The week started with the JP Morgan Healthcare conference, which is the big pharma conference where deals tend to be announced. Ther NVidia made quite a splash and showed its willingness to become a serious actor in the bio space, probably hoping to ride the wave of GPT and Generative AI to give them a head start.

We also saw a few more “AI Pact” style of deals being signed, with Caris, ConcertAI, Generate Biomedicine, and VantAI announcing deals to deisgn molecules using AI for big pharmaceuticals.

The creation of Arena Bioworks is also interesting as it joins Altos, and Arcadia as private research insititues in bio, where the founders realized that good researchers from academia can produce a lot of value, provided tehy are left to do what they are good at: “good science without a lot of red tape”.

This Week in TechBio 2024/01/15

• 2024/01/12 Arena Bioworks: Announcement of a new biomedical private research institute, whose goal is to move basic science results into startups by paying their researcher a pretty penny, and give them financial incentives as the patents / IP will be reinvested in to the foundation / research. This model is pretty similar to that of the Max Planck. Though I have to say that I am a bit curious about how much space is left around Kendall Square for building all these institutes.
• 2024/01/11 Endpoints News: Ionis is moving away from partnerships, and towards moving their molecule through the clinical stages themselves. It’s interesting to see them go against the wind that seems to be more oriented towards partnerships now.
• 2024/01/10 a16z: a16z explains where they see AI help in the pharma industry, while they believe that AI will be very useful in the preclinical stages, they insist on the fact that gains in clinical trial registrations, application, and patient selection could also be a tremendous boon to the industry by speeding up clinical trials (which currently account for half of the costs).
• 2024/01/10 Fierce Biotech: Caris Life Sciences and ConcertAI announce a partnership with AbbVie; Caris also announced a partnership with Flatiron to leverage their onco-genomic data.
• 20224/01/10 Fierce Biotech: Flagship announces, during JPM24, a new collaboration woth ThermoFisher and Samsung to focus on technology developement for their portofolio companies. This follows their announcement last November of Pioneering Intelligence, an initiative focused on bringing modern AI tools to their portfolio companies.
• 2024/01/09 BusinessWire: VantAI amends its partnership with Blueprint Medicine to include 3 programs for AI designed protein degrader, for up to \$1.250m in milestones and mid-single digit royalties.
• 2024/01/09 DeepOrigin: DeepOrigin integrates their tools into NVidia’s parabrick, one more integration for NVidia’s tools.
• 2024/01/09 STAT+: NVidia made a big splash at JPM24, pushing a lot for the techbio revolution, and announcing that it really joins the race. Tech companies doing bio related stuff is not news (after all my team at Google did that but was never given room to grow besides being a token bio team), but this time it may be different (the market for drugs is a bit larger than the market for targeted ads).
• 2024/01/09 Fierce Biotech: An interview with the CEO of Generate Biomedicine about how he sees the future of AI in drug discovery (pretty much says that there is a lot of noise but there are still no obvious data about how well it can work, citing the example of BenevoletAI’s failure in phase 2a). They also announced a sixth partnership with Amgen for \$375m.
• 2024/01/09 NewLimit: NewLimit’s 2023 in review, I found this to be super inspiring as it shows the huge progresses that techbio company can do when they respect data generation, and how much this data can help them. Jacob Kimmel’s post last week also reverberates a lot with the successes they have achieved and is a very thoughtful view of the industry
• 2024/01/09 Fierce Biotech: Roche designs a new antibiotic (paper in Nature), while seemingly not using AI it’s pretty incredible that two were announced in a row (including last week’s announcement) given how hard the search for new antibiotics has been.
• 2024/01/09 Fierce Biotech: NVidia enters the drug discovery game with strategic partnerships with Amgen (NVidia’s communication about it) and Recursion (also covered in Forbes), it’s pretty interesting to see NVidia move to the bio space as they have given a keynote at JMP24, as well as the CEO claiming 2 months ago that bio was the future application of AI. Their scheduling during this years conference (first day when everyone is fresh), versus last year (last day when everyone is taking an early flight), also shows that the techbio approach is taken more seriously.
• 2024/01/09 STAT: Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, and other universities create a nonprofit (Coalition for health) for benchmarking AI tools in healthcare.
• 2024/01/09 STAT: Mayo clinic signs a partnership with cerebras for building its genAI capabilities.
• 2024/01/08 DeepCell: DeepCell, a company focused on single-cell imagine analysis, has signed a partnership with NVidia to expand their AI capacities; this is probably mostly for announcement effects and to help NVidia signal their intent to move to bio (or sell GPUs to bio).
• 2024/01/08 Nature Biotechnology: Small letter on how the standard biotech playbook (early money -> VC -> big VG), is becoming less and less tenable as companies need more and more money to deisgn their proof of concept, as well as need multidisciplinary teams. It mentions the creation of BioHub communities, where universities can rent time on expensive lab equipment so that companies are not required to do the large capital investments on their end.
• 2024/01/03 Forbes: ByteDance joins the party of AI for drug discovery, this is a pretty weird move on their end, but they have the AI capabilities in-house to reach some promising results, as well as a lot of cash to fund it. It seems that AI for drug discovery has become a new viral trend,
• 2024/01/02 JAMA pediatrics: GPT4 performs very poorly on pediatrics predictions. While it should be obvious to anyone that GPT is not able to do a doctor’s job (at least without extensive fine-tuning), it is good to see it shown.

I probably missed quite a few announcements, don’t hesitate to DM me @gama_search if you see anything missing or needing corrections.