Life Sciences

[

Life Sciences

thesis

]

Many of the information technologies deployed in the Smart Enterprise Wave are now being applied to the biosciences.

Biological signals of unprecedented richness and volume are being combined with improvements in big data analysis, revealing increasing information about the human body and other living systems, illuminating complex cellular processes, and creating incredible investment opportunities. We call the confluence of innovations in biological and computational technologies the Bio-IT Wave.

What's Driving It

Tremendous opportunities are emerging for entrepreneurs, scientists, and engineers who can harness data-driven biology.

They will be able to bring biomedicine from bench to body by measuring large amounts of biological data, analyzing these data with informatics, and modulating living systems through bioengineering. The measure, analyze, modulate process allows technologists to effectively wield novel biomedical techniques to create cutting-edge products and solutions. Already, the initial Bio-IT companies are transforming healthcare, agriculture, and other sectors, and delivering massive returns on investment. By partnering with Bio-IT pioneers, we can work together to generate incredible value while improving lives.

[drivers]

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Recent events

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Over the past decade, the technologies of the Bio-IT wave have catalyzed numerous fields of study, each of which enables the creation of new companies.

Fields

Microfluidics

Genomics-IT

The Microbiome

Synthetic Biology

Robotics

Microfluidics

Microfluidic devices are emerging as one of the most significant contributors to progress in science and medicine. Particularly by enabling single-cell assays, microfluidics are allowing us to understand the dynamics of development and disease at unprecedented resolution. Mantra Bio, an 8VC portfolio company, is pushing microfluidics down to the level of extracellular vesicles by discovering novel exosome subpopulations for therapeutics and diagnostics. We feel that the next set of companies in the microfluidics space will propel the Bio-IT landscape as much as the high-throughput genomics sequencing technologies of the past decade.

Genomics-IT

Color Genomics, one of our portfolio companies, has built a platform for swiftly analyzing an individual’s risk for common hereditary cancers. We view their offering as paradigmatic of the successful modern Genomics IT company: assaying well-studied genomic variants, providing answers that are straightforward for patients to understand, and focusing on diseases with readily available preventative and screening measures. Teams that understand how we can continue to translate improvements in genomics technologies into increases in scale will be the catalyst for true personalized medicine, but only inasmuch as they also recognize how their offerings can be effectively integrated into clinical workflows.

The Microbiome

High-throughput sequencing techniques are just now providing a cost-effective means for probing the full diversity of the microbiome at strain-level resolution. Progress in this space has increasingly demonstrated the microbiome’s broad impact on drug metabolism and immune responses, well beyond early assessments of its activities in GI conditions and the gut-brain axis. Going forward, we anticipate that through both FMT and more targeted approaches, companies will devise adjuvants and treatments for numerous diseases, while expanding the purview of microbiotic modulation to encompass agriculture and livestock

Synthetic Biology

Early forays into biofuels resulted in hard-learned lessons about enthusiasm for cutting-edge science eclipsing considerations of at-scale profitability. This history holds particular relevance as the promises of CRISPR/Cas systems are captivating the popular imagination. Commercial synthetic biology must focus on producing unique or extremely high-value targets for the industrial processes to be practical. We have invested in Bolt Threads, an exemplar of this philosophy and a pioneer in using synthetic biology for products that are otherwise expensive and difficult to obtain.

Robotics

Cloud computing has served as one of the most transformative technologies undergirding the Smart Enterprise Wave, and the Bio-IT Wave is similarly poised to benefit from, and to develop, labs-in-the-cloud. Particularly as the scientific community places increasing emphasis on reproducible research, the roles of both on-site and off-site automation will continue to grow in academic and industry laboratories alike. Synthego, a portfolio company, is leading the way in building foundries for automated, cloud-based, high-throughput gene editing experiments. These advances will also help to make wet-bench biology more accessible to dry-lab researchers and entrepreneurs.

[Emerging Fields]

Key advisors

Arie Belldegrun, MD

Jonathan Weissman, PhD

Dan Faga

Andrew Perlman

[thesis advisors]

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Life Sciences

Many of the information technologies deployed in the Smart Enterprise Wave are now being applied to the biosciences.

What's Driving It

Tremendous opportunities are emerging for entrepreneurs, scientists, and engineers who can harness data-driven biology.

Recent events