11 ms·

Y Combinator Bets on Biotech

121 points by bmahmood 12y ago

exratione 12y ago
The SENS Research Foundation has a network of supporters among portions of the VC crowd in the Bay Area. Some of the halo of attached or associated young researchers there should explore putting one of their lines of research more likely to get somewhere interesting soon into YC, see what happens. A completely baked form of allotopic expression or toolkits for glucosepane breakdown in tissues could both produce viable and highly useful technology platforms prior to being far enough along to be applied to the reversal of aspects of aging. Neither of those seems too far away to be non-viable for this sort of timescale, and meaningful biotech projects are very cheap these days if you have access to a provisioned lab.
- delinquentme 12y ago
  When are you submitting a proposal ? Ping me if you want to talk more about what a project in this space would look like.
  - fasteo 12y ago
    Take a look here http://www.longecity.org/forum/page/index.html/_/feature/res2013 http://www.longecity.org/forum/page/index.html/_/feature/res... We (longecity members) founded this project out of our pockets a few months ago. I am sure Dr. Matthew 'Oki' O'Connor will love to discuss ideas with you.
sakai 12y ago
I find the timing of this and the "New Deal" press releases a bit confusing -- is YC starting to take biotech companies now (like YC S14) or in the next batch? I'm assuming the New Deal terms are for S14, but was also surprised to see the announcement after the applications were all in. Can anyone clarify / point me to what I've missed?
- henryaj 12y ago
  Mm, I'd also be interested in finding out. The Request for Startups [http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html] doesn't mention anything, but then again they don't look like they've been updated in some time. I'd be interested in seeing some guidance for nascent biotech companies wanting to apply, given the focus has been on software for so long.
  - tdaltonc 12y ago
    BioTech is a subcategory of FRS10.
- sama 12y ago
  companies can still apply late for the summer.
  - sakai 12y ago
    Ah ha. Thanks for the heads up! (Looking over the application again now...)
happyscrappy 12y ago
Responding to criticism of the Immunity Project's lack of peer review: "If the traditional science community wants to say these things aren’t going to work, they can keep doing that. That’s what used to happen with software companies. The Immunity Project may fail, and the next 30 things we fund may fail — and the whole model is such that that’s OK. We can have 31 failures and one success, and the model still works great. That’s how we’re designed."
- pdq 12y ago
  Unfortunately that's more of a defense of YC's funding of the Immunity Project than a defense of the Immunity Project itself.
  - the_watcher 12y ago
    The point is they don't need to defend the Immunity Project. They are giving them the resources to (ideally) allow them to defend themselves. If they fail, YC is fine with that, but the Immunity Project at least has the chance to try something.
    - Fomite 12y ago
      I think a lot of the pushback, and absolutely my source for concern, was not so much YC funding the Immunity Project, but the hype spike that comes from a high profile investment around something with very, very little actual scientific evidence behind it.
- tdaltonc 12y ago
  I was more struck by this part: > How many Nature papers are not reproducible? To call out a new bunch of people who are trying something different because people are afraid they’ll fail is sort of hypocritical given that we don’t really check whether anybody else’s results are correct, either. Peer review is more about politics then reproducibility. Reproducibility is really important, but Nature doesn't seem to agree.
  - 12y ago
fasteo 12y ago
This is a wise move. Let me suggest the mitochondrion as the main target to explore: - In a very simple but accurate analogy, a computer will not work properly - if at all - if the power is not coming. You can have the best hardware; you can put endless hours to develop the best possible software, but nothing matters if the power is not coming. - Mitochondria produce 90% of the energy - ATP - we need to function. - Mitochondria are a relatively simple structures. Its DNA is way smaller and simpler than the nuclear - double helix - DNA. - Many health issues seems to be the result of a primary mitochondrial dysfunction, or - Many health issues will result in a secondary mitochondrial dysfunction. I do have a mutation in my mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA), so - I know what I am talking about and - Yes, I am very biased; my life depends on this.
- dnautics 12y ago
