State Street SPDR S&P Biotech ETF

Friedberg support ×2 ▲ on 🤖 AlphaFold 3 turns drug discovery into software — Google/Isomorphic captures it E199 · 2024-10-11 ▶ 30:49

there have been literally dozens of companies that have been started since DeepMind was published, and probably several billion dollars of capital that's gone into companies that are creating new drugs, creating new industrial biotech applications, using this protein modeling capability that was unleashed with DeepMind a number of years ago. So it really has transformed the industry. It'll be a couple of years before we see a transform in the world

Friedberg support ×3 ▲ on 🤖 AlphaFold 3 turns drug discovery into software — Google/Isomorphic captures it E178 · 2024-05-10 ▶ 1:30:14

And they've basically kept all the IP for AlphaFold 3 in Isomorphic. So Google is going to monetize the heck out of this capability.

health care, I believe, should be pretty transformed by this. But the thing I'm personally most excited about is the sort of doing faster and better scientific discovery.

Jason support ×2 ▼ on 🏛️ Section 174 R&D amortization crushes small R&D-heavy companies E175 · 2024-04-19 ▶ 1:09:37

You got to figure out a way to fix this tax issue, or else we're going to kill a lot of startups.

Friedberg support ×3 ▼ on 🏛️ Section 174 R&D amortization crushes small R&D-heavy companies E175 · 2024-04-19 ▶ 1:03:59

The literally hundreds of thousands of small businesses that work in the life sciences sector, the defense sector, the tech sector, that are struggling this year to make the tax payments that are required under this law... And now they're going to have this huge tax bill, even though they didn't make any money this year. And it's crippling businesses around the country.

Jason support ×2 ▼ on 📈 FTC merger-blocking chills early-stage biotech financing E158 · 2023-12-23 ▶ 39:29

One is if we put in more conservative, Republican, Libertarian, etc., less regulatory regime in Washington that could open up M&A as soon as 2025, perhaps.

Friedberg oppose ×2 ▼ on 📈 FTC merger-blocking chills early-stage biotech financing E158 · 2023-12-23 ▶ 42:58

I don't know if I'd take the antitrust regime as being the core driver of M&A not being on the table. ... The biggest driver of concern is just all the return on capital metrics that the big buyers are having to face. Return on invested capital is becoming more important than it's ever been

Sacks support ×3 ▼ on 📈 FTC merger-blocking chills early-stage biotech financing E158 · 2023-12-23 ▶ 40:29

the fact that regulators took 15 months to analyze the deal only to come to the conclusion that they basically weren't going to allow it, and then Adobe finally killed it, is going to have a chilling effect on M&A and Silicon Valley ... when you take half the potential exits off the table, you're absolutely making it tougher for VCs and founders to get a good return. It's that simple.

Chamath support ×3 ▼ on 📈 FTC merger-blocking chills early-stage biotech financing E158 · 2023-12-23 ▶ 36:50

there is no viable M&A path for early stage venture capital businesses. So if you can't have a 20 billion dollar merger or a 40 billion dollar merger or a 15 or 20 billion dollar M&A with a high degree of confidence, then the path to liquidity through M&A is less than 20% of the outcomes

Sacks support ×2 ▼ on 📈 FTC merger-blocking chills early-stage biotech financing E137 · 2023-07-14 ▶ 40:27

There's so few ways to have a good exit in the tech industry that when you take away M&A, it puts a damper on all risk-taking and the deployment of risk capital into the ecosystem.

Friedberg oppose ×2 ▼ on 📈 FTC merger-blocking chills early-stage biotech financing E129 · 2023-05-19 ▶ 57:02

Yeah, but Chamath, we're just not seeing a lot of the younger stuff get blocked. I don't think we've seen any attempts at blocking speculative portfolio acquisitions or speculative company acquisitions.

Sacks support ×2 ▼ on 📈 FTC merger-blocking chills early-stage biotech financing E129 · 2023-05-19 ▶ 59:31

Look, it is hard enough to make money as either a pharma investor or as a VC that there's only two good outcomes, right? There's IPOs, there's M&A, everything else basically goes, everything else is a zero, it goes bankrupt. So if you take M&A off the table, you really suppress the already challenged returns of venture capital.

Chamath support ×3 ▼ on 📈 FTC merger-blocking chills early-stage biotech financing E129 · 2023-05-19 ▶ 55:27

It is because the people that traffic in these stocks are the same ones that fund these early stage biotech companies. And I talked to a bunch of them, and they're like, if these guys block this kind of deal, we're going to get out of this game entirely. So just from the horse's mouth, what I'm telling you is you're going to see a pall come over the early stage venture financing landscape because a lot of these guys that are crossover investors, that own a lot of these public biotech stocks, that also fund the private stocks, will change their risk posture if they can't make money.

