Journal Club: From Insect Eyes to Nanomaterials

10/29/20 • 20 min

On this episode of the Bio Eats World Journal Club, a16z bio deal team partner Judy Savitskaya and host Lauren Richardson discuss a new article that makes the full arc from basic science discovery to application. The article -- "Reverse and forward engineering of Drosophila corneal nanocoatings" by Mikhail Kryuchkov, Oleksii Bilousov, Jannis Lehmann, Manfred Fiebig & Vladimir L. Katanaev, published in Nature -- and the conversation begin by discussing insect eye nanocoatings, which give eyes key properties like anti-reflectiveness and anti-adhesiveness. The authors show these nanocoatings are formed by a self-assembling mechanism known as a Turing Pattern. But why do we care about fly eye nanocoatings and their patterns? Why did Alan Turing spend his time studying the basis biological patterns? As we discuss, understanding this patterning revealed a new method for creating nanostructured materials, which today is a high tech and costly process. We cover the reverse and forward engineering these nanostructures, the beauty of Turing Patterns, and how one could build a startup around this nanostructure technology.

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It's Time to Build in Healthcare: COVID-19, Innovation, and What Comes Next

In this episode of Bio Eats World, a16z founder and internet pioneer Marc Andreessen and general partner Jorge Conde zoom out to discuss the large scale societal effects of the current pandemic on society, healthcare, biotech, and innovation. COVID-19 has been catastrophic—but also catalyzed enormous change and a dramatic groundswell of innovation. Where are we now? Which of these changes will stay, and which may recede? What new innovations and impacts might be still to come, and what are we learning that can be applied towards the future? Building on Marc Andreessen's article and call to action, “It’s Time to Build,” Jorge and Marc discuss what needs to be built in healthcare today (for example, would a pandemic warning system help us next time?); the impact of COVID-19 on innovation and mindsets in the biopharma industry; the shift towards measuring output that could spur more innovation; and finally, what biopharma and venture capital have in common in terms of risk and experimentation that might serve as a much broader model.

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The Thermodynamics of Life

with @lifelikephysics, @vijaypande, and @omnivorousread Where does life truly begin? How do we understand the fundamental nature of what is “alive” and what is “not alive”? In this episode of Bio Eats World, Professor Jeremy England discusses his new book, Every Life is on Fire, all about how what we might use physics to understand to be the origins of life—and how we define what being alive is. As biologists, we are taught that life evolved as the result of Darwinian natural selection. But what happens if instead, you use a physicist’s lens to examine what life looks to be—and define it as a specialized order and relationship between matter and the patterns of it’s an environment? England—a senior director in artificial intelligence at GlaxoSmithKline, principal research scientist at Georgia Tech, former associate professor of physics at MIT, and one of Forbes’ “30 Under 30 Rising Stars of Science”—describes this new idea as “dissapative adaptation”. The conversation covers how looking at “life” in these terms changes what we understand to be alive and what the nature of "life" is; sheds new light on the “queasy middle ground” between those definitions, especially in areas like machine learning and AI; and allows us to ask new questions about things like what makes DNA so special, and what life can do.