  The guy who postulated and validated the way that the mitochondrion operates was very much a scientific outsider and had to secure funding and run his lab outside the traditional scientific apparatus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell
  - pvnick 12y ago
    Everybody: "All these ATPs must be coming from something very similar to glycolysis." Peter Mitchell: "Guys, I think the concentration gradient is responsible" Everyone: "Shut up Peter" Later, as Peter was accepting his Nobel prize for discovering one of the most most important biochemical processes, he got to say "I told you so." I didn't realize he had to secure funding from an outside institution though, that's really interesting. Thanks for that TIL moment.
    - dekhn 12y ago
      To be honest I doubt I would have believed him at the time given the context. It's a pretty complicated theory that requires a subtle understanding of biophysics. Remember the reception to the Avery/McCloud experiment- people still insisted protein was the heritable molecule. People simply couldn't understand how a "simple" polymer like DNA could encode information. it was a real mind-bender because (AFAICT) nobody really appreciated how nonuniform polymers could code for information. Or the reception to the discovery of enzymatic RNA. How could RNA possibly be enzymatic? Well, now we know that RNA runs the game and protein is just muscle.
pearjuice 12y ago
I don't think investing should be dumbed down to betting. The public already has high aversion towards "throwing $120K at [random] companies". YC (and with them a lot of accelerators/investors) analyze their prospects. Sure, sometimes there is a chance and an underbelly-feeling involved in whether a startup should be invested in, but to degrade investments as "betting" is probably the highest insult an investment/accelerator-firm can get.
- return0 12y ago
  What should they do instead? Make a hedge fund with the money? Yeah, that worked out well..
  - Fomite 12y ago
    The parent's suggestion is that to refer to a YC investment as a "bet" is a little bit of a misnomer. It's a targeted, reasoned investment, not "120K on 'Little Devil' to win."
001sky 12y ago
One of the side effects of 120k vs 20k opening the model to different sectors/needs at the earliest stages. What will be interesting to see is the developments in expertise and what different requirements there are for managing and mentoring entreprenuers in these different areas. Would be great to hear some thoughts on that, if not immediately perhaps in a years time or so.
almosnow 12y ago
I didn't grasp "the business model". Their plan is to offer the vaccine for free, how do you monetize on that? Or is it "for free bc it will be paid by governments"?
tdaltonc 12y ago
Science has become sclurotic. Teams that are funded outside of state science system are going to be able to take risks and try things that would be unthinkable in academia. Each of these teams in an experiment in a different way to do experiments. All of science will benefit from the results of these meta-experiments.
- Fomite 12y ago
  My experiences with industry research to date do not particularly back that up. For every "academia is too conservative", there's a pushback of "Yeah, but will this be profitable?"
  - tdaltonc 12y ago
    I think that what is different now is the cost of trying out a new idea. A biotech team is able to try something out without buy-in from academia or the big bio-tech firms. They need some money, but much less than they would have needed 10 years ago.
    - Fomite 12y ago
      And that is very cool. But frankly, is as true in academia - a new assistant prof. has the startup funding to try something big and splashy without bankrupting the lab. "Biotech is getting cheaper" applies to both groups.
      - dnautics 12y ago
        Yes, but how are new assistant professors selected?
        danieltillett 12y ago
        It is not how they are selected that is the problem - it is what they need to do to get tenure. This is what kills all innovation.
mifeng 12y ago
The issue isn't so much YC's investment in projects that may not have scientific rigor, but that of individual investors via crowd-funding platforms. At an extreme, this results in a company like GoBe raising $1.1 million on IndieGogo with PR and a slick video. YCombinator has the sophistication and time to vet their investments. If they want to back something most of the scientific community thinks won't work, all the best to them. However, raising capital from mom-and-pop investors is another story.
timr 12y ago
