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

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

“I think the answer is somewhat simple I think we have to invent stuff. So there's this really good China analyst named Dan Wang who just wrote a really good book on the whole structure between China and the United States right now. And the one sentence meme version is that China is an engineering state and America is a lawyer state. And I think that's simplistic, right? That's not Dan's full argument. But we forget that we're also an incredible inventor state, right? So some of our founding fathers, we had Benjamin Franklin as one of the U.S.'s founding fathers, right? We have the American research universities that are the envy of the rest of the world. We're incredible at going from zero to one. And so I think that to compete on this, if you're talking about something where it's fast followers and sort of a specific arbitrage opportunity, that's super challenging in terms of speed and cost. If you're talking about inventing totally new”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ones supplying the drugs, biotech startups now make two thirds of the drugs that go to market. We have this sort of geographic arbitrage.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that we're all doing that research with the same discovery technologies, right? So I'd argue that beyond the modernization of small molecule discovery, the growth of biotech and recombinant DNA technology, we haven't had, and in subsequent modalities, we haven't had these huge changes in the fact that people have internal technologies that the rest of the industry isn't using. And so like any other technology, when it's becoming commoditized, you can compete on speed and cost. And this is where China sort of enters the story, right? So China has enormous speed advantages in terms of regulation for starting and running human trials and enormous cost advantages in terms of the labor and the sort of work ethic and speed involving people that can be put together at these projects. And so what's happening is in this sort of loose social contract between big pharma and biotech startups, which are”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What happened is that as Lotta alluded to, there's this Erooms law in the industry where it's just gotten exponentially less efficient to do the internal research and clinical development. And so it literally became the case that it was IRR negative to actually do internal research. And so these pharma companies divested their internal research and clinical development out. This is the birth of these clinical research organizations and outsourced organizations in the first place. And the origin of drug discovery startups and biotechs is that we are the lunatics that take on that IRR negative business and say that we're in the business of making these new hits that could ultimately realistically get bought by pharma companies and become their next armitarium of drugs. So that's kind of the setup of like how biotech works, right? These companies divested their R&D companies are doing that research. And what happens?”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And the first drugs were incredibly crude pharmacology, right? So this was heroin, this was cocaine, this was morphine, higher attention than dye stuffs, right? That's a pretty interesting business. But obviously it got a lot more sophisticated and specific over time. So these groups like Merck in the 30s, they set up vertically integrated research labs. So they're in the business of manufacturing and distributing their medicines and then also doing internal research to make new products. And then the FDA comes along, writes a lot of these top pharma companies, predeed the FDA. And modern clinical development is formed. And so there's a three-part component for all these businesses where there is manufacturing, commercialization, and distribution. There is internal research, and then there's trials and clinical development.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think it's worth just backing up and saying, how is the bio industry industry set up in the first place? How does this actually work? So at the very outset, in about the 19th century, there were chemical companies that decided to get into manufacturing chemical drugs, right? So these were actually dye manufacturers and making dyes for textiles. And they decided to take their sort of chemical manufacturing and distribution and apply it to making drugs.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's right. So, like, if you were to break it down into cultural tech solutions in terms of just implementations and regulatory, you'd have to sort of assign some percentage at ease. And I think it is a composite of all three.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, when the FDA says we actually want to modernize the standards for trials and have electronic tablets. Actually, have to get the clinical research organizations to adopt those tools and technologies, and they aren't. They aren't incentivized to, right? And so there is sort of a structure to the actual process of executing on the trials that lags sort of a lagging indicator from the changes in regulatory itself. So it's sort of a two-pronged beast when you think about the cost of clinical development. It's actually sort of what the rule of law is, like what you can do, and then also just all of the sort of industry entrenchment of what we are doing. And so I think there are some ways for people to just do things a lot faster, even within the bounds of the law than we're sort of used to paying for expecting, which I think is in part just like a cultural component of biotech that we just assume that these things are expensive and take a lot of time.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Zero. Right. And so we've just come to accept the fact that everyone goes to Australia, everyone goes to Asia to do their studies because the things that we invent here we can't actually first test here. So there is sort of a regulatory barrier. But I was writing about this business vial that was trying to innovate on a clinical research organization. And one thing that I sort of learned in terms of the machinery of translating regulatory innovation into actually cheaper trials. So let's say that there's a change, like whatever variable we think about for trying to actually decrease the cost of trials. How does that get implemented? So it actually turns out that there's been this enormous consolidation of the clinical research organization market that's come down to about a dozen providers who have each done roughly 40 acquisitions across 30 years to really consolidate into these large clinical outsourced providers that most people rely on.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is interesting. There's 100% a growth of regulation. There's a bunch of low hanging fruit that would be just substantially better for starting trials, right? So we have three companies in the next 12 to 18 months that will be starting first at human trials. Guess how many are actually doing their first studies in the United States?”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A better point to actually see the progress of technology, right? So you have people developing zero shot antibody design in labs. You have incredible virtual cell projects The early stage, which I think is actually just for an investor, for a founder, an incredibly exciting time to be building a new company because there's this huge disconnect in the market between sort of publics and what's happening earlier. Tale”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sides of the market, right? So, as Lotta was saying, we had this enormous wave of excess. Boom cycle in this industry was COVID. You had an enormous amount of value creation and success. Sitting on the other side of that, and we're sort of objectively in a downturn. We have, as Lata pointed out, an enormous amount of EV negative public companies, that's starting to change and resolve a little bit, but there was a stretch of seven to eight months where there were no biotech IPOs. There's a log jam that goes from the public markets to the growth investors to leader stage investors to early stage investors that just changes milestones and makes everything super, super hard.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Longer exists. But there's a path forward if we're willing to advet our way out. We cover why regulation might not be the real problem, what GOP1s reveal about blockbuster drugs, whether AI can actually fix drug development, and why the next iconic biotech companies will look nothing like Gentech. This is the state of an industry admin collection point. Let's get into it.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biotech paradox one fifth of public biotech companies are trading below their cash balances. Steve Browns had hit record lows. The industry spends $2 billion per approved drug and that number keeps climbing. And yet, we're designing antibodies from scratch with AI. We have drugs that are bending the curb on aging. The science has never been better. So why is the business of biotech collapsing while the technology is exploding? Today's guests have spent years studying this contradiction. Lada Newsena found a general control, a startup tackling aging after writing the definitive analysis of why there are no trillion-dollar biotechs. Elliot Hirschberg is a partner Amplify, betting on the next wave of platform companies while watching American biotech companies flee to China and Australia just to run their first trials. Their diagnosis, we're competing on the wrong access. China wins on speed and cost. The FDA adds friction while innovation accelerates, and the entire industry is structured around an equilibrium that no”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had this enormous wave of excess, and now we're sitting on the other side of that. We have an enormous amount of EV negative public companies. There was a stretch of seven to eight months where there were no biotech IPOs. And so I'm really excited about that sort of opportunity to make things that are just net new in the industry. 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
“When George Youngopoulos started Regeneron, it cost about $10,000 per patient in trial. 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.”
2025-11-14 · a16z Podcast · Can America Win The AI Biotech Race Against China? | Lada Nuzhna & Elliot Hershberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source