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
<i>"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?"</i><p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
This is a wise move.<p>Let me suggest the mitochondrion as the main target to explore:<p>- 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.<p>I do have a mutation in my mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA), so<p>- I know what I am talking about and
- Yes, I am very biased; my life depends on this.
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.<p>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.
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.
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.
SV VCs getting burned in cleantech was apparently not lesson enough?<p>"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."<p>s/clean/bio/g<p><a href="http://gigaom.com/2012/02/01/we-can-thank-moores-law-for-the-vc-cleantech-bust/" rel="nofollow">http://gigaom.com/2012/02/01/we-can-thank-moores-law-for-the...</a>
I find the timing of this and the "New Deal" press releases a bit confusing -- is YC starting to take biotech companies <i>now</i> (like YC S14) or in the next batch?<p>I'm assuming the New Deal terms are for S14, but was also surprised to see the announcement after the applications were all in.<p>Can anyone clarify / point me to what I've missed?
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?!
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.
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.<p>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.
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.
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!
"some worry that Silicon Valley's penchant for technology and marketing might not be compatible with medical research”<p>I would say that a good portion of medical research IS technology and marketing, for better or worse.
Responding to criticism of the Immunity Project's lack of peer review:<p>"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."