Fireside Chat, Interview
Big Ideas in 2024: Programming Medicine’s Final Frontier with Jorge Conde
- Partners at a16z identify precision medicine delivery, entertainment franchises, small modular reactors, the nuclear renaissance, and AI in complex workflows as major innovations, noting a compiled list of over 40 significant ideas for 2024.
- The FDA is anticipated to adopt a regulatory framework modeled after the FAA's rigorous yet adaptive aviation safety approach to establish more transparent and flexible processes for approving programmable medicines.
- A pilot program mirroring Operation Warp Speed is expected to launch for rare diseases to test industry interaction models aimed at accelerating medicine delivery to patients.
- Regulatory approval timelines for subsequent CRISPR edits are projected to shorten and accelerate following the demonstration of safety in the first approved CRISPR therapy.
- Industry builders are expected to improve biological programming capabilities to enable scalable applications of programmable medicines at higher volumes and lower costs.
- There is a stated hope that engineering biology advancements will resolve issues of permanence and toxicity while significantly enhancing manufacturing scalability.
- Cost projections suggest programmable medicines may follow an exponentially decreasing cost curve, potentially transitioning from millions of dollars to thousands, though this trajectory has not yet materialized.
- The outlook envisions a shift where innovation is redeployed rather than reinvented, potentially leading to cures for intractable medical problems.