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Comment by entee | Hacker News Reader

Celine Halioua is an incredibly talented founder. We share investors and have spent a good amount of time together at investor working sessions, and she's building something really cool. This set of resources is quite valuable and provides good insight on how tech and biotech are different.

Some of the reasons they're different are real:

In tech you're pretty sure you can build something, you're just not sure if anyone will buy it. In biotech you're pretty sure people will buy it, just not sure you can build it.

The challenges are far more complex (biology is a bitch) and require a LOT more domain specific knowledge to get traction.

It's necessarily highly regulated.

But things like people not giving younger founders a chance, and the lowballing on valuation don't need to be how things work. Hopefully people like Celine help turn that around.

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> In tech you're pretty sure you can build something, you're just not sure if anyone will buy it. In biotech you're pretty sure people will buy it, just not sure you can build it.

Beautifully stated. There are countless brilliant founders in biotech who toiled for 5+ years to only find out their drug which had a credible mechanism of action failed phase 2 clinicals and now isn't worth a damn. In software, founders of this caliber would have since pivoted and more than likely created a product of some value.

In my opinion, the most important driver to unlock a revolution in biotech is enabling technologies that can create a rapid feedback loop from disease model -> drug hypothesis -> verification of safety & efficacy in humans. Right now, this is a 10 year process. Getting this process down to 1 year and <$50M would be a revolution worthy of several Nobel Prizes.

> There are countless brilliant founders in biotech who toiled for 5+ years to only find out their drug which had a credible mechanism of action failed phase 2 clinicals and now isn't worth a damn. In software, founders of this caliber would have since pivoted and more than likely created a product of some value.

That sounds like it's specific to pharma-biotech. In non-pharma biotech there seems to be more freedom to pivot (e.g. this story[0] from a few days ago).

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23749296

Decelphalized monoclonal humans.

Turn off neural tube development genes so they never develop brains. Grow them in test tubes, then hook them up to life support.

They can never be conscious beings, so you can do anything with them. They're essentially large-scale tissue cultures.

You can harvest them for blood and organs, create knockout lines for different studies, and speed drug development and verification tenfold. Population studies on everything imaginable becomes tractable.

We have to get out of the biological stone age and develop real automation primitives. We don't have a real test kit. Decephalized monoclonal humans is the reverse salient we need.

I hope someone does this. If nobody does it and I wind up becoming a billionaire, I'll do it. It needs to be done.

From a bio perspective, it sounds like a great idea.

From a squimish perspective... it sounds like something from a horrendous distopia. I just have visions of rows of human shaped tissue cultures.

A less horrendous version could be cultured cells for each organ, with some kind of circulation between them which one could test theraputics for cytotoxicity. I've seen "labs on a chip"[0] for things like PCR, I wonder if you could do that for drug testing in vitro.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lab-on-a-chip

You know how after the last big civilization all-out-war it turned out that the losers had secretly engaged in gross scientific experiments on humans? I think it would be naive to imagine that the winners didn't do so as well, they just didn't have their file cabinets put on display to retroactively justify the extreme violence that the world had just witnessed. Governments do scary things in basements, and they keep those basements as secret as possible -- we only get to see behind the veil when a government falls and an opponent successfully takes their files/scientists and that opponent has an incentive to make those files public. Not having brains attached would be a huge improvement over the current state of the art, in my opinion; I believe that we're probably already living in a world far more dystopian than the imagined one being discussed.

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