Niranjan Shekar

#data #biology #biotech #food #ai #ML This is such an important issue! First, if you’re not already subscribed to Jesse's newsletter Jesse Johnson, you should be! It’s packed with extremely interesting and educational content, especially for #data and #R&D managers and users (which means all of us, right?). This specific post is incredibly relevant in our company too, especially with teams that aren't traditionally data-oriented. Our solution in my data team along with Omer Genkin? We co-create internal tools with our users, leveraging ML and other cutting-edge techniques to solve real day-to-day challenges. Our mission is to make these tools as intuitive and accessible as possible – with the simplest UI/UX (if any at all) and ensuring the insights are crystal clear. It's all about #empowering everyone, not just the data scientists, to harness the power of #data and #AI.

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Squire Servance founded Syridex Bio, a #healthequity VC fund that invests in therapeutics that address health disparities to drive positive social change. Check out this excellent podcast hosted by Christian Soschner to learn more! 🚀 Investing with Impact: Squire Servance on Health Equity & Venture Capital - proving that profitability and purpose can coexist. 🎙️ What's in the Episode: 1️⃣ Investing in Overlooked Markets: Learn how health disparities create massive untapped opportunities for innovation and investment. 2️⃣ The Power of Diversity: Squire Servance explains why investing in diverse founders and solutions yields better outcomes for both society and investors. 3️⃣ Data-Driven Impact: Discover how Servance evaluates companies to ensure they drive both health equity progress and financial returns. 📌 Quotes: (00:08:10) "The love just kind of grew, grew from there." (00:39:02) "Accelerating health equity, while generating returns, transforms lives and society." (00:57:45) "You can do good and do well by directing capitalism towards health equity." (01:17:35) "We're leaving money on the table by not investing in diverse founders." (01:25:46) "Everyone has blind spots; that's why diverse teams perform better." (01:45:29) "There's no shortcut for success."

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I'm delighted to share news of this new AI-focused drug discovery company, Xaira, built on foundational technology from David Baker and led by Marc Tessier-Lavigne. The company applies AI tools to unlock opportunities in drug discovery for aspects of biology that we believe are not readily obtainable with conventional methods. I co-led NEA's investment in Xaira, along with my NEA partner and the firm’s co-CEO Mohamad Makhzoumi, and I will be joining Xaira’s board. Our enthusiasm for Xaira based on our belief that applying AI and large language models to biology holds immense promise and is still in its early stages. Currently, the application of AI to biology relies on model architectures borrowed from the tech world. A lack of well-curated clinical training sets hinders building and training these models effectively. This limits the advancement of AI in solving biological problems compared to other fields. Xaira aims to bridge this gap. We now have a clear understanding of the data needed to answer fundamental biological questions. By iterating on leading life science models and using focused perturbation data generated through our large-scale experiments, Xaira will generate data specifically suited to building advanced model architectures that are optimized for biology -- and hopefully, unlock therapeutic opportunities for patients who are not being optimally served by existing therapeutics.

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What's Grail REALLY Worth? 😳 Yet another weird thing about Illumina's GRAIL stock offering is the number of shares: 30 million 🤔 Most offerings work a kind of banker math that goes something like: "hey when this newco goes out it'll be worth about $2B and we want investors to get shares worth about $20 because that feels not-to-cheap and not-to-expensive so let's issue 2B/20 = 100M shares. Good example of this was Guardant that went out with 95M shares priced at $19, market cap ≅$2B. So why the small number of 30M for GRAL? Let's say the bankers are trying to get it to trade at the opening around $10 avoid the embarrassment of being a sub $10 "junk" stock, and staying well clear of $1 when NASDAQ "delists" the stock (poor Ginkgo). That $10 price target would mean the bankers actually think GRAIL is worth 30M by $10 = $300M. (Nice add is that the market cap has to fall below $30M (😳) to get into delisting.) Now that's fascinating of course because according to the Form 10 numbers GRAIL thinks it's worth about $2B-ish. And how could it be worth $300M if there is $1B in their bank account? You'd think it would have to be worth at least $1B right? Alas no, because the bankers are probably hearing from investors that they think the company will simply burn that cash up on expenses (remember, $700M/year right now with no plans to change) and the company will, as they say, "go to zero". There was profound indicator of this yesterday in the new Form 10 version as they added the uppercase text since the first version: "It is likely that some Illumina shareholders, INCLUDING SOME OF ITS LARGER SHAREHOLDERS, will sell their shares of our common stock". Could be interpreted that Grail execs and bankers ran a road show pitching the big ILMN investors to hold the stock when it issues to them, but they're saying "hell no wtf". And the Gral lawyers made them add this to the Form 10 -because laws. Not stock advice, just a guy on the interweb 🤷‍♂️

