VC Expert Interview - Bio Tech in VC
- 03:09
Uzma answers, can you explain more about your area of focus 'bio and frontier tech'?
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Transcript
Yeah, so I look at biotech tech bio, so I haven't built my experience in developing single asset therapies or therapies that will look at a specific indication or target a specific modality, but more specifically at leveraging biology and how nature works to solve some of the big problems in society today. And that can be everything from like climate change to human health, which is where I spend most of my time today, and to synthetic biology or energy and circular economy. And so the reason why I am interested in this space is that when I finished my PhD at this point, both the compute power as well as our understanding of, of biosciences and the evolution of molecular tools such as CRISPR/CAS, gene editing tools, as well as the genomic revolution giving us access to a lot of genomic data and information was set the scene right for what I call the bio revolution whereby, I think we're able to develop solutions and technologies at a far, you know, faster speed and at much more efficiency to not only solve problems within health, such as curing cancer, or metabolic diseases, to then actually also looking at, you know, how do we, how do we make diagnosis more efficient? How do we move away from like one glove fit all approach when it comes to patients to novel ways of manufacturing therapies? Which was one of the big issues around covid was manufacturing capacity and who gets the vaccine first. And so actually innovation within that space, was quite interesting. And then finally, I think on, on synthetic biology side, it's more around actually how do we look at alternatives to petrochemicals using nature and biological solutions, moving away from our reliance on fossil fuels, and looking at biofuels and as an alternative. And obviously I think one of the areas that probably people, or public might be more familiar with is the computational drug discovery. So AI and drug discovery whereby they're looking at driving more efficiencies through reducing the time it takes to take a drug to market, which is traditionally, about 10 years, in development. And so how do you really squeeze that down? How do you reduce the failure rate of drugs through clinical trials? So, you know, it costs about a billion or 2 billion roughly to like take a drug to market. There's a high rate of failure. How do you reduce that failure rate? How do you better optimize and screen for, for drug candidates? So all of those are areas that are interesting from a bio perspective. And as I said, I think it doesn't just touch health and pharma, but actually more broadly looking at solutions where we look at moving away from petrochemicals, we look at like environmentally friendly processes to make products.