More About Vineeta
Vineeta Agarwala, MD, PhD is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) where she leads investments for the firm’s bio + health fund across biotech, life sciences software, and digital health, with a focus on companies leveraging unique technologies and datasets to advance drug development, personalized medicine, and innovation in patient care delivery.
Prior to joining a16z, Vineeta held many different roles in the healthcare space: as a physician taking care of patients; as an operator at healthtech startups; and as a venture investor on the GV (Google Ventures) life sciences team. She has been a data scientist; a management consultant for biotech, pharmaceutical, and medical device clients at McKinsey & Co; and a Director of Product Management at Flatiron Health (acquired by Roche), where she led the company’s partnership with Foundation Medicine to integrate real-world clinical and genomic data into national-scale data products to accelerate research and development in oncology. She has conducted academic research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Broad Institute, where she did graduate work in computational biology and human genetics.
Vineeta holds a B.S. in biophysics from Stanford University, and MD and PhD degrees from Harvard Medical School / MIT. She completed her clinical residency at Stanford, and is board certified in internal medicine. Vineeta continues to see patients at Stanford as an adjunct clinical professor in the Division of Primary Care and Population Health.
Vineeta serves on several portfolio company boards, including Amber Bio, BigHat Biosciences, Gate Bio, GC Therapeutics, knownwell, Orbital Therapeutics, Pearl Health, Pomelo Care, Rezo Therapeutics, Thyme Care, and Waymark.
Latest Content
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If these modalities have proven to be so effective (in some cases, even curative) against cancer, is there a role for them outside oncology, in the treatment of chronic diseases that might also be driven by a population of bad-actor cells? Arda Therapeutics is building upon exactly this bold hypothesis.
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GCTx is flipping the entire iPSC differentiation paradigm on its head. Rather than manually iterating through a limited set of differentiation protocols, the Human TFome technology platform instead deploys large-scale combinatorial screening to discover new hypotheses and new protocols that are as-yet unknown to even the best biologists.
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Michael Crackower, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer of Ventus Therapeutics, and Jason Burch, PhD, join Vineeta Agarwala, PhD, general partner at a16z Bio + Health.
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Lawrence Ingrassia, author and journalist, joins Vineeta Agarwala, general partner, and Kris Tatiossian, editorial lead at a16z Bio + Health.
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This medical home is exactly what knownwell is building – and scaling. Through a hybrid virtual and in-person care model, knownwell offers both primary care as well as longitudinal specialty care, inclusive of weight management, diabetes care, medication (and side effect) management, multi-disciplinary nutritional counseling, and behavioral health services.
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Brooke Boyarsky Pratt, founder and CEO of knownwell, joins Vineeta Agarwala, general partner at a16z Bio + Health.
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There is perhaps nowhere more exciting or impactful to build such tools than in healthcare—where progress is often so constrained by human expertise. Valar Labs is taking on exactly this challenge, and bringing AI into the toolbox for better cancer care.
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Vineeta Agarwala, MD, PhD, joins Luke Timmerman's The Long Run podcast on stage at the Life Science Innovation Northwest Conference.
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Rosana Kapeller, CEO of Rome Therapeutics, and Marty Taylor, physician-scientist at Harvard Medical School, join Vineeta Agarwala, general partner, and Bryan Faust, investment partner at a16z Bio + Health.
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The biotech industry is built on one of the cleanest go-to-market strategies in existence: if you make a safe drug that really works, patients are likely to receive it and payors are likely to pay for it. But how can biotech teams effectively communicate to investors and partners how they will, with each round of financing, incrementally reduce the risks of discovering and developing successful new drugs?
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Jordi Mata-Fink, PhD, cofounder of Gate Bioscience, joins Vineeta Agarwala and Ben Portney of a16z Bio + Health.In this episode, Jordi discusses how he and his cofounders are working to commercialize a novel class of therapeutics, termed "molecular gates."
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While most small molecule drugs bind and inhibit the disease-causing activity of their (typically intracellular) protein targets, Gate Bio instead attacks harmful extracellular proteins by eliminating them at their very root: right where they are produced and secreted from the cell.
