
There are now 141 bio and healthcare companies funded by YC - sethbannon
https://blog.ycombinator.com/there-are-now-141-bio-companies-funded-by-yc/
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rheffern
Though the line of best fit seems to fit well to an exponential for now, it is
likely a sigmoid in the end [0]. The real trick is figuring out when you've
reached the 50% mark, as any physiologist will tell you! ;)

Also, I might as well mention that I'm a recent bio-eng grad that posts in the
'Who's hiring?' threads still. Details in my profile page. And, sorry to be so
blatantly self promoting.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function)

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ArtWomb
And congrats to Ginko on recent $120M deal with Cronos Group. Engineering
yeast strains that can produce full-spectrum of cannabinoids via fermentation
at factory scale. Really exciting!

[https://thecronosgroup.com/investor-
relations/](https://thecronosgroup.com/investor-relations/)

~~~
jamestimmins
Mind explaining what this means and why it's exciting?

~~~
ArtWomb
Maybe some Ginko peeps can chime in ;) But I'm very impressed with the scale.
$100M is ballpark scale of all cannabis US research funding per annum.

And most trials investigate CBD, THC. There are hundreds of other cannabinoid
compounds worth investigating. Providing high quality samples to researchers
will result in discoveries. A single cannabis breakthrough treatment changes
the entire game. Plus, expertise for Ginko with synthesizing cannabinoids
conceivably translates to opiods and myriad other medicinal plants compounds.

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kayhi
"I define “bio” at YC as anything enabled by biology and anything in
healthcare."

Is that a common definition? I haven't consider healthcare companies as bio.

I'd be interested in the list of the 141, unsure if I'm the only one.

~~~
kayhi
Okay, thought I would try to answer my own question. We write software[1] that
helps research labs save money and here are companies that I'd consider bio:

Sorry if missing some:

Glowing Plant, S14

Ginko Bioworks, S14

Notable Labs, W15

Transcriptic, W15

Industrial Microbes, W15

Lygos, W16

C16 Biosciences, S18

CB Therapeutics, S18

Cytera CellWorks, S18

Hepatx, S18

Borderline:

HistoWiz, W16

Forever Labs, S17

Ambercycle, F2

[1] Lab Spend - [https://labspend.com](https://labspend.com)

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jedberg
And yet no cure for cancer!

I kid, but actually there are a few YC companies literally working on cures
for cancer, and every time I see one I think, "That's the kid of swing for the
fences YC is known for, good luck to them!".

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doublerebel
Really excited to hear this now!! I've been watching the job postings appear
for HumanDx and I'm looking forward to what the YC companies can achieve
together. I think in healthcare it's particularly important to understand the
"user(s)." YC companies have a great opportunity to use smart startup
techniques to make healthcare more accessible and more successful.

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erohead
If you're interested, YC maintains a list of all the public (ie launched)
companies. You can sort by category as well:
[http://www.ycombinator.com/companies](http://www.ycombinator.com/companies)

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jacquesm
If you don't have a lab you are not into bio.

That said there are a lot of companies that are trying real hard to replace
their labs with software.

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danielecook
Is there a list of these somewhere?

~~~
elektor
The closest thing I could find was this list:
[https://yclist.com/](https://yclist.com/)

A ctrl+F of "bio" gave me a few results.

~~~
danielecook
Nice! Very interesting to see the failures also...

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bra-ket
it would be interesting to see what these 141 companies be able to accomplish
if combined

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abdullahkhalids
That's nice. But can someone list out the notable ones which have solved
important problems.

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kateybatey8
woohoo!

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duxup
"I define “bio” at YC as anything enabled by biology and anything in
healthcare. In healthcare, this includes medical devices, tools, therapeutics,
diagnostics, and healthcare IT"

Healthcare IT... not what I would think of as Bio.

As noted in the quote if it is "anything in healthcare" that just seems like,
healthcare.

~~~
breck
I don't have any experience in Healthcare IT but I'm curious why you say you
wouldn't think of that as bio?

I work at a bioinformatics lab and have been surprised by the big disconnect
between the mountains of real-time clinical data produced by healthcare each
day, versus the relative trickle of data we get in our lab (after IRB, et
cetera).

Seems like there is a lot of room for innovation in Healthcare IT that could
connect to bio-research and make the whole research system more like modern
software updates versus the box software(research papers) of the 80's.

~~~
JacobDotVI
@breck -

I'm working on some projects that are tangential to this on both sided and I'd
love to hear your thoughts on connecting healthcare IT to bio-research. What
kind of healthcare data would you be looking to receive on the bio-research
side? and what features of "modern software updates" are most important to you
(regularly scheduled like MS Patch Tuesday? seamless in the background like
SaaS products?)? do you think of this data as inputs to your research or
living next to your research?

Thanks!

~~~
breck
Well a large 1M Homo sapiens multiomics dataset with 100+ clinical variables
would be great. :) ... the data gets more and more interesting the more
variables you have, but generally all the government datasets reduce number of
variables for privacy reasons. That’s why if perhaps there was a way to get
access to the quantity of data on something like GEO or TCGA, but with full
clinical, from healthcare providers, you might find some interesting things.

I would like to see more research as dashboards more than research as reports.
The book “The Half-life of Facts” is relevant: many bio conclusions we’ve made
in the past hundred years seems to later be contradicted or at least tweaked
as new tech and data come out. NIH and others now have big pushes for
personalized medicine, like NCIs Precision Medicine Initiative, because it’s
pretty obvious that a great medicine or piece of advice for one person is
useless or even harmful to another. The amount of health data we’ve collected
in all of human history will be dwarfed by the amount of data we will collect
in 2028. Instead of looking back on data and making static conclusions, what
if we wrote the code that adjusts the conclusions as more and more data come
in. So the research findings will be “updated” continuously, like modern
software, as opposed to shipping once in the form of a paper.

