antibiotics

a16z Journal Club (part of the a16z Podcast), curates and covers recent advances from the scientific literature -- what papers we’re reading, and why they matter from our perspective at the intersection of biology & technology (for bio journal club). This inaugural episode covers 2 different topics, in discussion with Lauren Richardson:

0:26 #1 identifying new antibiotics through a novel machine-learning based approach -- a16z general partner Vijay Pande and bio deal partner Andy Tran discuss the business of pharma; the specific methods/  how it works; and other applications for deep learning in drug discovery and development based on this paper:

• "A Deep Learning Approach to Antibiotic Discovery" in Cell (February 2020), by Jonathan Stokes, Kevin Yang, Kyle Swanson, Wengong Jin, Andres Cubillos-Ruiz, Nina Donghia, Craig MacNair, Shawn French, Lindsey Carfrae, Zohar Bloom-Ackermann, Victoria Tran, Anush Chiappino-Pepe, Ahmed Badran, Ian Andrews, Emma Chory, George Church, Eric Brown, Tommi Jaakkola, Regina Barzilay, James Collins

11:43 #2 characterizing the novel coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic -- a16z bio deal partner Judy Savitskaya shares what we can learn from the protein structures; the relationship to the 2002-2004 SARS epidemic; and more based on these two research articles: 

• "Structure, Function, and Antigenicity of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike Glycoprotein" in Cell (April 2020), by Alexandra Walls, Young-Jun Park, M. Tortorici, Abigail Wall, Andrew McGuire, David Veesler
• "Cryo-EM structure of the 2019-nCoV spike in the prefusion conformation" in Science (March 2020), by Daniel Wrapp, Nianshuang Wang, Kizzmekia Corbett, Jory Goldsmith, Ching-Lin Hsieh, Olubukola Abiona, Barney Graham, Jason McLellan

You can find these episodes at a16z.com/journalclub.

with @JorgeCondeBio, @julesyoo, and @omnivorousread

In some ways, the coronavirus feels like it came out of nowhere—a kind of Black Swan event. But at the same time, it's been exposing a lot of the fundamental flaws in our healthcare system that now feel like a perfect storm coming together... and have hurt our ability to address the problem that we should really have seen coming.

In this episode, a16z General Partners Jorge Conde and Julie Yoo talk with Hanne Tidnam about some of those big forces and dynamics in the healthcare system, at the intersection of business, policy, and public health: how in healthcare like perhaps nowhere else, broken policy can lead to broken business models that, in the wrong circumstances, can then lead major failures in public health like the one we’re seeing today; where we’ve seen this before, in the markets of vaccines, antibiotics, and diagnostics; and what should be different next time, so that when a new pandemic hits we aren’t facing another perfect storm.