Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and
Speaker 2: Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio Matter.
Speaker 3: You're thinking a lot about biotech.
Speaker 1: I love the biotech sector. I think I still think
Speaker 1: that there's so much we have yet to learn about
Speaker 1: the body and how things work. Yeah, and I think
Speaker 1: with AI there is this potential.
Speaker 3: I just want cancer to be cured.
Speaker 1: I just want cancer to be truly I know, I know.
Speaker 1: I feel like it's the next big thing. We've figured
Speaker 1: out some things.
Speaker 2: There's idea of cancer moonshots, and it's just I don't know,
Speaker 2: it's just like it's very frustrating.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know, I know, I know. So we talk
Speaker 1: about it a lot. We do. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: money going though at the world of pharmaceuticals and biotech,
Speaker 1: and one story we wanted to point out our Jerry
Speaker 1: Smith wrote this of Bloomberg that Blackstone is investing two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty million in a biotech startup, Xanogramd Therapeutics.
Speaker 1: It's part of the private equity giant strategy to own
Speaker 1: more cutting edge drug makers. I mean, it's called Blackstone
Speaker 1: Life sciences. They have some seventeen billion in au M,
Speaker 1: typically investing in late stage medicines invented by biotech and
Speaker 1: pharma companies in exchange for a royalty and future sales.
Speaker 1: I gets into the model. I think what's interesting to
Speaker 1: me is their latest life science is Fun has six
Speaker 1: point three billion of commitments. It's the firm's biggest haul
Speaker 1: for backing clinical trials of medicines and technologies. I like
Speaker 1: to see where the money flows. I also think money
Speaker 1: can help make things happen and hopefully have a cure
Speaker 1: for cancer. We put it in one bucket, but there's
Speaker 1: hopefully lots of cures.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these are things that Jenny Rook thinks a lot
Speaker 2: about because this is an area that invests in. She's
Speaker 2: the founder and managing director of Geno Adventures. She's back
Speaker 2: here in our Bloomberg Interactive Brokers studio. Your portfolio has
Speaker 2: investments in new culture, reducts, biofellow bond, pet foods.
Speaker 3: And more.
Speaker 2: Good to have you back with us. It's been gosh
Speaker 2: since January when we last spoke. How are you doing.
Speaker 1: Well, nothing's happened, right, It's.
Speaker 4: Been pretty chill.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, well, you know what's the connection between the
Speaker 2: public markets and and sort of what you see in
Speaker 2: your world of venture capital and VC investing. Is there
Speaker 2: any connection to volatility that we saw in March, increase
Speaker 2: in sentiment, positive sentiment we saw in April.
Speaker 3: Does that affect your world at all?
Speaker 4: It does, and maybe even more than I probably originally
Speaker 4: realized getting into venture. But it's exactly as you're just saying, Carol,
Speaker 4: is that when you have in the public markets the interest,
Speaker 4: the capital, the emphasis on driving these later stage businesses forward.
Speaker 4: Getting medicines out into the through the clinic and into
Speaker 4: the market. That drives a lot of the underlying layer
Speaker 4: of demand for tools, the application of AI to the
Speaker 4: discovery of biology, making you less frustrated about what we
Speaker 4: don't know in medicine. So it really is driving I
Speaker 4: think both the right atten and the right investment, Jenny.
Speaker 1: When there's a big player like Blackstone, is that good
Speaker 1: for the market? Is it more competitive than for you?
Speaker 1: These are late stage I think you're earlier, right.
Speaker 4: That's right. So at General Adventures we exist to lead
Speaker 4: first rounds and companies that are hopefully going to be
Speaker 4: public in seven to ten years. Being part of the
Speaker 4: venture asset class. But it's very important to have these
Speaker 4: later stage funds validating that the segment itself is an
Speaker 4: important place to put capital and is driving returns later
Speaker 4: as well.
Speaker 3: So let's get to curing cancer, okay, please, Why is
Speaker 3: it so difficult?
Speaker 2: And our company is still working on this given that
Speaker 2: we've and we've talked about this with you in the past.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, in the past eighteen months or
Speaker 2: so about research funding drying up at some universities. But
Speaker 2: our company is still putting money, oh very much.
Speaker 4: So I would say if you look at the therapeutic
Speaker 4: space generally and where investment is going, that is still
Speaker 4: the oncology and still one of the leading segments for
Speaker 4: investment and innovation. Yes, there's work still to be done,
Speaker 4: but it is no longer a death sentence today like.
