Just a few days ago San Francisco based Igm Biosciences launched a successful ipo raising 125 million. The company is developing antibodies to treat blood cancers. Biotech is not my area of expertise. Fortunately, i have three other chairs at this desk and can invite people who are much smarter than i am to talk about the industry. This morning i would like to specifically talk with Genomic Research and crisper, this is a way of editing genes. I would like to talk most beabout the Positive Side of it what it will allow us to do and the lives it will save. You are looking inside the labs of biosciences, created by trevor martin, he is joined by Kristen Brown of bloomberg and aaron brown ofst business insider. Thank you for joining us. Lets keep this simple sequencing is the e reading a document and crisper is the equivalent of word processing. Is that a good place to start. It is a good place to start. Crisper is a tool for programming biology. When you think about dna and rna, the code of life, actually inside of us, plants, animals, crisper is this tool that can read that document and go in and change specific locations. This has been possible before. We are all hearing about crisper, but crisper is new and the best and most advanced way of doing it. Yeah, there have definitely been ways to edit the document before. But they suffered from limitations. It was difficult you edit that thing that you are trying to edit you also edit other parts of the document. You dont want that, right . Crisper is a great a what you a trying to edit and do it in a pass i will and easy accessible way. Trevor, i think most people are most familiar with crisper as a ge you know, curing disease. But that is not what you guys are doing. You are doing something that illustrates the diverse possibilities of crisper. Tell us how you are using crispers search functionality. Crisper can sort of radio he had the code of life as a word document and edit it. Sometimes you dont want to find and replace. You just want to find, to know if something is present or absent. Thats useful when you are trying to diagnose a disease. Trying to stay do i have strep or flu right now. Sometimes you are sick and you are not sure whether you should take a therapeutic. The way we think about crisper at mammoth is as a Search Engine. Instead of a word processing tool we think of it as google, you can type in whatever you want it will search all nucleic acids, the dna and the rna and give you a report of whether it found the pathogen or that odiseind of thats how we use chris. Er is as the Search Engine where we are not finding and replacing, we are thursday finding. You are talking about diagnostics. They are not a hot area of investment. Talk about your strategy there . We are excited about where health care is headed. There is a concept out there, personalized medicine. We are huge believers in that concept where instead of one size fits all in terms of treatments, where we are still at today what if you could tailor therapies to individual patients . That means diagnostics is critical. We are doubling down on that type of future where diagnostics are driving treatment decisions instead of everybodiet going the same responds to every different drug slitly differently. And obviously the doctor will try to dial in the dose, lets give you more, oh, that was too much. But being able to read how a person is built would medicines right. We are seeing this today with things like companion diagnostics where before you are allowed to get the therapy you need diagnostic information to know whether that persmedicine going to be effective or not. Would you be looking at the flu . Would you be looking to create Something Like a pregnancy test . What kinds of diagnosing would you be doing with your tool . We see it as a platform for all sorts of different diagnostics. We are excited about helping others as well leverage the technology you can geno type patients so you know if their code of life is going to respond well to whatever therapy you are offering. Or others outside of health at if you are trying to detect if there is a microbe in your soil and you are a and that microbe is going to help you grow a certain crop. I know one of your visions is this will be a tool that isnt just available to a hospital. It will be available to you in your holes, same way you take your temperature, if you think you have a fever. What will that look like . How will people use these at home . Accessibility is a focus. Right now there is technology out there, you can only access them at a hospital, and you wait a long time and you have lots of a professionals and time and money and people working to the to create a certain result. What we are looking forward to in terms of the crisper search emergency is taking results that were previously only available in a hospital environment and bringing them into areas like assume there are going to be ci the fda or who would be responsible for making sure that everyone followed the rules on these . Diagnostic for an illness the fda probably would step in. Sure. We have seen the fda step in with 23 and me where they are diagnosing disease risk whereas other Genetic Companies are looking at more wellness things they dont step in there. The one you wrote about was more casual, it was maybe less harmful, maybe they werent doing the data the way they should have. It was a lifestyle product. Nobody is looking at those companies. Trevor, who polices you. At mammoth scientific rigor is number bun, if you are offering a diagnostic product i know you police you, who else polices you . Absolutely. For things likeectis diseaseik the fda, we embrace that process. We as a society decided we have certain standards of rigor we want to adhere to. We see it as an Exciting Company to prove you have hit that bar, a public way of saying this is the product thats rigorous, effective. I can see being in favor of that kind of regulation in the sense that you are an upstanding company trying to do it right. You have absolutely nothing to fear. Exactly. Given that fda is not exactly a fastmoving train what is your time line looking like as far as getting the diagnostics we are talking about from the lab interest somebodys home or into hospitals . Im curious who your target customer is, doctors and researchers or consumers . Cause we ar want it just to be y in a Single