"The thing I never understood is: shouldn’t the biotech community be happy that more people are trying to do this and that more people are funding this work?" It's a world where lots of great ideas are underfunded (or not at all), because the traditional government sources don't have the money needed to invest in every good idea. Also, it's still generally too expensive to chase every possible business idea in biotech, and there are plenty of ideas with academic promise that don't get anywhere because the traditional sources of investment are too conservative. Scientists get punchy when they see funding going to "unproven" entrepreneurs, while they're slaving away at research that is peer-reviewed, but isn't getting any investor attention. It's good to see YC bringing in outside expertise for this area, because the likely outcome for amateur angel investment in biotech would be investing in lots of flashy-but-insubstantial entrepreneurs, while legitimate research never gets off the bench. In my experience, it's much harder to evaluate biotech ideas than software.
- danieltillett 12y ago
  My business straddles both biotech and software and I find it much easier to evaluate good biotech ideas than software ideas. The problem is the money and time required is so much greater with biotech that almost none of the good idea get invested in.
  - timr 12y ago
    Agreed about the money and time, but I do think biotech ideas are harder to evaluate, if only because the basic knowledge required is far more specialized. Your average CS undergrad can understand the technical risks of most software startup ideas, but you need at least a graduate degree or equivalent industry experience to be able to evaluate the technical feasibility of lab research. Moreover, life science research depends on sophisticated intuition that can't really be taught in a classroom.
    - danieltillett 12y ago
      I agree the barrier to entry in biotech is higher than software - in the area of bioinformatics it is usually easier to train someone with a life sciences PhD how to write software (bad software usually) than it is to try to train a CS graduate in the required life sciences. However once you have skills in both area the biotech ideas are easier to evaluate. I think this might be due to there being more good biotech ideas around because far fewer can be exploited because of the cost.
danieltillett 12y ago
Biotech start-ups are very different to most other technology start-ups. I am not sure the ecosystem that YC has is really adaptable to "wet" biotech. I certainly hope I am wrong as biotech could definitely do with new thinking and approaches to funding.
- collyw 12y ago
  A lot of biotech isn't "wet" these days. I work in a sequencing centre. More than half of the employees seem to be computer based.
  - danieltillett 12y ago
    DNA sequencing software is what my company develops (if you still have any ABI machines it might be of interest). If your centre is like my customers the computer based people still need the wet lab people to generate the data.
    - collyw 12y ago
      All Illumina here. Yes, of course we have wet lab people, but excluding admin staff, I think the wet lab staff make up less than half of the workforce.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
pvnick 12y ago
Great! This is why I went back to school to get my biochem degree. I was a data scientist working with hadoop + mahout at a startup and I said "this is going to revolutionize medicine." When I get my masters in biomedical engineering in a few years I have a dream to help found a company that applies big data and machine learning to problems with clinical significance. Elizabeth, you may end up hearing from me :P
- lanaius 12y ago
  If startups don't work out because of sensitivity in medical data, look at Northrop Grumman. They work with the CDC on big data analysis.
- dbcooper 12y ago
  Look for something beyond target identification, if you can. That is lowest part of the value chain.
  - pvnick 12y ago
    Not sure what you mean by targets, are you talking about enzymes and drug discovery?
    - dbcooper 12y ago
      Typically I would be referring to the protein (or other molecule) that you want to target with a drug, to either reduce or promote its action. As wiki puts it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_discovery#Drug_targets http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_discovery#Drug_targets Generally, the "target" is the naturally existing cellular or molecular structure involved in the pathology of interest that the drug-in-development is meant to act on.
  - antifragile 12y ago
    True, 'cause one drug for one condition now costs $4-12B, because the success rate is < 0.02%. There needs to be multi-functionality in our innovative efforts when we experiencing such high rates of disruption, say, extinctions.
sandipc 12y ago
"some worry that Silicon Valley's penchant for technology and marketing might not be compatible with medical research” I would say that a good portion of medical research IS technology and marketing, for better or worse.
