Andresseen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm, has launched a bio fund reportedly amounting to $200m.
The new vehicle, led by the firm’s newest General Partner Vijay Pande, who joined as a Professor in Residence from Stanford University, will focus on investing in bio 2.0, an emerging macrotrend including:
– digital health and therapeutics, which leverages mobile to enable traction and patient success;
– cloud biology, which uses software to conduct experiments; and
– computational medicine, which personalizes cancer treatments based on patient tumor genetic screening.
Pande, who was professor of chemistry, computer science, and structural biology at Stanford University. He directed the Program in Biophysics; and ran a distributed computing lab focused on Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, and other types of cancer, explained the objectives of the new bio dedicated fund in an interview available on the firm’s web site. You can find it here.
Presumably as a part of this new effort, the firm has just led the seed round of twoXAR, which has raised $3.4M to advance its digital approach to drug discovery.
FinSMEs
20/11/2015