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❗ One of the things I like most about Aron Knickerbocker is that he isn't hyping the hypable. 🤖 His company, Aulos Bioscience, was the first to put an AI-designed #monoclonalantibody in humans. It would be easy to glorify the #artificialintelligence. ⏩ Instead, he says the IL-2 human mAb Aulos is developing COULD have been designed solely by humans. But, Aulos' humans knew how to use tech to do it faster. 📺 🎧 Get Knickerbocker's pragmatic take on AI in biotech, and learn his secret to building successful biotechs (spoiler: it's all about the data) on this week's episode of the #businessofbiotech. Watch here https://lnkd.in/eur__HP, or listen anywhere you subscribe to podcasts. Life Science Connect Bioprocess Online

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It’s exciting to see Oregon policy makers eager to learn how the state can work to build and strengthen every level of the state’s biotech ecosystem. Our three big takeaways today were… 1) Venture creation often starts in academic labs after new intellectual property is filed. If the state worked to increase research funding to flagship institutions like Oregon State University, the University of Oregon, Portland State, and OHSU, we would likely see an increase in the number of patents filed in Oregon. Additionally, any funding used to reduce tuition costs or prevent further increasess would limit the burden of student-debt on Oregonians, making entrepreneurship less risky for young people who would otherwise be forced into a traditional career path. Either policy could increase the number of biotech (and general deeptech)companies in Oregon. 2) The Oregon Bioscience Incubator and OTRADI is a wonderful organization that provides an essential early-stage landing pad for startups in the form of low-cost laboratory space. However, there’s a lot of room for impactful growth for OBI as the steward of biotech in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. We identified a list of aspirational peers for OBI like MassBio, The Engine, and other government and non-government organizations around the globe. These organizations provide a template for success and roadmap for growing the biotech industry in Oregon. In my opinion, the legislature should adopt policies to increase OBI funding for improved facilities, increased SBIR/STTR-matching, and enhanced programming for entrepreneurial education and investor relations. Implementing these changes will increase the chance of success for Oregon-grown startups. Moreover, when coupled with Portland’s low cost-of-living compared to hubs like SF & Boston, these changes could attract other startups to the region. 3) Finally, we discussed what incentives there are for successful companies grown in Oregon to stay in Oregon. We discussed the recent example of AbSci, a 100 employee biotech company, which started in Portland but later moved to Vancouver, Washington for rational financial decisions — due in-part to Washington-state incentives. In my opinion, the state should work to assess and understand disparities between Oregon and other states’ (especially WA & CA) policies that incentivize companies to leave. Matching those incentives so Oregon companies stay in Oregon would be a great first step. More optimistically, the growth of biotech could be used to increase the number of companies in Portland’s urban core. Biotech companies, even those that leverage the latest laboratory automation tools, generally require their scientists be in-office 5 days/week to work in the lab. Policies from the state, or even the City of Portland, that support office-to-lab conversions would certainly be a boon for the industry and the City of Portland. Note, I’m biased here as someone working to grow an R&D team in Portland.

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