00:00You really think Boston, though, is going to potentially be a winning trade when you think
00:04about the confluence of what's going to win out if health care is supercharged by AI?
00:10Well, Caroline, thanks so much for having me here in the studio. It's great to be back.
00:13And look, as investors, we're always looking for a clear why now in a market opportunity,
00:17and we are certainly seeing signs of transformation in life sciences and AI.
00:24What's changed is that we now have the data, we have the sophistication of the models,
00:28and we have real industry pull to unlock this potential.
00:32And what it could do is unlock $4 trillion worth of value across life sciences and health care.
00:37What's changed is that biology is no longer just a wet lab discipline.
00:41It is now a data and information industry. Many people are calling it tech bio.
00:46And we at Underscore, as pre-seed and seed investors, and particularly based in Boston,
00:50are incredibly excited about this because it's opened up a whole new world of software investing opportunities
00:54in the world of science.
00:56Can I go to that $4 trillion number?
00:59Yes.
00:59What's that pegged upon?
01:01What is it that we're seeing that will be fueled and to garner $4 trillion of worth?
01:06Well, if you think about what the combination of life sciences and actually, honestly,
01:10all of scientific data and health care, it's across the gamut of how this gets done today.
01:15I mean, today it takes $2 to $3 billion per drug and decades to develop these therapies.
01:20Think about if that can get changed to be a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time.
01:27The economic and the human impact of that is absolutely enormous.
01:31So the opportunity we see is across the entire value chain in life sciences.
01:34So whether it's research and discovery, whether it's in preclinical and clinical trials and services,
01:39manufacturing, development and deployment, you put all that together and it's not hard to see how there could be a $4 trillion opportunity coming out of this.
01:46And you said you're seeing signs. What are the signs and what are the software companies that are leveraging those signs?
01:53We're seeing signs across all the different players in the market.
01:56So the major pharma companies are certainly making moves in this space.
01:59They are under enormous pressures. I mean, the cost of R&D is rising.
02:02It basically doubles every nine years. They are facing issues with their margins.
02:08They're facing a potential $260 billion revenue cliff as some of their patents expired.
02:13And so that's creating the market pull for AI solutions.
02:16They are partnering with often many times startup companies.
02:19So, for example, Takeda just launched their partnership with TetraScience, which is a company we're invested in.
02:24Think of TetraScience like the Snowflake, but specifically for scientific data.
02:29And what it's doing is it's partnering with all the major technology players, NVIDIA, Google, Microsoft, Databricks, Snowflake,
02:36and rallying the tech stack around this opportunity to unlock scientific data so it can actually be used by models.
02:42And so in this one, what they're able to do is working with Takeda on hundreds of use cases so AI can sit on top and use this data.
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