- return0 12y ago
  Actually the "might not be compatible with medical research" is the great part about it. Life sciences research often tends to be short-sighted, plagued by the egos of scientists, the politics of scientific publishing and the fight for government funding. I hope YC chooses the "incompatible" route.
epaladin 12y ago
Great news, especially after the "biotech is dead" chants from Wall St. for the last couple of weeks. I hope to see some posts like "XYZ Company (YC ##) hiring bioinformatics developer" sometime soon!
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
NDizzle 12y ago
Is $120k going to be enough to even make a dent in a biotech startup?! It's years and years and years of hard work before you may even get denied by the FDA. With all this funny money flying around who has the patience to wait 10 years to maybe see a return?!
- mkempe 12y ago
  There is a need for biotech startups that help navigate FDA regulations. Think process & documentation for medical solutions, like shovels for gold-miners. I've been doing consulting work at healthcare manufacturers. The environment is insane -- constraining, slow, unproductive, depressing. And it's used as a huge moat.
  - mkempe 12y ago
    Down-voting my comment will not make the FDA regulations go away. You will not bring any biotech products to [edit: medical] market unless you comply with the FDA (or somehow manage to eradicate it). Health-related products and services are heavily controlled -- in ways completely at odds with the common practices of Internet startups. If you haven't yet had to comply with these regulations, you may want to find out how onerous they are. Here is one example: Quality System (QS) Regulation/Medical Device Good Manufacturing Practices [1], covering: Quality System, Design Controls, and Human Factors. They audit your compliance with their regulations. You have to document everything you do, every decision you make, every change you make. That is not how startups commonly operate. [1] http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidance/PostmarketRequirements/QualitySystemsRegulations/ http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidanc...
    - technotony 12y ago
      Who say's biotech products have to go via the FDA? There are all kinds of potential markets with lower or non-existent barriers to market, eg my company which makes Glowing Plants. These are the areas which make more sense initially as you really can take a lean startup approach to them.
gammarator 12y ago
SV VCs getting burned in cleantech was apparently not lesson enough? "One of the key misplaced assumptions that Valley VCs made in cleantech boom times is that the rapid progress of Moore’s Law could be created for cleantech with a little bit of VC funding and Valley smarts." s/clean/bio/g http://gigaom.com/2012/02/01/we-can-thank-moores-law-for-the-vc-cleantech-bust/ http://gigaom.com/2012/02/01/we-can-thank-moores-law-for-the...
enscr 12y ago
Interesting move. I've often heard people complain that the best minds are writing HTML/Javascript when they should be solving real problems (e.g. medicine/health)... obviously because Tech pays big money. I'm not undermining the utility of FB & Whatsapp but I feel a larger percentage of the World population needs better healthcare & medicine. I'd be happy to see the balance of crazy paying startups shift towards life sciences. What could be a better incentive to innovate than this. Have a BS/MS/PhD? Good, go hack the body & decode it. 'x' years from now, there'll be open plugins to debug & fine tune your body.
- operon 12y ago
  There are also great ("best") minds solving real problems in medicine/health. They are just a trillion times harder/expensive than writing an app.
  - enscr 12y ago
    The barrier to entry for writing an app has been lowered because of money+innovation in tech. Hoping for same in medicine. Human simulators would make it so easy to test medicines.
antifragile 12y ago
Being a biotech is not a fundamental constraint unless you approach healthcare orthogonally. We already know that the BIG Pharma R&D model is broken and irrational. Actually words expressed by Merk late last year, as Well as Voltaire in the 1700s! To hack healthcare you must, at least initially, by-pass the gate-keepers, the incumbents, and they're lobbyists by targeting unregulated markets, ideally Golidlocks markets. That's my strategy anyhow.Regarding multi-million dollar costs, people must strain their brains some by doing design-arounds and using surrogate markers and collaborating, i.e., perspective shifting by questions fundamental assumptions. In fact, it is possible to run experiments at 2 orders of magnitude less than what establishment-heavies are doing theirs (speaking from experience).

