The Next Biotech Breakthrough

0:00They told us to expect change. They warned us about the transition. But honestly, they forgot the best part. This is the chapter where we finally focus on us. LifeMD delivers expert menopause and midlife care right from your home. From hormone health to holistic wellness, LifeMD helps you feel your best for the best years of your life. LifeMD, it's just getting good. Visit LifeMD.com slash goodlife. The thing about AI for business, it may not automatically fit the way your business works.

0:35Jenny Rooke, Ph.D.:At IBM, we've seen this firsthand. But by embedding AI across HR, IT, and procurement processes, we've reduced costs by millions, slash repetitive tasks, and freed thousands of hours for strategic work. Now we're helping companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business, IBM. Adobe Acrobat Studio, your new foundation. Use PDF spaces to generate a presentation. Grab your docs, your permits, your moves. AI levels up your pitch, gets it in a groove. Choose a template with your timeless cool. Come on now, let's flex those tools.

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1:32Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. Carol, this story crossing by Rachel Metz just about 1 p.m. this afternoon. This is pretty cool. OpenAI is releasing a free tool. It's aimed at making it easier for scientists to use chat GPT to draft research papers and collaborate with colleagues. It's part of a larger effort to position its chatbot as an aid for scientific work and discoveries. Okay, it's called Prism. OpenAI is rolling it out today. It uses the company's GPT 5.2 AI model to carry out tasks related to writing and revising academic work.

2:12A scientist, for example, might ask it to help improve the way a paper is written and find related papers to cite in their work or generate a computerized version of a handwritten diagram. Just be careful not to copy somebody else's work. I'm just going to say, you will be not good. Citations are important. I think the administration ran into some issues with using AI to come out with some guidelines in recent months. And it was found that it cited papers that don't actually exist. Yeah, it's super interesting. I think we're finding our way. But I do agree, and I think there's momentum of AI in general, what it couldn't do maybe for the healthcare space, for the science space.

2:55We have a great voice on this. We love touching base with her. Jenny Rook, founder and managing director of Genoa Ventures. It's a VC firm. It invests in having a tough – I'm having a tough time on this Tuesday. I blame the snow and maybe being a little off. She says the quote, next generation of companies at the convergence of technology and biology. This is what she invests in. Jenny, good to have you back with us. So talk to us about New Year, maybe some new ideas, maybe some new momentum. The JPMorgan Healthcare Conference wrapped up earlier this month. You were there. Tell us what we need to know, especially for those who are listening and watching in terms of the investing landscape trends narratives in this space.

3:40Sure. Happy to. Good to be back with you, Carol and Tim. Yeah, it was a dynamic year for the JP Morgan Biotech Conference. It happens every year here in San Francisco. It is always good sort of bell weather for how people are feeling going into the new year. I would say the headline that I kept hearing in conversations around here was cautiously optimistic, which, you know, I'll take it after the last couple of years. Although I must admit that was a phrase that we said last year as well. And then 2025 happened with all its uncertainties. But there was a different, a palpably different feel. There were more people here actually this year than last year, generally speaking.

4:23Events were quite well attended. And I think there was a lot of energy around the very real impacts, as you were just talking about, of AI on health and science and also some of the shifts in the availability of funding, both public and private, for advancing healthcare and science, actually along the lines of your previous guest. So I would say in general, lots to be excited about, again, perhaps cautiously. Yeah, we spoke to, you know, just a couple of weeks ago from the JPM conference, we heard from some of the heads or chairs of the biggest pharmaceutical companies out there. Are you also seeing like the early stage stuff, are you seeing a lot of opportunities there still?

5:10Because as we've spoken to you a lot about quite, you know, over the last year, a lot of that stems from academic research. There are questions about funding. We just spoke about it with Janet Lauren at, you know, in these universities and that funding drying up from the federal government. Is that excitement still there? Are the opportunities still there? Are you having a hard time picking and choosing which investments to make because there are a plethora of investments to make? I think there are always going to be opportunities because there's so much we're still learning about basic science and how to use it.

5:41And as we've been talking about, the acceleration of the ability to get some data as a scientist, as a researcher, as a technology developer, as an entrepreneur, get that data reincorporated in one's thinking with the tools of AI and come up with new ways to pursue either the business plan or the scientific research. That flywheel is spinning faster with the assistance of AI and other kinds of connectivity and collaboration. So that's definitely happening. I think one of the things we've talked about in our conversations in the past is while it was very much disruptive to people's expectations about where federal dollars were going to be coming from for advancing science, we've seen a couple of things.

6:27One, the resilience of those driven, passionate researchers who are looking to get their work done one day, one way or another, figuring out ways to get that funding done, as well as entrepreneurs. They tend to be the grittiest and the most driven. So we're seeing in some cases is actually perhaps counterintuitively is creating a new category or more opportunities for the early stage investor where perhaps a researcher who hadn't been thinking of commercializing their research is starting to think, well, is there an opportunity to bring this out in a way where I can access both commercial dollars and the funding that is available for advancing science?

7:15Yeah, I also think about, you know, how patient any investors have to be for really seeing the AI payoff when it comes to, you know, either biotech developments. We know some of this stuff takes time in a normal world, and we know AI can certainly, you know, speed up things. But I'm just curious, does the time frame for figuring out developments in this area, is it sped up because of AI or is it still going to take a while? This is such an important point, Carol. We have to keep in mind that many of the accelerations that we're talking about that AI can bring to the practice of science is still happening at the beginning of a journey to, for example, bring a new intervention or diagnostic product to market.

8:02And so perhaps it can help us come up with novel medicines or novel targets for medicines. But we're still looking at the beginning of the multi-year, many hundreds of millions of dollars journey to bring a drug properly through clinical development. So I think it is important, to your point, to temper our excitement about that potential impact with the overlay of the timelines that it takes to actually properly investigate and develop and launch medicines. Very cool stuff. I was thinking about, too, we had a conversation with Kathy Wood and talking about AI, certainly in health care and drug development.

8:48She's bullish. Yeah, definitely bullish. So we highly recommend folks check out that conversation. But Jenny, always love touching base with you. Certainly an important area to have on our radar. And that, of course, was Jenny Rook, founder and managing director of Genoa Ventures. Good to check in with her. Joining us from the West Coast, San Francisco. They told us to expect change. They warned us about the transition. But honestly, they forgot the best part. This is the chapter where we finally focus on us. LifeMD delivers expert menopause and midlife care right from your home. From hormone health to holistic wellness, LifeMD helps you feel your best for the best years of your life.

9:31Life MD, it's just getting good. Visit lifemd.com slash goodlife.

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