493. From Data Science to Drug Design: How AI Shifts Discovery, Target Validation, and Portfolio Construction (Jim Tananbaum)

This episode of TFR is brought to you by Ramp, the spend management platform we use here at TFR. They're offering listeners a $150 just to take a demo. We've never had an offer quite like this. Claim your $150 before this offer is gone at our partner link, ramp.com/partner/tfr. And this episode of TFR is brought to you by the American Arbitration Association, where smart startups and investors turn to for fast, efficient, and cost effective dispute resolution. Visit adr.org/tfr to learn more. Welcome to the podcast about venture capital, where investors and founders alike can learn how VCs make decisions and reach conviction. Your host is Nick Moran, and this is the full ratchet. Jim Tannenbaum is back on the program and joins us today from Los Angeles. He's the founder and CEO at Foresight Capital, a multistage health care and life sciences investment firm with over 3,500,000,000.0 AUM. Before founding Foresight in 2011, he co founded Geltex Pharmaceuticals acquired by Genzyme for 1,600,000,000.0 and Theravance, which went public in 2004. Jim, welcome back. Nick, it's so great to be back. It's hard to believe it's been eight years. Feels like thirty. It does. It does. We've seen a lot in these past eight years. Well, it's good to see you again, and it was fun catching up before this. Last we had you on the show was 2018. So bring us up to speed. You know? What's changed about Foresight? What's changed about the thesis and your focus over the past seven years? Wow. Seven years, boy. It's been a an eternity. So let's see. First, when we were talking back in in, in '18, the markets were steadily improving. We were, you know, full blown in in what became a boom cycle, and life science generally was thriving as well as biotech. Life science is being defined as the tools that are used by researchers and developers and generating the biotech products. Then COVID hit and the world went to a screeching stop, but then it rebooted around healthcare. So, so we had a boom, then an abrupt bust, and then another boom in '20 in the 2021. Really, anything that that touched COVID, you know, got a lot of speculation. And, we saw companies like Moderna hit, I think, you know, a 100 plus, you know, maybe two even more billion dollar market caps. Pfizer, you know, I think has had its peak price all around the vaccines. And, we certainly had a number of things that rose in in the bubble, of of COVID and and then interest rates started. And, that has just had a profoundly negative impact on our industry. And the reason for that is anything that's long dated, like really long dated, like biotech investing or long term health care investing, you start applying an interest rate that is 5% that's just so far beyond anything that anybody had ever thought about. It over a ten or fifteen year period …