watch time: 16 minutes

What is a medicine, really? From the days of aspirin from willow bark, medicine is as old as humanity itself: something humans have been discovering, designing, and creating for ages to help heal ourselves. But now, thanks to technology, we’re entering an entirely new age where the very definition of what a medicine is, is changing.

In this talk given at a16z’s annual Summit event, Jorge Conde — general partner on the bio fund at Andreessen Horowitz — talks about how we are now harnessing and even programming biology itself in new modalities, from the cell to the gene to the living microbiome. What are the implications when we begin to think about medicine in this way — for how we design drugs, for therapies, and for new ways to treat disease?

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