[volkk]

i imagine a big reason for this is that we don't have a silicon valley of biotech pumped with VC money. and presumably a big reason for that is there's all kinds of red tape when it comes to health and humans. no such thing as "disrupting" if you're going to violate some intense laws and then get arrested for it or get your labs shut down. or even worse, the potential resulting violence from fundamentalists surrounding your campus, or stalking employees. scary stuff

[roughly]

Well, even getting past the human/medical side - one thing the computer/VC people miss coming into the field is Bio is both expensive and not amenable to the kinds of growth/pricing curves computers have been. It costs money to grow a cell strain in a tube, but to grow 100 cell strains, it costs… 100x as much. It takes 24 minutes for E.coli to reproduce, but in another couple years we’ll be able to get that down to… 24 minutes. There’s opportunities for improving the cost, reducing the spend on reagents (or finding better ones), reducing the number of strains required, that kind of thing, but the computer/internet/digital industry’s basically priced a Moore’s law curve in on everything, and that just doesn’t work in Bio. The capital costs are large and the time to iterate is really slow compared to digital.

[TeMPOraL]

> no such thing as "disrupting" if you're going to violate some intense laws and then get arrested for it or get your labs shut down. or even worse, the potential resulting violence from fundamentalists surrounding your campus, or stalking employees. scary stuff

Or, you know, actually "disrupt" something, like endocrine system of half a million people, or the entire global economy.

For the past decade, "Uber for Biotech" was my go-to scary hypothetical to post in HN comments. I'm increasingly worried we may actually get one for real.

(And to be absolutely clear: I'm fine with the biotech part itself. I'm worried about the consequences of using it to frack markets, SV-style.)

[toss1]

Yup, Theranos attracted more than $700 million, was valued at $10 billion, and silently returned bogus test results for thousands of people. They weren't doing anything like altering people's DNA, immune systems, endocrine systems, etc.

Yes the barriers and regulations are (rightly) much higher than just business or consumer software, but I fully expect that the VC money will be, and in fact is already moving there. VC is very herdlike, and it'll only take a few really hot biotech hits to open the floodgates. I'd predict 5-10 years away, maximum.

[Balgair]

TBF, San Diego and Boston are the centers for Biotech. The issues you raise are the correct ones.

[asielen]

Also Oyster Point in South San Francisco (north of Silicon Valley) is a massive biotech hub.

In some way hubs are even more important in biotech than in software because of the massive startup cost.