does that open up a much wider indication of base?”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is where I'm sort of an unequivocal platform bull still is that I think one of the most exciting opportunities for AI and biology is this sort of world that we're going to where the platform is the product so if you think of like Moderna's and Biointex cancer vaccines this is a product that's in clinical trials where it is part next generation sequencing part AI and machining there's actually a neural network that processes the sequencing data and then there is a specific mRNA cancer vaccine designed for that patient, right? And so in that case, it's hard to even disentangle like it totally breaks our conception of what the target is, what the drug is. The drug is, you know, part information product, part diagnostic. And that, in theory, that type of really personalized approach could sort of open up and actually be a total pan indication solution, again, in the”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it is a fascinating thing because the armamentarium, as you were saying, has gotten so large that now you're really slicing a specific patient preferences, right? Someone may prefer an oral to a weekly injection. Someone may prefer an infusion once a year to take an injection every month. That kind of thing, it starts to get very challenging to tease out which product profile wins in the market.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the truth that new modalities often struggled, even though they were better in some shape or form. I mean, the whole generation of CRISPR companies, I don't think we've really seen through the CRISPR dream quite yet. 10 years ago when the first CRISPR companies were launched, the dream was really we will develop a tailored gene editor for every rare disease that exists out there. And it's partially bottlenecked by the regulation. Even for well-known targets like PCSK9, the question is like, do you really want to do a gene editor or do you is a repatha or in Claysoran actually good enough? So, I think many new modologies will be bottlenecked by the Beatles problem.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're like every quarter you take an injection and you don't have to think about it, you don't have to sort of adherence risk of a small molecule. I think some of that is totally right that that's not always the canonical rule with them.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are main targets on farmers, most wanted lists that have been on that list for many decades now, I mean, targets like 53 that so many companies try to target and no one really managed to get to molecules that really works or like it worked by the target product profile wasn't desirable. Yeah, I think until we clear out that list, there's definitely a bottleneck on the ability to design certain therapeutic modalities. The question is like, do we always want to have an oral for every antibody that exists out there? Maybe antibodies are actually not that bad. I think The whole Jelpy One story definitely altered my perception of how much people are willing to do inductable drugs on themselves.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That could be really, really big products, right? So you see this very low hanging fruit without this tool, combination of PD1 and vegF and like that's beating Gitruda, right? Like that's like this enormous step change. And so our ability to sort of potentially get those types of results. Seems possible to me.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think it's pretty substantial, right? So we've gotten really good at making monocolonials, right? We've been making monoclonal antibodies for 50 years, half a century. And we've got exquisitely good experimental tools for sort of panning and finding these types of molecules. And so if you sort of have a specific no-nonsense target, but if you're talking about a really complex poly-specific molecule that's hitting multiple components, you know, you see the beauty of multivalency with PD1 vegF. What else is out there that is like two, maybe three interactions that exquisitely tunes the immune system or the state of a cancer as we learn more about moving cells around on their sort of manifolds of different cell states? I think that there actually are target product profiles and medicines that we just genuinely can't get to with our existing disengagery technology technology techn”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's coming out of molecular machine learning and just make things that are unequivocally impossible to make without these tools make some really, really exciting medicines. And so I think that the ambition of a TPP will go up. I think that's also really important, right? Because a portion of EROOM's law is predicated on the better than the Beatles problem. We keep adding to this armamentarium of medicines that we have. And that stacks up and up and up over time. We're sort of continually in pursuit of beautiful medicines. And to actually make something more beautiful and more potent at this stage of the game, the alpha probably is in really interesting data sets, new modeling tools and capabilities. And I'm really excited about this sort of categories of medicines that could be made with this type of approach.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so sort of efficacy prediction on net new targets or sort of hypotheses for a mechanism. And then the third being that there's an enormous amount of interesting ideas that we have, but we actually can't express those ideas in molecules and sort of make new drugs. So that's sort of a third pillar of why it's really hard to make exciting new medicines. For all the reasons we talked about it, it's sort of hard to dramatically change the time and cost if you're doing preclinical discovery when it comes to clinical development. But when it comes to making things that are otherwise impossible medicines, so either finding really interesting new targets and having higher confidence in predicting the efficacy of a drug, there are some exciting directions. And then especially when it comes to expressing ideas in molecules, I think that a lot of these platforms and capabilities to take new interesting data sets, to take”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, I think Lotta's right. The answer is probably unequivocally yes. It's like it's becoming consensus that AI is a pretty important new experimental tool for biology and biologists, right? Just as software was. The way that I like to evaluate where it's useful right now is if you sort of break down the three horsemen of Eroom's law of the time and cost of clinical development, that's an enormous pillar that's sort of hard to tackle. We sort of talked about that of tech, probably software 1.0 can help a lot there. Regulation, culture. One layer deeper, you have the challenge of phase two failure, which is basically a readout on the fact that we don't understand biology.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a real negative externality, right? In terms of just the mean substrate of communicating science of open source, of these sort of, this proliferation of technologies, a lot of technologies are built on other technologies. And if everybody has to keep it closer to Jesper, that exact reason that your time to actually commercialize your own invention shrinks, that's probably one of the, that's a consequence of this trend that we have to think about.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talked about this a little bit, right? Where it sort of changes one of the name eggs, which is like secrecy. In the industry, there's like secrets become more important, is like when you want that longer time horizon to actually invent something, you probably need to keep it a little bit closer to the chest initially. I do think that there's some nuance in terms of how we think about regulation for this, right? It's probably not biosecure where you are totally trying to restrict relationships and transactions between the US and China because that's just sort of net negative. But if there is really direct fast followers and like you're saying that sort of half-life an initial invention, we might need to rethink like what that actually like how to extend that horizon for inventions.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leonard Scheiffer and Georgian Coppolos, these scientists that are actually sort of going to tell us where the future is.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Modalities and sort of growing the pie, things on the scale of the recombinant DNA revolution, which is a fundamentally U.S. thing, the birth of immunotherapy, which is in Texas, right? These are these types of things that I think get us out of it where we have to just invent our way and actually change what's possible with biotech. I think when you get those big unlocks, that's when you start to really deliver value. So it does ship the risk profile though, where I think that fundamentally like part of where you go is really pushing the boundaries of new modalities. I spent a lot of time with Michael Fischback and Credible scientists at SAMPA. We're all talking about what's the next big interesting set of modalities? What's the new interesting mechanism in biology? And so I think that risk profile shifts and like, you know, at Amplify, that's what we always think about those technical founders, right? Because it starts to be the case that it's like the regenerons of the past, right?”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source