Gimenez: Governments Fund Biology on 20-to-50-Year Horizons Unlike VCs
Dr. Francisco Gimenez · The Year That Changed Medicine Forever | Francisco Gimenez Explains the Biotech Revolution. · Joe Lonsdale · Apr 18, 2022 · at 20:32
Dr. Francisco Gimenez, partner at 8VC, explains to Joe Lonsdale why government funding of basic science is complementary to venture-backed commercialization.
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“Governments get to think on different timescales than say venture capitalists and, you know, startups, right? A government can think on like the sort of 20, 3050 year timescale to say, let's fund exciting biology just for the, you know, Interest and pleasure of finding things out here that might turn into something.”
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“I would say my sort of falsifiable prediction would be that we're going to start seeing more and more biotechs make drugs that they try to commercialize themselves as opposed to selling to pharma to do the commercialization.”
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“Once we create the tools and technologies to cure those,
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“So we've got, like, on the order of, what, a hundred, maybe 200 pharmas looking to make these M&As. So it means a hundred to 200 chief scientific officers are dictating what does.”
Gimenez: Tenured academics enjoy the privilege of principle without practical trade-offs
“If you are in a tenured position in academia and you consider moving to industry, the dark side, which is always considered like the phrase that they tell you have like the privilege of principle that many other people don't, right? You don't have to make trad…”
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“I think we would flip the model of what we think of in bio life sciences from amelioration of suffering, which is essentially curing diseases, to sort of improvement of, like, human condition, like this, the transhumanist might call it something like that”