Challenges in Healthcare Innovation
Jorge Conde is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a private venture capital firm. In this presentation, he discusses how technology is “rewriting” the healthcare industry, especially in the field of biology in which new medicines are discovered, tested, and brought to market.
The US spend $2.6 trillion on healthcare in 2010, an amount that is expected to double by 2020. Conde starts off by asking whether healthcare can be disrupted. He identifies the convergence of life science, computer science, and engineering as the power that shifts biology towards an engineered discipline, which will have major impacts on healthcare. He then gives an example of how this shift will change the manufacture of medicine. Of course, Conde relates everything back to why healthcare innovation is difficult by discussing what makes making new medicine difficult.
But what’s so important about the transformation of the field of biology? According Conde, biology + technology is not only an industry, but will be part of every single industry.