Market area. In twe want to have these produ out in a matter of years not decades. Oftentimes you will hear about a technology and ten years later, what happened . When was that going to come out. Trevor, i only have a couple of minutes or a minute left. Talk about your cofounder, jennifer. This gives you instant credibility in the genetics and genomics industry. Jennifer is an amazing scientist. This crisper diagnostic technology is coming out of our lab. She invenned it. My cofounders were in hadar lab. I should say Jennifer Dowden to clarify. Continue. I think what is exciting about having jennifer on the team is that science tsk expertise and the vision of where istool . Are there other applications we havent thought of yet . She helps us think about the long term vision or 15 years from now, not just today. We appreciate you being us. This Venture Capital make a buck by doing good . We will take a look when press here continues. The juul. They took 12. 8 billion from big tobacco. Juul marketed mango, mint, and menthol flavors, addicting kids to nicotine. Five million kids now using ecigarettes. The fda said juul ignored the law with Misleading Health claims. Now juul is pushing prop c, to overturn San Franciscos ecigarette protections. Say no to juul, no to big tobacco, no to prop c. Nbc has been talking about climate in krinis. We know the problem. We know some of the solutions. But doing good for the environment and doing good for profits often conflict. We do live in a capitalist society after all. Think of the classic case of an owl in a tree. The environmentalists want to save the owl. The capitalists want to cut down the tree because there is no money in owls. Maybe there is. This is venture firm Data Collective. They are investing in interesting science that can save the world and still return a healthy return to investors. Zach boeing is comanaging partner at Data Collective. He is here with some news. His firm just raised its fifth fund. It was how much money . 725 million. Earlier this week or last week i guess it was, and i read somewhere that he raised 15 million. And thats a lot of money. But it is funny, li right. 725 million. The key is that we actually take that money and produce a return on it and give it back to our investors unlike the 15 million. More than what you started with, right. Exactly. This is not obvious to me. One of the things you are fighting is deforestation. Where is the money in not cutting down a tree . Trees obviously you know, taking a step back, our deep tech investment thesis is what we are pursuing with this fund. And our theory behind this thesis is that we are tackling some of the hardest global problems using novel computational approaches and sorter broader deep tecumseh followin. E investing in is maki the world a better place. Making the world a better place and a greener necessarily a profitable move. It can be, particularly withver. You are an investor in ub, he right . Personally. Right. Venture capitalists investing in uber is not that hark remarkable. But Venture Capitalists invests in things to save animals or trees or things is kind of remarkable because it is not obvious there is money there. Sure. We a great example is my Portfolio Company planet labs. They launched over 200 satellites into orbit and takes a snapshot of every square inch of the planet every day at 10 00 a. M. They were instrumental in tracking and holding brazil to task for all the forest fires in the amazon. That said, this data set is novell and it is valuable and they have other paying positive benefits for the world achieve t while still returning a return. Onebo oth your portfolio i think and biotech right now in generas you see these companies that are doing agriculture. They are doing ago tech. Also doing pharmaceuticals. You have a few Companies Like that, ginko which just raised a big round, now worth 4 billion. Do you think we need to start thinking about these biological technologies at not industry specific . Absolutely. We are small feed investors in ginko. This is tremendous validation for that team. Absolutely. One of the thesis areas we are most excited about is biology as a platform. If you use an a. I. Enabled genomics and these plaorms spawn off hits that are applicable in pharmaceutical areas as well as agricultundmre actually work in all you know, sort of allogie you are most excited about . A phenomenal one is my Portfolio Company rekurgs pharmaceutical. They use advanced Machine Vision and robotics to look at the shape of diseased cells. And it uses this to discover new types of drugs. Obviously the Drug Discovery process is broken. It costs billions of dollars and there are many failures along the way. Recursion has accelerated this process, they have two compounds in the clinic and a third one being offered boy a major pharmaceutical partner. We have talked about the outdoors. I would like to ask you about indoor agriculture. Its hot area right smaller ind environments controlling inputs, co 2, water, light, thing like that and as a result controlling output as well, the a nutritio all of these great things you definitely want to do. My biggest question is in cutting to out the sun, our giant source of energy how much more expensive is indoor ago than traditional agriculture. This references my Portfolio Company plenty, which is a leader in the indoor agriculture industry. And they have achieved broadly, the premise behind the industry is that you can achieve much Lower Energy Usage as well as less labor as well as less using less water. So ins thats where a lot of the expense is. You can actually drive expenses and achieve cost parrette with products that are grown in sort of the conventional way. Obviously in the conventional way there are about over 30 different steps that requirefue, around, hauling tting at a districts center. Driving to the Grocery Store, et cetera, et cetera. Why dont you just grow the greens next to the Grocery Store . You are saying it can be less expensive . It can. I didnt know indoor agriculture was a thing. It is coming. I notice you have investments in a number of different agricultural it makes sense. I mean we all know that when you really think about it, for instance, californias largest industry, if you quiz somebody on it, they will say movies or tech, but it is agriculture. Agriculture is very important, i think sometimes