In this episode, a16z 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. And so that part was there. 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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Folding@Home

AlphaFold

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Vijay Pande

Derrick Harris

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