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Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

All of VC is frothy right now. It's not that biotech is suddenly more attractive, it's that the tidal wave of cheap money is finally sloshing against the deepest parts of the shoreline.

But also, it's not getting any easier to raise money for a real biotech, where you have to have scientific validation and might hurt people; it's easier to raise money when you're a blockchain biotech, and are promising whizzy vaporware that interacts with customers only in unregulated ways that can't be validated.

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Some of the really big rounds have been for therapeutics as well. Denali raised a $250M series A a couple years ago.

There is just a ton of money right now.

Even for companies like uBiome whose business strategy is “we’ll sequence your microbiome and <waves hands around furiously>”

It sounds like we've figured out what'll cause the bubble this time around

Trying desperately not to be bitter as I submit yet another grant to keep my lab going, and where $250K a year is a really pretty successful grant portfolio.

I'd put Denali in the "actually does science" category, though. Certainly more than uBiome. They do have a drug in clinical trials, after all.

I think that's a bit cynical of the current round of bio-based funding. It's not wrong, but it's also not the whole picture.

It's only just started, but there is now a light at the end of the genetic/gene-therapy tunnel. With the approval of the first CAR last year (and it's success at curing children of leukemia), there's now a very real environment to produce valuable inventive biological products that are not just chemicals or antibodies.

Kite and Juno sales for ~$10B each earlier this year has done quite a bit for the field. Vapor always follows the good money, but it's not just that the money is cheap.

Maybe you're right that investors are going a little crazy because there's a whiff of success in the air. But even so, throwing money at a company like uBiome based on the stuff you're talking about is just the usual VC herd-following behavior.

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