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Utilizing resources such as virtual data rooms and shared laboratories facilitates the growth of biotech startups. This is good news: we need more companies attacking cancer from novel angles, including AI-enabled early detection. And who knows, maybe one of them will become a trillion-dollar company. — Ana
Expanding early cancer detection
The newest from Y Combinator startup application (RFS) It's worth a read, and not just because it's been a while since the incubator shared the ideas and categories its partners “would like to see more people working on.” As my colleague Sarah Pérez pointed out, YC had not updated its full list since 2018.
As a whole, YC's RFS is a great way to get a sense of the zeitgeist; the list includes AI, of course, as well as climate technology, defense technology, and more. But focusing on individual requests is also a worthwhile exercise.
One of the requests that caught my interest asks “a way to end cancer.” Written by Surbhi Sarna, a partner at YC group and former CEO of a medical device company, it focuses on MRIs. “Given that most cancers are now treatable if detected early,” he wrote, “this technology would dramatically reduce cancer deaths if implemented widely and affordably.”
My first thought was that there are already MRI startups out there. Just a few days earlier, New York-based Ezra raised a new round of $21 million – and we're talking about a team that TechCrunch covered for the first time in 2018. It also has competitors, such as nekoendorsed by Daniel Ek of Spotify, and Prenuvowho has a $2,500 full body scan that was promoted by Kim Kardashian.
For Sarna, that price is part of the problem, as it inherently limits scale, but it's not the only one. “There is a backlash from the medical community as MRIs also create incidental findings (or false positives) that cost our healthcare system valuable research time and money.” the jury is still outside whether they are beneficial or for individuals, much less for society. But YC still hopes startups can help.
“For this to work, the world would need to increase at least 100 times the number of MRI scans it performs. Doing that will require innovations in MRI hardware, artificial intelligence algorithms to interpret scans and reduce false positives, and business models and consumer marketing to make it a viable business.”
Of course, companies like Ezra hope to do some of this in-house as well. in his last Launch pad, the startup boasted that it “leverages Al at every step of the recruiting process.” But if others can contribute from other angles, I can see why YC would be interested: I am.
Coworking for biotechnology
Shared lab spaces have been a game-changer for biotech startups, Nature reported. Of course, coworking is not new, but coworking labs offer their clients much more than office space, saving them time and money.
This reminded me of the Startup Battlefield alum. Parallel health – its chief scientific officer, Nathan Brown, had mentioned shared labs in passing when we chatted at Disrupt. I noticed that I had appreciated a republishing of the Nature article, so I asked him what he thought. She confirmed that the skincare startup she co-founded had been using BioLaboratories' shared facilities in Los Angeles, and highlighted some of the benefits of this concept:
BioLabs has allowed us to profitably create a consumer biotech product. They make lab infrastructure available to us without having to spend our entire seed round on capital expenditures like DNA sequencing machines, laminar flow hoods, and lab freezers. We also save immense amounts of time at BioLabs, because they manage all aspects of environmental health and safety, as well as infrastructure management. Perhaps most importantly, they create a thriving culture of innovation where startups can easily collaborate and learn from each other.
While this can be interpreted as local endorsement, startups don't have to be based in California to take advantage of this trend. BioLabs itself is a franchise that has expanded to a dozen locations, and similar things could probably be said for many competing facilities around the world. However, a founder interviewed by Nature, Accurate health CEO Jessica Sang shared a caveat: Some labs are better equipped and have more reach than others. “If you're thinking about starting a business, try visiting a few to see which one is the best.”
Virtual data rooms
Virtual data rooms are another important resource for biotech startups. Calling them “the unsung hero of biotech funding” and noting that they can also be useful in business development conversations, a16z published a guide about what biotech teams should and shouldn't put in their data rooms.