121 points by bmahmood 12y ago

The SENS Research Foundation has a network of supporters among portions of the VC crowd in the Bay Area. Some of the halo of attached or associated young researchers there should explore putting one of their lines of research more likely to get somewhere interesting soon into YC, see what happens. A completely baked form of allotopic expression or toolkits for glucosepane breakdown in tissues could both produce viable and highly useful technology platforms prior to being far enough along to be applied to the reversal of aspects of aging. Neither of those seems too far away to be non-viable for this sort of timescale, and meaningful biotech projects are very cheap these days if you have access to a provisioned lab.

delinquentme 12y ago
When are you submitting a proposal ? Ping me if you want to talk more about what a project in this space would look like.
- fasteo 12y ago
  Take a look here http://www.longecity.org/forum/page/index.html/_/feature/res2013 http://www.longecity.org/forum/page/index.html/_/feature/res... We (longecity members) founded this project out of our pockets a few months ago. I am sure Dr. Matthew 'Oki' O'Connor will love to discuss ideas with you.

sakai 12y ago

I find the timing of this and the "New Deal" press releases a bit confusing -- is YC starting to take biotech companies now (like YC S14) or in the next batch? I'm assuming the New Deal terms are for S14, but was also surprised to see the announcement after the applications were all in. Can anyone clarify / point me to what I've missed?

henryaj 12y ago
Mm, I'd also be interested in finding out. The Request for Startups [http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html] doesn't mention anything, but then again they don't look like they've been updated in some time. I'd be interested in seeing some guidance for nascent biotech companies wanting to apply, given the focus has been on software for so long.
- tdaltonc 12y ago
  BioTech is a subcategory of FRS10.
sama 12y ago
companies can still apply late for the summer.
- sakai 12y ago
  Ah ha. Thanks for the heads up! (Looking over the application again now...)

happyscrappy 12y ago

Responding to criticism of the Immunity Project's lack of peer review: "If the traditional science community wants to say these things aren’t going to work, they can keep doing that. That’s what used to happen with software companies. The Immunity Project may fail, and the next 30 things we fund may fail — and the whole model is such that that’s OK. We can have 31 failures and one success, and the model still works great. That’s how we’re designed."

pdq 12y ago
Unfortunately that's more of a defense of YC's funding of the Immunity Project than a defense of the Immunity Project itself.
- the_watcher 12y ago
  The point is they don't need to defend the Immunity Project. They are giving them the resources to (ideally) allow them to defend themselves. If they fail, YC is fine with that, but the Immunity Project at least has the chance to try something.
  - Fomite 12y ago
    I think a lot of the pushback, and absolutely my source for concern, was not so much YC funding the Immunity Project, but the hype spike that comes from a high profile investment around something with very, very little actual scientific evidence behind it.
tdaltonc 12y ago
I was more struck by this part: > How many Nature papers are not reproducible? To call out a new bunch of people who are trying something different because people are afraid they’ll fail is sort of hypocritical given that we don’t really check whether anybody else’s results are correct, either. Peer review is more about politics then reproducibility. Reproducibility is really important, but Nature doesn't seem to agree.
- 12y ago

fasteo 12y ago

This is a wise move. Let me suggest the mitochondrion as the main target to explore: - In a very simple but accurate analogy, a computer will not work properly - if at all - if the power is not coming. You can have the best hardware; you can put endless hours to develop the best possible software, but nothing matters if the power is not coming. - Mitochondria produce 90% of the energy - ATP - we need to function. - Mitochondria are a relatively simple structures. Its DNA is way smaller and simpler than the nuclear - double helix - DNA. - Many health issues seems to be the result of a primary mitochondrial dysfunction, or - Many health issues will result in a secondary mitochondrial dysfunction. I do have a mutation in my mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA), so - I know what I am talking about and - Yes, I am very biased; my life depends on this.