Speaker 3: It is not.
Speaker 2: But one scary thing about the reason why I think
Speaker 2: so much money is going into oncology is because it's
Speaker 2: becoming increasingly common for people as they live longer. That's right,
Speaker 2: So more people are getting it because more people are
Speaker 2: living longer. And also there are other types of cancers
Speaker 2: that younger people are now getting.
Speaker 4: Right, the color rectal cancer exactly rise. Yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 4: So in a sense, it is the flip side of
Speaker 4: the coin of living longer, healthier lives some have called
Speaker 4: cancer disease of aging, so we are now living long
Speaker 4: enough to encounter it. It's also very complex. It's not
Speaker 4: one thing, it's not even just one thing in a
Speaker 4: given organ. It's many different kinds of molecular changes.
Speaker 1: So talk to us about what's interesting that's going on
Speaker 1: in terms of biology. What are you seeing right?
Speaker 4: Well, something that's been really exciting in this past quarters.
Speaker 4: You've seen we've started to see the public markets opening up.
Speaker 4: We've had a couple of IPOs in the biotech space,
Speaker 4: surprising and delightful to us as investors in the infrastructure
Speaker 4: and the tool chain. One of those was not therapeutics
Speaker 4: at all, but a proteomics company, so alamar Bio came
Speaker 4: out on NASDAK oversubscribed, has traded up since then and
Speaker 4: the months since then. And what they do is they
Speaker 4: make it possible to measure more proteins in, for example,
Speaker 4: a patient sample, at a greater level of precision and
Speaker 4: sensitivity than ever possible. And the hunger for being able
Speaker 4: to measure what's happening in the protein layer, which is
Speaker 4: in some sense the business end of biology, is necessary
Speaker 4: for the next phase of understanding cancer biology, diagnostics, and
Speaker 4: even kind of engineering of drugs in all of those spaces.
Speaker 1: Why is that like understanding that layer now?
Speaker 4: I think you probably know you've probably heard the dogmas
Speaker 4: and they say genes, DNA make RNA, make proteins, and
Speaker 4: it's proteins that circulate, interact with each other. It's kind
Speaker 4: of the network of what's happening in the body and
Speaker 4: between cells, and it's often proteins. Something going on with
Speaker 4: the proteins that go goes wrong when we're talking about
Speaker 4: disease pathology, and so we need to be able to
Speaker 4: measure that, got it? And you know, we've made bets
Speaker 4: in that space too.
Speaker 1: I think before we got going, I still feel like
Speaker 1: I just that we still don't know so much about Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's our body and what the body can be used.
Speaker 1: I think we're doing. We're learning more with therapy, right,
Speaker 1: and how to use the body to help cure what
Speaker 1: ails us.
Speaker 4: That's right, But all of this depends on and actually
Speaker 4: that AI revolution is fueling hunger for more and better data. Yeah,
Speaker 4: probably know that AI is only as powerful as the
Speaker 4: quality and the amount of data that you put into it. Right,
Speaker 4: and so we've known, as you say, Carol, there's so
Speaker 4: much we still don't know. But now there's reasons to
Speaker 4: get that complexity of DNA because we can interact with
Speaker 4: it with AIO.
Speaker 2: To your point, Carol, I think what surprises me so
Speaker 2: much and talking to with friends who are doctors, is
Speaker 2: how much out there is idiopathic.
Speaker 3: It's the idea that.
Speaker 2: Okay, we recognize that the symptoms exist. We see your symptoms,
Speaker 2: we just have no idea what causes them. Well, like
Speaker 2: that's in twenty twenty six with imaging, with blood testing,
Speaker 2: with all of the diagnostic testing that we have, there
Speaker 2: are still so many more questions.
Speaker 1: So how do we get to those really great data
Speaker 1: sets because I mean our health facilities competing for the
Speaker 1: data because that gives them more value, or is there
Speaker 1: going to be some comprehensive data set so that we
Speaker 1: all benefit off of.
Speaker 4: I think what we've seen so far with AI. Generally
Speaker 4: this is outside of healthcare, but AI is most powerful
Speaker 4: when one can close the loop between generation of exactly
Speaker 4: the right data set at a high quality to answer
Speaker 4: the question you want to answer. So in the healthcare space,
Speaker 4: closing the loop between turning biology into data, feeding that
Speaker 4: into better and better AI models, generating insights, and then
Speaker 4: doing it again, and so that pace of learning with
Speaker 4: the AI support is only accelerating.