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As we strive to find and support the most ambitious life sciences founders, we also work to connect these founders with exceptional advisors who have traveled the journey before.
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Greg Verdine, PhD, is a leader in the discovery, development, and commercialization of new drug modalities, a repeat founder, and the newest venture partner at a16z Bio + Health. He is joined by Vineeta Agarwala and Jorge Conde, general partners at a16z Bio + Health.
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In this episode, taken from a live a16z event, Bio + Health general partner Vineeta Agarwala moderates a panel of UCSF faculty founders, including Michelle Arkin, Jimmie Ye, and Natalia Jura
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As we have seen the Pomelo team build out their virtual clinic, care model, and software platform, they are dedicated to a few key principles which we believe are absolutely critical to building a scalable company in this space.
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This is a crossover episode with The Bioverge Podcast, hosted by Neil Littman. Neil is joined by Vineeta Agarwala, general partner at a16z Bio + Health.
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Orbital is taking advantage of what is already known, but also innovating with urgency to make RNA-based therapeutics impactful and accessible for a much wider set of patients worldwide.
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The precision medicine paradigm is a powerful one--for cancer patients, and for the entire oncology ecosystem. Over 50 targeted (‘tailored’ or ‘genome-informed’) oncology drugs have been approved by the FDA for clinical...
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Ben Cravatt, Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute, and Gene Yeo, Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at UCSD, join Vineeta Agarwala, general partner at a16z Bio + Health, and Bryan Faust, investing partner, to talk about their latest published research.
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Eric Topol joins a16z Bio + Health general partners Vijay Pande and Vineeta Agarwala and editorial lead Olivia Webb to talk about where AI in healthcare is going, where AI can help patients and providers the most, and what needs to happen to achieve widespread adoption.
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“The future is already here - it’s just unevenly distributed,” said science fiction writer William Gibson. As much as we hem and haw about the adoption of value-based care being slow, the fact is that it’s already here in various pockets, and in those pockets, it runs deep.
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a16z Bio + Health general partner Vineeta Agarwala chatted with Bobby Franklin, the president and CEO of the National Venture Capital Association.
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The most significant bottleneck in the adoption of healthcare technology to date has been distribution. Over the last decade, generations of digital health companies have struggled to reach escape velocity—not because th...
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Featuring Suchi Saria, PhD, and the CEO of Bayesian Health; Neri Cohen, MD, PhD, as well as a collaborator with Bayesian Health; and Vineeta Agarwala, MD, PhD, and a16z general partner. Hosted by Olivia Webb.
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Peter Donnelly is a professor of statistical science at the University of Oxford and the CEO of Genomics PLC, which uses large-scale human genetic data to inform healthcare and drug discovery. In this interview he, Laure...
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Even in today’s modern era of care delivery, this description of a physician’s core responsibilities still resonates. As patients, we hope – and even expect – that our care teams are constantly tracking details of our pr...
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2021 saw higher than ever funding of startups, continued maturation of the tech-enabled bio and healthcare landscape, and new platforms and business models that propelled growing levels of adoption and scale amongst both...
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Bernard Tyson was a close friend of our firm, in particular of my partner Ben Horowitz, and the ideals that he brought to his leadership role in healthcare continue to pulse through the fabric of the a16z bio/healthcare...
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Welcome to 16 Minutes, our show where we talk about tech trends in the news. We have three expert guests: Eli Van Allen, associate professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of the Division of Population Sciences at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; a16z bio general partner Vineeta Agarwala; and a16z bio partner Jay Rughani.
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Patients living with cancer are among my personal heroes. They endure difficult treatment regimens for months and years; they trial some of our most unproven novel therapies with hope and optimism. They find themselves i...
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The notion of “value-based healthcare” has been a strategic priority in the U.S. for over a decade now. Value-based care promised a future in which our healthcare system (and its consumers) would systematically pay for v...
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We were at an inflection point with the COVID pandemic, between old and new tech, science institutions, public health policy, more. So what can we learn from the past for the future? Former head of the FDA Dr. Scott Gottlieb (author of the upcoming new book, Uncontrolled Spread) shares stories from behind the scenes, debating probing ethical and policy questions with a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen and a16z bio general partners Vineeta Agarwala MD, Phd and Vijay Pande PhD.