dnautics 12y ago
The guy who postulated and validated the way that the mitochondrion operates was very much a scientific outsider and had to secure funding and run his lab outside the traditional scientific apparatus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell
- pvnick 12y ago
  Everybody: "All these ATPs must be coming from something very similar to glycolysis." Peter Mitchell: "Guys, I think the concentration gradient is responsible" Everyone: "Shut up Peter" Later, as Peter was accepting his Nobel prize for discovering one of the most most important biochemical processes, he got to say "I told you so." I didn't realize he had to secure funding from an outside institution though, that's really interesting. Thanks for that TIL moment.
  - dekhn 12y ago
    To be honest I doubt I would have believed him at the time given the context. It's a pretty complicated theory that requires a subtle understanding of biophysics. Remember the reception to the Avery/McCloud experiment- people still insisted protein was the heritable molecule. People simply couldn't understand how a "simple" polymer like DNA could encode information. it was a real mind-bender because (AFAICT) nobody really appreciated how nonuniform polymers could code for information. Or the reception to the discovery of enzymatic RNA. How could RNA possibly be enzymatic? Well, now we know that RNA runs the game and protein is just muscle.

pearjuice 12y ago

I don't think investing should be dumbed down to betting. The public already has high aversion towards "throwing $120K at [random] companies". YC (and with them a lot of accelerators/investors) analyze their prospects. Sure, sometimes there is a chance and an underbelly-feeling involved in whether a startup should be invested in, but to degrade investments as "betting" is probably the highest insult an investment/accelerator-firm can get.

return0 12y ago
What should they do instead? Make a hedge fund with the money? Yeah, that worked out well..
- Fomite 12y ago
  The parent's suggestion is that to refer to a YC investment as a "bet" is a little bit of a misnomer. It's a targeted, reasoned investment, not "120K on 'Little Devil' to win."

001sky 12y ago

One of the side effects of 120k vs 20k opening the model to different sectors/needs at the earliest stages. What will be interesting to see is the developments in expertise and what different requirements there are for managing and mentoring entreprenuers in these different areas. Would be great to hear some thoughts on that, if not immediately perhaps in a years time or so.

almosnow 12y ago

I didn't grasp "the business model". Their plan is to offer the vaccine for free, how do you monetize on that? Or is it "for free bc it will be paid by governments"?

tdaltonc 12y ago

Science has become sclurotic. Teams that are funded outside of state science system are going to be able to take risks and try things that would be unthinkable in academia. Each of these teams in an experiment in a different way to do experiments. All of science will benefit from the results of these meta-experiments.

Fomite 12y ago
My experiences with industry research to date do not particularly back that up. For every "academia is too conservative", there's a pushback of "Yeah, but will this be profitable?"
- tdaltonc 12y ago
  I think that what is different now is the cost of trying out a new idea. A biotech team is able to try something out without buy-in from academia or the big bio-tech firms. They need some money, but much less than they would have needed 10 years ago.
  - Fomite 12y ago
    And that is very cool. But frankly, is as true in academia - a new assistant prof. has the startup funding to try something big and splashy without bankrupting the lab. "Biotech is getting cheaper" applies to both groups.
    - dnautics 12y ago
      Yes, but how are new assistant professors selected?
      - danieltillett 12y ago
        It is not how they are selected that is the problem - it is what they need to do to get tenure. This is what kills all innovation.

mifeng 12y ago

The issue isn't so much YC's investment in projects that may not have scientific rigor, but that of individual investors via crowd-funding platforms. At an extreme, this results in a company like GoBe raising $1.1 million on IndieGogo with PR and a slick video. YCombinator has the sophistication and time to vet their investments. If they want to back something most of the scientific community thinks won't work, all the best to them. However, raising capital from mom-and-pop investors is another story.

