Vijay Pande bets small on AI-driven biotech

vijay pande, former head of a16z's $4 billion healthcare and life sciences practice, left to start vzvc, a new firm that makes a handful of concentrated bets a year. vzvc relies heavily on ai for its operations. pande believes ai and machine learning can improve drug development by helping computers understand complex biological data, reducing the cost and time to clinical trials. however, he notes that the use of synthetic data in clinical trials is still an aspiration, and high costs remain a challenge. pande's new approach may impact how biotech investments are made and how advances in ai-driven biotech are accessed.