Friedberg support ×2 ▲ on 🤖 The gut microbiome becomes a real therapeutic platform E102 · 2022-10-29 ▶ 1:30:21

And so now we can be very targeted potentially about eradicating that bacteria from the gut or kind of changing our gut biome in a way that ultimately resolves to eliminating that disease risk.

Chamath support ×2 ▲ on 🤖 The gut microbiome becomes a real therapeutic platform E93 · 2022-08-26 ▶ 1:14:38

But we are finding now that you can take feces from healthy individuals that have good gut biome and good bacterial counts, and if you put it, inject it into people that are suffering from a bunch of different diseases, it actually is looking like it's curative. So Parkinson's, MS, IBS, colitis.

Friedberg support ×3 ▲ on 🤖 The gut microbiome becomes a real therapeutic platform E93 · 2022-08-26 ▶ 1:09:49

So guys, there's a known principle that's really deeply studied now in neurology, in neuroscience, called the gut-brain axis, that you can actually profoundly affect disease and the condition of the brain and neuro conditions by changing the gut biome.

Chamath support ×2 ▼ on 🏛️ Medicare price negotiation compresses pharma pricing power and biotech returns E92 · 2022-08-20 ▶ 1:26:49

And, you know, they're in the midst right now of completing a massive facility. I think it's in Virginia where they'll be able to make as much insulin as is needed for the entirety of America for no more than 35 bucks a dose.

Sacks support ×2 ▼ on 🏛️ Medicare price negotiation compresses pharma pricing power and biotech returns E92 · 2022-08-20 ▶ 1:25:52

Well, I mean, you're saying that these drug companies are going to make a lot less money. Well, obviously, that's going to have a downstream impact in the willingness to fund new drugs, new investment, new R&D.

Friedberg support ×2 ▼ on 🏛️ Medicare price negotiation compresses pharma pricing power and biotech returns E92 · 2022-08-20 ▶ 1:22:34

And so I'm hopeful that this will actually provide a more effective market force in allowing the biggest customer in the market to negotiate prices and that the VCs, instead of making 48% IRR, they'll ultimately make 28% IRR on the investments that they're making in biotech startups.

Friedberg support ×3 ▲ on 🤖 AlphaFold's open proteome kickstarts a drug-discovery wave E85 · 2022-06-30 ▶ 1:32:47

And that opens up a whole new area of research in medicine, gene therapy, and new things that we can think about targeting to fix a lot of these underlying diseases. ... It's an incredible example of how AlphaFold has been used to solve this really misunderstood or never really well understood aspect of biology that is at the root cause of so much of disease and creates all this opportunity for medicine and therapeutics, research and discovery.

Friedberg reversal ×2 ▲ on 📈 FDA's loosened approval bar creates markets — capital floods the biotech complex E80 · 2022-05-13 ▶ 29:08

roughly one third of public biotech stocks are trading below cash. ... But because the capital markets are gone now for them, or the assumption is, hey, there's not going to be any capital left

Friedberg support ×2 ▲ on 📈 EBV-causes-MS proof turns Epstein-Barr into a funded therapeutic target E71 · 2022-03-05 ▶ 1:23:38

including what we talked about a few weeks ago, multiple sclerosis, given that we now have a strong belief that if you can get rid of the EBV, the Epstein-Barr virus, from your body, you can wipe that out. So CAR-T can in the long run be harnessed not just for cancer, but autoimmunity

Chamath oppose ×2 ▲ on 📈 EBV-causes-MS proof turns Epstein-Barr into a funded therapeutic target E63 · 2022-01-15 ▶ 1:12:12

two-thirds of the adult population under the age of 55 have herpes simplex 4 So you're literally talking about inoculating the entire world. ... And when we start to think about that grand of a scale, there's a cost issue, there's a manufacturability issue, and then there's an ROI issue that unfortunately will be adjudicated.

Friedberg support ×2 ▲ on 📈 EBV-causes-MS proof turns Epstein-Barr into a funded therapeutic target E63 · 2022-01-15 ▶ 1:10:36

But if Epstein-Barr virus is in fact causing this problem with MS, there's a reason to go after it, a lot of money to go after it. ... But this paper has such incredible data and such strong signal that it's really going to catalyze investment.

Friedberg support ×2 ▲ on 📈 FDA's loosened approval bar creates markets — capital floods the biotech complex E59 · 2021-12-17 ▶ 1:09:02

they really kind of struggled for years to find the right footing of what's the right business model and the right product and the FDA kind of struggled with approving this stuff. And then boom, COVID hit. ... I think there's now a few, a handful of these RNA interference products that have been approved by the FDA. And we're now starting to see many more of these cancer and immunotherapy drugs start to get approved as RNA therapies.