#5 - Frontier Tech Developments
Synthetic meat, techbio platform KPIs, ML for matching sound effects to audio, Rockley photonics for biometrics, wearables for consistent hormone monitoring, China & AI, and a supply chain holy grail.
Frontier Tech Investment Theses
Synthetic Biology: “Cultured Meat: A Comparison of Techno-economic Analyses” by Linchuan Zhang (9.24.2021)
A summary of investor predictions about animal cell based meat reaching cost parity, based on factors such as food vs. pharma grade bioreactors, media/growth factors (such as fetal bovine serum), amino acids, and cell engineering.
Healthcare: “2022 Healthcare Predictions” by Bessemer Venture Partners (1.11.22)
Infrastructure as a service, increased focus on clinical outcomes in a world of greater competition, the great resignation of clinicians, a tech-enabled renaissance for the independent clinician, and much more!
Biotech: “TechBio KPIs: Is Your Discovery Platform Validated?” by Pablo Lubroth (Hummingbird Venture Partners, 4.5.22)
“Given the number of metrics a company could report on, the key question that arises for founders is ‘How do I show that my platform has been validated?’” A guideline:
Research Developments in the Frontier Space
Machine Learning & Video/Audio Editing: “Soundify: Matching Sound Effects to Audio” by Runway (disclosure, our firm, Compound, is an investor)
Incredibly exciting system that automatically (1) finds suitable audio for a video clip, (2) precisely aligns sounds to video, and (3) tunes parameters such as pan and gain frame-by-frame automatically.
Synthetic Biology: “Designing DNA with AI: Synthetic enhancer sequences created using deep learning” by Elliot Hershberg (8.7.22)
“If we can predict gene expression from DNA, can we also engineer DNA to encode specific expression patterns? This would effectively turn the field of synthetic biology into a more quantitative field. …. In this study, they used these models to guide the design of totally new enhancer sequences that expressed genes only in specific cells.”
Machine Learning & Education: “Minerva: Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Models” by Google Research (6.30.22)
Google is making some interesting progress in the quantitative reasoning space, an area of machine learning also heralded as a notable benchmark for the next inflection point of ML. “Quantitative reasoning is one area in which language models still fall far short of human-level performance. Solving mathematical and scientific questions requires a combination of skills, including correctly parsing a question with natural language and mathematical notation, recalling relevant formulas and constants, and generating step-by-step solutions involving numerical calculations and symbolic manipulation.”
“Minerva combines several techniques, including few-shot prompting, chain of thought or scratchpad prompting, and majority voting, to achieve state-of-the-art performance on STEM reasoning tasks.” You can play with their model as well!
Solving a multi-step problem: A question from the MATH dataset and Minerva’s solution. The model writes down a line equation, simplifies it, substitutes a variable, and solves for y.
Market Commentary in Frontier Tech Space
Wearables & Biometrics: “Rockley Photonics Will Revolutionize Healthcare By Measuring Biomarkers Such As Glucose With Lasers In The Apple Watch” by Dylan Patel (7.22.21)
“Rockley Photonics is a silicon photonics firm focused on medical technology that is going public through a SPAC ($SCPE). They have developed a novel, non-invasive multimodal method for biomarker monitoring. Rockley’s method involves many lasers on a single microchip being bounced off a human to measure lactate, alcohol, CGM (glucose), hydration, body temperature, blood pressure, blood oxygen, and heart rate. The technology that Rockley has developed is so compelling, Apple has already paid them $70M in engineering fees. SemiAnalysis believes that Apple watches in 2022 or 2023 will begin integrating this photonic sensing platform.”
The constant refrain in the wearables and biometrics space is “why won’t Apple own this in 5-10 years?” This will certainly cause waves in the space, and give Levels, the trendy continuous glucose monitoring company, a run for its money if Apple does proceed with integrating these sensors.
Pharma & Biology: “Moderna's Bets: Moonshots and Platforms” (8.8.22)
“But part of Moderna's bet was that their company was not an effort to spread out research dollars and eventually luck into a blockbuster product. They argue that mRNA is a broadly applicable technology. From the S-1: ‘We believe the manufacturing requirements of different mRNA medicines are dramatically more similar than traditional recombinant protein-based drugs across a similarly diverse pipeline.’ The low initial cost for mRNA drug development creates a notable competitive dynamic: since drugs are expensive to produce, sometimes when a large company goes after a particular market it can scare away smaller competitors (or their funders). Splitting the market is a challenge.”
China & AI: China AI Venture Capital Trends Report (8.1.22)
“In 2021, only 57 AI companies were established in China. This number has fallen sharply from the peak in 2018, when Chinese entrepreneurs started 1089 new AI companies.” This is a wild drop following China’s pivot against private enterprise in the past few years - particularly against companies like Didi, and Alibaba CEO Jack Ma.
Bonus: Patent Edition
Endocrinology: Secretive Projection Computing Company Humane’s 2018 patent for sensor based cycle tracking (Shoutout to Hope Angel Williams for spotting this!)
Unfortunately it looks like they’re just doing basal body temperature tracking (more precise temperature). This is exciting, but not revolutionary as many women track this manually with a thermometer as an indication of ovulation - it won’t give you a granular breakdown of estrogen/progesterone.
Open question that I’ve been thinking about a lot: what would consistent hormone monitoring look like? (cortisol, estrogen, progesterone, etc)
Fertility, PMDD, and menstrual cycles as well as PCOS, endometriosis, depression, thyroid issues and many more endocrine related issues - are currently managed with very blunt tools for trying to play with hormonal balance.
Generally this looks like prescribing birth control, basal body temperature measurements for fertility, or 1 a month hormone panels & at best once a week saliva tests for fertility. In my opinion, the fluctuation of hormones throughout a day/relative to environmental factors is actually key to understanding these dynamics and whoever tackles this will revolutionize the space.
Holy Grail Resource: Supply Chain Syllabus
Endless reading about all things supply chain. On my Substack home page, I’ll be regularly linking holy grail resources in the future.
Frontier tech jobs:
Renewable energy / oceanology: Mechanical & electronics engineering https://boards.greenhouse.io/stealthenergystartup
Machine Learning / Creative Tooling: ML engineer, research scientists, SWE https://runwayml.com/careers/
Autonomous Vehicles: Robotics, data science https://wayve.ai/join-us/
Infrastructure/Fintech/Agriculture: https://ambrook.com/careers
Chemical Engineering / Biology: Helaina, synthetic breast milk
Neuroscience / BCI: Science.Xyz (Neuralink spinout): https://science.xyz/careers/
See details on what the team is working on here
Biology / (CV/ Embedded Systems) Engineering: Spaero, lab automation
Biology: Culture Biosciences, cloud-based bioreactors
Psychedelics / Manufacturing: Psygen
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