it gets lost in Silicon Valley. We get very just paying attention to Northern California and not the iowa of the world, which is where the actual food is grown. But you one, we feel it is a tremendous of years and there is plenty of room for innovation. The past 20 years a tremendous amount of Venture Capitalt. Ind. Now these technologies are mature and we can use those to disrupt Larger Industries like agriculture. A great example of this is my Portfolio Company pivot bio. Pivot is using microbes to disrupt the 200 billion chemical fertilizer industry. They let row crops like corn and wheat affix their own nitrogen and prevent having to apply fertilizer with big tractors. It boostst yield and it is lower cost. What is behind that venture . I knowt financial, hey we can make money on this. But you are really interested in the world of agriculture . Absolutely. We feel it is a tremendous opportunity to apply the new technologies to disrupt it and provide a return. It is also a polluting industry. Absolutely. Synthetic fertilizer, that industry produces 10 of global Greenhouse Gas conditions. If we can attack that and make it more profitable for farmers thats a win win. Thats the type of investments we at Data Collective like to make. You have raised your fifth . Our fifth Flagship Fund our eighth overall. Dcvcv. Five, dcvc five. Thank you for joining us. Back in just a minute. Welcome back to press here. I was reading your articles. I want to start with you kristen. You wrote an article about there are these new drug companies, hims is one of them, roman is another that is selling i will remind you this is a sunday morning program, selling pills to men for their various needs or things that they need to improve in which it is the real drug. The generic for viagra is its actually legit, right . Yes, it is. The Company Sells other drugs. They are also targeting women selling drugs for sexual health, birth control, all kin things, skin care products. But they are selling them for so much more. If i would go the my doctor to get the erectile dysfunction drug i would pay a lower price than these on line right, you are getting a generic, but you are getting a generic, first of all, much more conveniently. Sure. You know, when i tried the product i think it took me four bart stops on my commute a good way to measure it. To fill out the application. Then you get it in very sleek packagi packaging. Thats what you are paying for. I think what is most interesting about these companies is that they are really going direct to consumer. Right . You are not going to your doctor and saying, you know, you higele it . You are going to their website saying i know i need this drug, let me fill out this on line form. Hopefully honestly. Hopefully honestly to see if a doctor thinks it is possible. Basically you are saying i diagnosed myself, am i right. We think of the direct to consumer skipping the middle man, in this case the doctor as being less expensive, but the member are paying factors higher. For the actual drug depending where you get it. Of course you are not having they dont happen health insurance. If you have Good Health Insurance you are definitely paying more, i think. They. They sell things like antianxiety meds. They sell propran off label does that give them bigger license to sell off label. Off label is when a drug has not approved a drug for that whether they should be it is not illegal to use a off label. Right, a doctor can prescribe a drug off label, but there are questions where you can market it off label. And you have written about a San Francisco company that had the fbi out in front of it. U biome convinced San Francisco that testing pop was a 600 million business. They filed for bankruptcy recently. It is not looking g them. I tried out the product myself also and it sounds very disgusting but it is actually not i didnt think it was that gross. What relooking for . The idea behind it, two products, one is a clinical product. And one is a Consumer Product. The Consumer Product and the clinical product are very similar. The idea is you return a sample of your poop, its tested and you are told essentially what your myobiome looks like from a Health Perspective and if you might be at a higher risk for serious diseases, chrons, irtdible bowel disease being another one. Here comes the fbi. The reason they are bankrupt is because the guy this is the wind baekers are out front. The fbi is related to varying issues with their filling. It came to light that essentially every time you take the test, you get an update with your results and another update a few weeks or months later with your latest results, we found new thing. That could happen up to apparently six times. Also apparently each time an update was run the customer would be charged an additional 3,000. Oh. We are talking about 18,000 here that people were being charged for a test that could not diagnose disease. You have both written about Smaller Companies that are getting themselves into trouble th with, you know working the numbers. Move fast and break thing doesnt really work in health care. Right. I think we are having this moment where a lot of Silicon Valley investors see that the age of the computer has become age of biotechnology and they want to get in on it. But i think in a lot of these instances, tear knows, you buy them, the company i just wrote about called origin, investors did not necessarily do their due diligence. Kristen brown and erin broad within are on the case. Watch out and rules. Press here will be back in just a minute. The juul record. They took 12. 8 billion from big tobacco. Juul marketed mango, mint, and menthol flavors, addicting kids to nicotine. Five million kids now using ecigarettes. The fda said juul ignored the law with Misleading Health claims. Now juul is pushing prop c, to overturn San Franciscos ecigarette protections. Say no to juul, no to big tobacco, no to prop c. Thats our show for this week. A reminder, when we are not working on terking on a podcastd hill road. The next episode comes out tuesday and we will talk about investments in Companies Like nest. Find sand hill road anywhere you find the finest of all podcast. My thanks to my guests and thank you for making us part of your sunday morning. The olympic games, nhl, notre dame football, nascar and sunday night football, only on 2019 r continues herenbc