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Continuous use of resources such as virtual data rooms and shared labs facilitates the growth of biotech start-ups. This is good news: We need more companies attacking cancer from new angles, including AI-enabled early detection. And who knows, maybe one of them will become a trillion dollar company? — Anna
Scaling up early cancer detection
Y Combinator’s newest request for startups (RFS) is worth reading, and not just because it’s been a while since the incubator shared the ideas and categories its partners “would like to see more people working on.” As my colleague Sarah Perez noted, YC hadn’t updated its full list since 2018.
All in all, YC’s RFS is a great way to feel the fun. the list includes artificial intelligence, of course, as well as climate technology, defense technology, and more. But zooming in on individual requests is also a worthwhile exercise.
One of the requests that caught my attention requires “a way to end cancer.” Written by YC Group partner Surbhi Sarna, a former CEO of a medical device company, it focuses on MRIs. “Given that most cancers are now curable if caught early enough,” he wrote, “this technology would dramatically reduce cancer deaths if widely and economically available.”
My first thought was that MRI startups already exist. Just a few days earlier, New York-based Ezra made another round 21 million dollars — and we’re talking about a group that TechCrunch first covered in 2018. It also has competitors, including Neko, which is backed by Spotify’s Daniel Ek and Prenuvowhich has a $2,500 full body scan that was promoted by Kim Kardashian.
For Sarna, that price is part of the problem, as it inherently limits scale, but it’s not the only one. “There is a backlash from the medical community, as MRIs also generate incidental findings (or false positives) that cost the healthcare system valuable time and money to investigate.” The jury is out yet outside on whether they are beneficial or individuals, let alone society. But YC still hopes startups can help.
“For this to work, people would have to scale up the number of MRIs they do by at least 100 times. Doing so will require innovations in MRI hardware, artificial intelligence algorithms to interpret scans and reduce false positives, and business models and consumer marketing to make it a viable business.”
Of course, companies like Ezra also hope to do some of this internally. In his last tar deck, the startup boasted that it “takes advantage of Al at every step of the screening process.” But if others can contribute from other angles, I can see why YC would be interested — I am.
Collaboration on biotechnology
Shared lab spaces have changed the game for biotech startups, Nature mentionted. Of course, co-working is not new, but co-working labs provide their clients with much more than office space, saving them time and money.
This reminded me of Startup Battlefield alum Parallel Health — its chief scientist, Nathan Brown, had mentioned shared labs when we were talking at Disrupt. I noticed he had liked a reprint of the Nature article, so I asked him for his thoughts. She confirmed that the skincare startup she co-founded was using BioLabsshared the facilities in Los Angeles and highlighted some of the benefits of this concept:
BioLabs enabled us to cost-effectively manufacture a consumer biotechnology product. They have the lab infrastructure without having to spend our entire production cycle on capital expenditures like DNA sequencers, laminar flow hoods, and lab-grade freezers. We also save BioLabs a huge amount of time because they manage all aspects of environmental health and safety as well as infrastructure management. Perhaps most importantly, they create a thriving culture of innovation where startups can easily collaborate and learn from each other.
While this can be seen as a local endorsement, startups don’t need to be based in California to capitalize on this trend. BioLabs itself is a franchise that has expanded to a dozen locations, and similar things could probably be said for many competing facilities around the world. However, a founder interviewed by Nature, Accure Health CEO Jessica Sang shared a word of caution: Some labs are better equipped and more spacious than others. “If you’re thinking of starting a company, try visiting just a few to see which one is the best.”
Virtual data rooms
Virtual data rooms are another important resource for biotech startups. Calling them “the unsung hero of biotech funding” and noting that they can also be useful in business development conversations, a16z published a guide on what biotech groups should and shouldn’t put in their data rooms.
