In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, a16z Bio + Health General Partner Vijay Pande walks us through the past two decades of applying software engineering to the life sciences — from the Folding@Home project that he launched, through AlphaFold and more. He also discusses the major opportunities for AI to transform medicine and health care, as well as some pitfalls that founders in that space need to watch out for.
Here’s an excerpt of Vijay discussing how AlphaFold and other projects revolutionized biology research not just because of their algorithms, but because of how they introduced software engineering into the field:
“I think the key thing about AlphaFold that really got people excited was not just the AI part — because people have been using machine learning — I think it was how fast, at least to me, an engineering approach could make a big jump in this field. Because this was a field largely addressed by academics, and academics would have a lab of maybe 20 [or] 30 people — some of the bigger ones, maybe slightly bigger. And of that, these are graduate students working on their PhDs. It’s very different than having a team of professional programmers and engineers going after the problem.
“And so that jump in team ability, plus the technology, I think was very critical for the jump in results. And also, finally, I think having a company like Google say, ‘You know, this is a problem we’re excited about and we’re interested in,’ and that AI and biology is something that is an area of great interest to them . . . was a huge flag to plant.”
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Vijay Pande is a former GP and founder of the Bio + Health team at Andreessen Horowitz, focused on the cross-section of biology and computer science.
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Derrick Harris is an editor at a16z, managing the content workflow across the Infra and American Dynamism teams.
More About This Podcast
Artificial intelligence is changing everything from art to enterprise IT, and a16z is watching all of it with a close eye. This podcast features discussions with leading AI engineers, founders, and experts, as well as our general partners, about where the technology and industry are heading.