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1/ IT'S TIME TO HEAL. Tech is often criticized for a culture of moving fast and breaking things. But what we saw last year was tech enabling bio and healthcare to move fast, to *heal*. https://a16z.com/time-to-heal/
2/ Our new tools and technologies will change how we approach everything, from new drugs to the global market of healthcare—what we design, how we develop it, and how it’s deployed to patients.
3/ Here are the 16 biggest trends we believe are emerging to transform biology, medicine and healthcare: https://a16z.com/2021/01/08/time-to-heal-16-trends-driving-future-bio-healthcare/
4-1/ Patient data moves beyond traditional electronic health records (EHR). We’re finally at a tipping point where patient data generated outside of EHRs will be more valuable than the data generated within it. https://a16z.com/2020/08/07/healthcare-technology-great-unlock/
4-2/ Health insurance gets unbundled. We’ll start to see more emphasis on consumer fintech products for facilitating out-of-pocket healthcare spend, as well as more low-acuity healthcare services being offered as monthly memberships or simple online e-commerce-like purchases.
4-3/ Virtual care becomes a first-class citizen. We’ll start to see it woven into a broader set of care models across the entire acuity spectrum, leading to all kinds of new patient/clinician, supply/demand dynamics. https://a16z.com/2020/03/18/virtual-medicine-telemedicine/
4-4/ A new OS for healthcare. We will soon have entire patient populations being treated primarily with virtual-first care models, powered by novel tech operating systems, needing new infrastructure tools.
4-5/ The home becomes a primary site of care (again). The home-based services that became necessary during the pandemic are showing us more than ever how much more care can actually be delivered in the comfort of one’s own home. https://a16z.com/2020/06/12/return-of-home-based-healthcare/
4-6/ Mental health gets engineered. Technology will play a key role in making this system more efficient: facilitating scalable patient-provider matching, logistics, communication, and overall bringing engineering approaches to this space.
4-7/ Value-based care comes for Rx. New innovations, in both technology and business models, will usher in an era where we increasingly pay for therapeutic outputs (performance) over inputs (doses).
4-8/ Illumina for X. New research tools will allow us to study biology at higher precision, and at lower cost, leading to the development of waves on waves of tools that allow us to quantify biology, health, and disease in ways barely imaginable now.
4-9/ Infectious disease diagnostics and therapeutics attract investment dollars again. With governments stepping up with contracts and incentives, there is once again a viable market for developing the medicines and tools that will protect us from the next big bugs.
4-10/ Clinical trials (finally) go digital, with FDA support. Many more aspects of clinical trial design and execution will be streamlined by software--say bye to clipboards and hello to cheaper clinical trials that include more sites and get new therapies to patients faster.
4-11/ Personal genomics finally goes clinical. And unlike the first go-around, we now see willingness on the part of health systems, payors/employers, and pharma companies to invest in population genomics programs to keep patients healthier.
4-12/ Working on rare diseases gets more common. In recent years, a substantial fraction of new medicines approved by the FDA have been so-called orphan drugs, or drugs targeted at very rare disease indications. Now the interest in rare disease therapeutics is only accelerating.
4-13/ Biotech reaches the industrial age. Platform biotech companies will have an outsized impact on discovery timelines. This will be true in essentially all areas of biotech: small molecule discovery, protein engineering, genome editing, gene delivery, cell therapy, and more.
4-14/ Targeted delivery of complex therapies. Given the pace of advances in this area, we expect to now finally see not only cutting edge cargo, but also multiple novel delivery platforms reach patients in the clinic.
4-15/ Biotech R&D goes more virtual, driving both the computational and experimental approaches through a combination of machine learning, biophysical simulation, robotized experiments, and external development and manufacturing services (CROs and CDMOs).
4-16/ The bright line between life sciences and care delivery blurs. There will be huge opportunities for companies to be built in the white space of this nexus.
5/ All of these trends—and the regulatory tailwinds driving them forward—will bring more change to the healthcare system than we have seen in a generation. But above all, the year of 2020 has brought the end game into much better focus. https://a16z.com/2021/01/08/time-to-heal-16-trends-driving-future-bio-healthcare/
6/ There has never been more opportunity to attack problems in the world of healthcare and bio. COVID has accelerated the future; things that were hard to build but impossible to introduce are now arriving. It’s time to build...and heal! https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/
