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Given recent news of drug company settlements, policy moves, and more, this episode is a rerun of one of our early explainers on the opioid crisis -- how do opioids work; who's to blame; and where does (and doesn't) tech come in?
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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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Eroom’s Law is Moore’s Law spelled backwards. It’s a term that was coined in a Nature Reviews Drug Discovery article by researchers at Sanford Bernstein and describes the exponential decrease in biopharma research ...
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Drug design is fundamentally a data science problem. Naturally, data science starts with the data, with a key challenge being the creation of accurate and highly reproducible data at scale. But data on its own are useles...
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a16z Journal Club covers a new approach for preventing coronavirus and influenza infection using the genome editing platform CRISPR-Cas.
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a16z Journal Club covers recent advances from the scientific literature; this inaugural episode for bio covers 2 two different topics: (1) identifying new antibiotics through a novel machine-learning based approach; and (2) characterizing the novel coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Developing new drugs is incredibly hard. That’s why, despite superhuman efforts from the industry, we’re still looking at 12-18 months minimum before we can realistically hope for a vaccine for COVID-19, and probably...
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In this episode, we dive into the remarkable story of one American family, the Galvins: Mimi, Don, and their 12 children, 6 of whom were afflicted with schizophrenia. Robert Kolker follows the Galvin's from the 1950s to today, through, he writes, "the eras of institutionalization and shock therapy, the debates between psycho-therapy versus medication, the needle-in-a-haystack search for genetic markers for the disease, and the profound disagreements about the cause and origin of the illness itself." So this conversation, with a16z's Hanne Tidnam, is more than a portrait of one family; it covers all of how we have struggled over the last decades to understand this mysterious and devastating mental illness: the biology of it, the drivers, the behaviors and pathology, the genomics, and of course the search for treatments that might help, from lobotomies to ECT to thorazine.
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“The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.” —William Osler, Founding Professor, Johns Hopkins Hospital