Speaker 3: Have we seen any of that proven out yet?
Speaker 4: Yeah? I think you see it in. One of the
Speaker 4: other kind of big news in the space is Roch's
Speaker 4: acquisition of pathai, right, and I think from people who
Speaker 4: are interested in the space and trying to understand how
Speaker 4: AI is affecting healthcare, that's a pretty great one stop
Speaker 4: example or case study because pathai solutions include generation of
Speaker 4: data on samples, visualization like you were saying, and then
Speaker 4: the AI tools to understand it, as well as workflow
Speaker 4: improvements because it all matters. What matters is can you
Speaker 4: deliver it to patients in the healthcare system.
Speaker 1: But you know what that's going back to the data,
Speaker 1: like who is going to be the accumulator like I do.
Speaker 1: We've had a guest on somebody I had talked to
Speaker 1: at Bloomberg and Fast about this whole idea of agentic
Speaker 1: AI but talking about data sets that are very specific
Speaker 1: to a different industry, and her point really was that
Speaker 1: you know, you're not going to need all these lms
Speaker 1: accumulating everything.
Speaker 3: You're going to need these very focused right.
Speaker 1: So who, like, let's take I don't know, colon cancer, Like,
Speaker 1: will there be an accumulator taking in data from global
Speaker 1: so that you really get a great data set or
Speaker 1: does everybody have their own?
Speaker 4: The answer it ends up being both, so you end
Speaker 4: up with large comprehensive data sets. For example, like the
Speaker 4: UK Biobank is a very rich data set with a
Speaker 4: lot of longitudinal information about patients and their healthcare, and
Speaker 4: then the ability to access that and add to it
Speaker 4: the layers of specific data sets that, for example, a
Speaker 4: company trying to develop a diagnostic in a particular cancer
Speaker 4: might add a proteo mix layer or a glycoproteomics layer
Speaker 4: around a particular test.
Speaker 1: Is the US still accumulating great data? With the administration
Speaker 1: and some of the cuts and so on and so forth,
Speaker 1: Are we still accumulating smart data?
Speaker 4: This is a really important question. A lot of the
Speaker 4: conversation this year that I've been in has been what
Speaker 4: is our relative investment in generating more data at high quality?
Speaker 4: And how does that compare to other geographies like China?
Speaker 4: We have to talk about China.
Speaker 3: I want to go in a different direction than China.
Speaker 4: Okay, but because we haven't talked about China, an.
Speaker 2: Are our incentives aligned for in our healthcare system to
Speaker 2: make people healthier?
Speaker 4: It's honestly easier to talk about China than our healthcare system.
Speaker 2: But because our healthcare system makes money when people are sick. Yeah,
Speaker 2: if you think about some of the biggest hospitals, insurance
Speaker 2: and insurance companies.
Speaker 3: Some people argue insurance companies serve as a.
Speaker 2: Check on some healthcare facilities because they're only going to
Speaker 2: pay for X so, and you know, and they kick
Speaker 2: you out after a certain number of days.
Speaker 3: Are the incentives misaligned in our society?
Speaker 4: And you're quite right to talk about the incentives. And
Speaker 4: you know this is well above my pay grade as
Speaker 4: a venture investor, So.
Speaker 2: That must cross your mind when you're doing the calculation.
Speaker 2: Have a spreadsheet out.
Speaker 4: So you have to think about, is a solution that
Speaker 4: is based on innovation coming to market in a way
Speaker 4: that can at least align enough of the incentives to
Speaker 4: get there to be used.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the question. Okay, next time, China.
Speaker 4: Next time, China, time China.
Speaker 1: No, I really do want to talk because we're talking
Speaker 1: about China solar early like yeah, I.
Speaker 4: Have to well, yeah, and we have to also talk
Speaker 4: about how that intersects with biotechnology beyond healthcare as a
Speaker 4: technology layer or general purpose technology for security, for defense,
Speaker 4: for agriculture and food for industrials. You were talking earlier
Speaker 4: about critical minerals. It's a space where we're looking where
Speaker 4: bio can have an impact as well.
Speaker 1: See, you always leave us won anymore, Jenny Rook, my
Speaker 1: pleasure be well, be well, have a good weekend. Thanks
Speaker 1: for thanks for bringing by Jenny Rook. She's founder imaging
Speaker 1: director of General Adventures