Hacker News Reader

Comment by OopsCriticality | Hacker News Reader

I'm still wondering what YC's value proposition is in this space: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9998739

Gotta agree with this. If YC is serious about biotech, we should expect them to start bringing domain experts into the fold soon - doctors, surgeons, eminent researchers, possibly folks with high level experience in regulation etc. I imagine we'll start seeing this soon.

They recently added Anne Wojcicki (23andMe) as a part-time partner.

Same here. By partnering with academic labs, you can often minimize the upfront cost of both equipment and technical assistance, as well as gain credibility. Downsides include (1) your IP has to be licensed from the university (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10001393), and (2) you can't (directly) control recruiting.

Agreed on your two points. I'll add that my own experience of licensing (my own) IP from a top-25 university TTO has been interesting: their terms are pretty fair, they haven't been too sluggish on coming to decisions and executing, but despite their previous successes with monetizing their IP they come off as pretty clueless about business in general. I also get the feeling that while they certainly want their money, they're really more interested in the prestige of being able to let their PR office go nuts about how their IP is a commercial success.

What were your thoughts on the whole "cult of the molecule" thing from the interview? It struck me odd that Sam would ignore any number of collaborations that have happened and are happening in pharma, and ignore the (as I see it, very legitimate) motivations for maintaining trade secrets.

Which interview?

> I'll add that my own experience of licensing (my own) IP from a top-25 university TTO has been interesting

In my experience, there's a lot of variance between universities, and even between tech transfer officers within a given university. Another complication: at Harvard/MIT, where professors may have cross-institutional appointments, you need to nail down exactly who you'll be dealing with (for example, the Broad has their own TTO: https://www.broadinstitute.org/osap). There are also other issues, such as IIAs & CRADAs.

> What were your thoughts on the whole "cult of the molecule" thing from the interview?

As you said, it fails to take into account existing attempts to form partnerships by biotech VCs:

- http://lifescivc.com/2014/04/pushing-forward-with-collaborat...

- http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2014/01/a-...

This is one of those situations where presumption of stupidity (http://www.aaronkharris.com/presumption-of-stupitidy) can be very tempting, given the magnitude of the problems that remain unsolved in the biosciences. It can also take quite a bit of digging to find this info - it's not splashed all over the front page of TechCrunch, like the latest batch of YC startups are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com