The a16z Show

Jorge Conde × Stéphane Bancel

Moderna and Merck’s personalized mRNA cancer vaccine met its Phase 3 primary endpoint in melanoma and also hit distant metastasis-free survival at the first interim analysis, with patient availability hoped for in 2027.Phase 2 showed 50% five-year recurrence-free survival versus Keytruda alone and 80% disease-free; inside-cell antigen presentation and a Marlborough facility capable of tens of thousands of doses support scale, while pricing and 20% nonresponse remain watchpoints.

Daisy Wolf × Andrew Huberman

GLP-1 adoption could make healthy weight an accessible baseline, with Huberman predicting more than half of Americans could use them within five years and citing retatrutide’s potential for up to one-third body-weight loss.The peptide market is expanding faster than regulated evidence, creating opportunities in metabolic and sleep care while leaving purity, pricing, cardiovascular effects, tumor growth, and other safety risks unresolved.

Mark Zuckerberg × Priscilla Chan × Ben Horowitz × Erik Torenberg × Vineeta Agarwala

Biohub is betting that shared scientific tools, not another round of small grants, can accelerate cures through $100 million to $1 billion investments over 10–15 years.CELLxGENE standardized single-cell data and created a network effect: CZI funded 25% of the resource while the broader community contributed 75%, supporting a model-to-experiment flywheel.Biohub plans to expand from roughly 1,000 GPUs toward 10,000, but virtual-cell models remain quite early and must prove that directional predictions can reliably derisk costly wet-lab work.

Jay Bhattacharya × Erik Torenberg × Vineeta Agarwala × Jorge Conde

Bhattacharya wants NIH managed like a venture portfolio, tolerating productive failures and funding younger, newer ideas instead of rewarding six-to-eight-year-old proposals and publication volume.The $50 million autism data-science program and cautious leucovorin and acetaminophen guidance show near-term execution, while replication, public-health trust, and AI-generated application volume remain critical reform risks.

Erik Torenberg × Patrick Hsu × Jorge Conde

Arc is combining neuroscience, immunology, machine learning, chemical biology, and genomics to reduce organizational and experimental latency, with virtual cells aimed at navigating diseased cells toward healthy states.The commercial prize depends on better targets, drug design, higher clinical success, lower capital intensity, and shorter timelines, but physical testing and human endpoints remain serial bottlenecks while virtual-cell capability sits somewhere between GPT-1 and GPT-2.

Vijay Pande × Eric Topol

The nearer-term longevity opportunity is preventing cancer, cardiovascular disease, and neurodegeneration, with AI integrating multi-omic data, organ clocks, polygenic scores, and biomarkers to identify individualized intervention windows.GLP-1s, immune therapies, and risk-based screening could expand prevention beyond obesity, but at least half of patients regain weight after stopping and delayed proof mean adoption and outcomes will develop over the next 5–10 years.