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In today’s episode we have two short segments, both on bioscience topics.
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When it comes to healthcare, the topic of how expensive it is and what we can do to lower costs is always top of mind. One area with particularly steep costs is the emergency department. These are hospital departments th...
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On the path from scientific discovery to new drug, the clinical trial is a huge — and critical — hurdle. Clinical trials are themselves experiments, and to make sure that they are doing the best possible job at determini...
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We have two brief segments in today’s episode: News and analysis of the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine pause, and the widespread hack of Microsoft Exchange Servers across the country (and the dramatic and unusual steps the FBI took in response).
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Today on our news analysis show 16 Minutes — since this show is all about teasing apart what’s hype/ what’s real and where we are on the long arc of innovation — we're taking a quick pulse-check with the experts on just where we are with the COVID vaccine rollout in the U.S.
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On this episode of the Bio Eats World Journal Club, we explore the very compelling question of whether we can use our understanding of developmental biology to create oocytes (aka eggs or female gametes) from stem cells...
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In this edition of the a16z bio newsletter we've got a reading list of books covering biotech's beginning, plus much more
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Imagine a 3D surface with peaks and valleys of complex shapes. Then expand that surface into many more than three dimensions, to account for the dozens of required properties of a successful medicine -- target affinity,...
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Genetic testing is on the cusp of a major revolution, which has the potential to shift not just how we understand our risk for disease, but how we practice healthcare. In the clinic today, genetic testing is used only in...
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It's Time to Heal is a special package about engineering the future of bio and healthcare. See more at: https://a16z.com/time-to-heal/.
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It's Time to Heal is a special package about engineering the future of bio and healthcare. See more at: https://a16z.com/time-to-heal/.
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Given our early and ongoing coverage of coronavirus in this feed, we share a recent episode of 16 Minutes breaking down the 4 D's and what to know about recent news around the vaccines.
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Approximately half of all severe developmental disorders are caused by de novo (new, not inherited) mutations in protein-coding genes. But which genes? In this episode of the Bio Eats World Journal Club, a16z general par...
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In this episode of 16 Minutes with a16z bio general partners Vineeta Agarwala and Jorge Conde in conversation with Sonal Chokshi, we break it all down: the math, the science, and the practical considerations -- from "vaccine efficacy" vs. efficiency, from cold chains to distribution, from patients to the system... as well as from the past, to present future of, vaccines.
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It's not normal to talk to your employer about the details of your health: your current temperature, who you've been exposed to, whether your kid is sick, whether or not you've been social distancing. So how do employers...
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16 Minutes on the News #39: A Faster, Cheaper Test — Will It Really Democratize Coronavirus Testing?
In this episode of 16 Minutes, we cover the recent news around the FDA's Emergency Use Authorization approval of Abbott Lab's latest COVID-19 test, which takes 15 minutes and will cost $5. At that speed and price point -- as well as the fact that it doesn't require lab equipment at point of care -- it should definitely increase testing capacity, making it a potential "game changer" in this pandemic... But does it truly democratize coronavirus testing (in an available-to-everyone-everywhere way)? How is and isn't it like a pregnancy test, and when or how would we be able to administer it everywhere and by anyone?
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Dr. Bobby Green, MD (Community Oncologist and Chief Medical Officer, Flatiron Health) and Dr. Sumit Shah (Oncologist and Head of Digital Health, Stanford Cancer Center) join a16z's Vineeta Agarwala (physician and general partner) and Hanne Tidnam to talk about what is happening to oncology during the outbreak—how treatment is affected; what kind of clinical decisions oncologists and patients are having to make, and how they're making them; the tech tools that specialists are using, and how they could improve; and what happens to oncology as a whole when it's forced to go virtual.
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Four years ago, when we launched our first bio fund, the idea that software would make an impact in drug discovery sounded like science fiction; the idea it could transform the patient experience in healthcare a fool’s e...
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Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described on this page are not representative of all investments. A list of investments made by funds managed by a16z is available here: https://a16z.com/investment-list/.
