TechBio Insights from Leading San Francisco Bay Deep Tech VC
The DCVC Deep Tech Opportunities Report is live! And here’s the exciting part: Chapter 2.0 is all about the rise of TechBio. ‘TechBio is emerging as the data-centric, AI-native counterweight to biotech’, says the report. DCVC is a prominent California-based Deep Tech venture capital firm that is at the forefront of the TechBio revolution. They recently closed their $400M DCVC Bio III fund, dedicated to leveraging AI-driven platforms to accelerate the discovery of new medicines. Building on this report, I am happy to share a glimpse into the TechBio revolution, highlighting a few key achievements that are both inspiring and poised to spark ideas within the Quantum Biospace community.
To start with, the report is providing an excellent description of what TechBio is about :
‘We use TechBio, an inversion of biotech, as a name for the new branch of the AI industry that constructs proprietary biological and chemical datasets to fuel advanced computation and raise the hit rate in drug discovery. (…) TechBio companies still do plenty of wet-lab work, but their fundamental business proposition is different from that of their biotech elders. TechBio companies aren’t built to pick apart the molecular pathways behind specific forms of neurodegeneration, cancer, or arthritis and engineer potential cures – a high-risk strategy that fails far more often than it succeeds. Rather, they’re built to collect the raw data that will reveal, through in silico modelling, which hypothesis and drug candidates are most worth testing.’
In short, TechBio means moving away from testing one hypothesis at a time towards identifying and prioritizing the hypotheses that are most worth testing. This is a real paradigm shift allowing broad exploration before choosing the focus.
Let’s focus on two companies from the DCVC’s portfolio, Recursion Pharmaceuticals and Relation Therapeutics presented in the report.
Recursion Pharmaceuticals truly pioneered the TechBio field by starting in 2013 long before there was a common term for it. The company invested near $1Bn over the last decade in building an ultimate TechBio approach. Recursion’s main investments include highly automated and industrialized laboratories supporting 2 million experiments every week, and BioHive-2, the 35th most powerful supercomputer in the world, comprising 504 NVIDIA GPUs and being the most powerful cluster fully owned and operated by a pharma company. By leveraging these assets, Recursion collected 50 petabytes of chemical and biological data since 2018 and trained a series of foundational models called Phenom. The company already has seven drug candidates in preclinical or clinical testing.
Founded in 2020, Relation Therapeutics uses the power of active-graph machine learning, called Metagraph and was awarded access to NVIDIA's CAMBRIDGE-1, the UK's most powerful supercomputer, to power digital biology breakthroughs. The company focuses on osteoporosis and is on a mission to create the world’s largest functional, single-cell bone atlas. A clinical observational study called OSTEOMICS is ongoing to develop a fundamental understanding of cellular bone homeostasis using patient-derived samples is ongoing. Recuitment started in 2023. The trial will recruit 2000 patients until 2032. Leveraging its lab-in-the-loop approach, Relation is rapidly advancing programmes in bone diseases.
Florence Bosco
CEO | Quantum BioVenture Studio
Head of Biotech Business Development | Quantum Biospace by BVI.EU