timr 12y ago

"The thing I never understood is: shouldn’t the biotech community be happy that more people are trying to do this and that more people are funding this work?" It's a world where lots of great ideas are underfunded (or not at all), because the traditional government sources don't have the money needed to invest in every good idea. Also, it's still generally too expensive to chase every possible business idea in biotech, and there are plenty of ideas with academic promise that don't get anywhere because the traditional sources of investment are too conservative. Scientists get punchy when they see funding going to "unproven" entrepreneurs, while they're slaving away at research that is peer-reviewed, but isn't getting any investor attention. It's good to see YC bringing in outside expertise for this area, because the likely outcome for amateur angel investment in biotech would be investing in lots of flashy-but-insubstantial entrepreneurs, while legitimate research never gets off the bench. In my experience, it's much harder to evaluate biotech ideas than software.

danieltillett 12y ago
My business straddles both biotech and software and I find it much easier to evaluate good biotech ideas than software ideas. The problem is the money and time required is so much greater with biotech that almost none of the good idea get invested in.
- timr 12y ago
  Agreed about the money and time, but I do think biotech ideas are harder to evaluate, if only because the basic knowledge required is far more specialized. Your average CS undergrad can understand the technical risks of most software startup ideas, but you need at least a graduate degree or equivalent industry experience to be able to evaluate the technical feasibility of lab research. Moreover, life science research depends on sophisticated intuition that can't really be taught in a classroom.
  - danieltillett 12y ago
    I agree the barrier to entry in biotech is higher than software - in the area of bioinformatics it is usually easier to train someone with a life sciences PhD how to write software (bad software usually) than it is to try to train a CS graduate in the required life sciences. However once you have skills in both area the biotech ideas are easier to evaluate. I think this might be due to there being more good biotech ideas around because far fewer can be exploited because of the cost.

danieltillett 12y ago

Biotech start-ups are very different to most other technology start-ups. I am not sure the ecosystem that YC has is really adaptable to "wet" biotech. I certainly hope I am wrong as biotech could definitely do with new thinking and approaches to funding.

collyw 12y ago
A lot of biotech isn't "wet" these days. I work in a sequencing centre. More than half of the employees seem to be computer based.
- danieltillett 12y ago
  DNA sequencing software is what my company develops (if you still have any ABI machines it might be of interest). If your centre is like my customers the computer based people still need the wet lab people to generate the data.
  - collyw 12y ago
    All Illumina here. Yes, of course we have wet lab people, but excluding admin staff, I think the wet lab staff make up less than half of the workforce.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

pvnick 12y ago

Great! This is why I went back to school to get my biochem degree. I was a data scientist working with hadoop + mahout at a startup and I said "this is going to revolutionize medicine." When I get my masters in biomedical engineering in a few years I have a dream to help found a company that applies big data and machine learning to problems with clinical significance. Elizabeth, you may end up hearing from me :P

lanaius 12y ago
If startups don't work out because of sensitivity in medical data, look at Northrop Grumman. They work with the CDC on big data analysis.
dbcooper 12y ago
Look for something beyond target identification, if you can. That is lowest part of the value chain.
- pvnick 12y ago
  Not sure what you mean by targets, are you talking about enzymes and drug discovery?
  - dbcooper 12y ago
    Typically I would be referring to the protein (or other molecule) that you want to target with a drug, to either reduce or promote its action. As wiki puts it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_discovery#Drug_targets http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_discovery#Drug_targets Generally, the "target" is the naturally existing cellular or molecular structure involved in the pathology of interest that the drug-in-development is meant to act on.
- antifragile 12y ago
  True, 'cause one drug for one condition now costs $4-12B, because the success rate is < 0.02%. There needs to be multi-functionality in our innovative efforts when we experiencing such high rates of disruption, say, extinctions.

sandipc 12y ago

"some worry that Silicon Valley's penchant for technology and marketing might not be compatible with medical research” I would say that a good portion of medical research IS technology and marketing, for better or worse.

return0 12y ago
Actually the "might not be compatible with medical research" is the great part about it. Life sciences research often tends to be short-sighted, plagued by the egos of scientists, the politics of scientific publishing and the fight for government funding. I hope YC chooses the "incompatible" route.

epaladin 12y ago

Great news, especially after the "biotech is dead" chants from Wall St. for the last couple of weeks. I hope to see some posts like "XYZ Company (YC ##) hiring bioinformatics developer" sometime soon!

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

NDizzle 12y ago

Is $120k going to be enough to even make a dent in a biotech startup?! It's years and years and years of hard work before you may even get denied by the FDA. With all this funny money flying around who has the patience to wait 10 years to maybe see a return?!

mkempe 12y ago
There is a need for biotech startups that help navigate FDA regulations. Think process & documentation for medical solutions, like shovels for gold-miners. I've been doing consulting work at healthcare manufacturers. The environment is insane -- constraining, slow, unproductive, depressing. And it's used as a huge moat.
- mkempe 12y ago
  Down-voting my comment will not make the FDA regulations go away. You will not bring any biotech products to [edit: medical] market unless you comply with the FDA (or somehow manage to eradicate it). Health-related products and services are heavily controlled -- in ways completely at odds with the common practices of Internet startups. If you haven't yet had to comply with these regulations, you may want to find out how onerous they are. Here is one example: Quality System (QS) Regulation/Medical Device Good Manufacturing Practices [1], covering: Quality System, Design Controls, and Human Factors. They audit your compliance with their regulations. You have to document everything you do, every decision you make, every change you make. That is not how startups commonly operate. [1] http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidance/PostmarketRequirements/QualitySystemsRegulations/ http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidanc...
  - technotony 12y ago
    Who say's biotech products have to go via the FDA? There are all kinds of potential markets with lower or non-existent barriers to market, eg my company which makes Glowing Plants. These are the areas which make more sense initially as you really can take a lean startup approach to them.

gammarator 12y ago

SV VCs getting burned in cleantech was apparently not lesson enough? "One of the key misplaced assumptions that Valley VCs made in cleantech boom times is that the rapid progress of Moore’s Law could be created for cleantech with a little bit of VC funding and Valley smarts." s/clean/bio/g http://gigaom.com/2012/02/01/we-can-thank-moores-law-for-the-vc-cleantech-bust/ http://gigaom.com/2012/02/01/we-can-thank-moores-law-for-the...

enscr 12y ago

Interesting move. I've often heard people complain that the best minds are writing HTML/Javascript when they should be solving real problems (e.g. medicine/health)... obviously because Tech pays big money. I'm not undermining the utility of FB & Whatsapp but I feel a larger percentage of the World population needs better healthcare & medicine. I'd be happy to see the balance of crazy paying startups shift towards life sciences. What could be a better incentive to innovate than this. Have a BS/MS/PhD? Good, go hack the body & decode it. 'x' years from now, there'll be open plugins to debug & fine tune your body.

operon 12y ago
There are also great ("best") minds solving real problems in medicine/health. They are just a trillion times harder/expensive than writing an app.
- enscr 12y ago
  The barrier to entry for writing an app has been lowered because of money+innovation in tech. Hoping for same in medicine. Human simulators would make it so easy to test medicines.

antifragile 12y ago

Being a biotech is not a fundamental constraint unless you approach healthcare orthogonally. We already know that the BIG Pharma R&D model is broken and irrational. Actually words expressed by Merk late last year, as Well as Voltaire in the 1700s! To hack healthcare you must, at least initially, by-pass the gate-keepers, the incumbents, and they're lobbyists by targeting unregulated markets, ideally Golidlocks markets. That's my strategy anyhow.Regarding multi-million dollar costs, people must strain their brains some by doing design-arounds and using surrogate markers and collaborating, i.e., perspective shifting by questions fundamental assumptions. In fact, it is possible to run experiments at 2 orders of magnitude less than what establishment-heavies are doing theirs (speaking from experience).