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Patrick Malone, MD PhD
@patricksmalone
physician-scientist turned biotech investor @KdT_Ventures | helping founders build science and tech-driven companies | writing at decodingbio.com
DC
pmalone.me
Joined March 2011
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    Patrick Malone, MD PhD
    @patricksmalone
    Nov 12, 2023
    on biotech platform strategy in a new essay, @ElliotHershberg and I riff on biotech platform typology and partnering dynamics. we unpack why many biotechs pivot from external partnerships to internal programs, and why that trend might change in the near future. we start with a
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    Patrick Malone, MD PhD
    @patricksmalone
    Aug 18, 2022
    the fact that the majority of scientists would change their research focus if they didn't have to apply for grants is the single most concerning reality of the current scientific funding system
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    Patrick Malone, MD PhD
    @patricksmalone
    May 31, 2022
    Since pivoting to venture capital from medical/grad school, I've had a lot of conversations with MD and PhD students about getting into VC. Long thread on my thoughts/advice on how to 1) prepare for, 2) break into, and 3) succeed in VC: 1/40
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    Patrick Malone, MD PhD
    @patricksmalone
    Aug 22, 2022
    imagine if scientific funding worked more like VC funding - capital for young scientists pursuing high-risk/high-upside hypotheses. instead, the NIH does the opposite - the majority of funding goes to already well-funded 66+ year-old tenured professors pursuing incremental ideas
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    Patrick Malone, MD PhD
    @patricksmalone
    Nov 9, 2022
    the most credible criticism of AI-driven drug discovery is that all techbio companies eventually become biotech companies, facing the same rate-limiting steps, and therefore many of the advertised advantages (accelerated timelines, lower development costs) hold less water
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    Patrick Malone, MD PhD
    @patricksmalone
    Mar 23, 2024
    one important reason we haven't reached an "alphafold moment" for biological data beyond protein structures: datasets for protein structure are consistent and uniform. x-ray crystallography or cryo-EM data provide absolute atomic coordinates, meaning that the data is
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    Patrick Malone, MD PhD
    @patricksmalone
    Nov 29, 2022
    the first law of biotechnology is that every tools or diagnostics company eventually becomes a therapeutics company
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    Patrick Malone, MD PhD
    @patricksmalone
    Dec 19, 2022
    one of the most consistent oversights in platform development in biotech is not validating known biology this should be experiment #1. reproduce something that is already known on your platform before trying to discover something new
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    Patrick Malone, MD PhD
    @patricksmalone
    Nov 1, 2023
    a new AlphaFold model: in AI for biology, you get what you train for since the release of AlphaFold in 2020, a once-hypothesized revolution in drug discovery has failed to materialize. while accurate at predicting protein structure, the utility of AF for drug discovery has been
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    Patrick Malone, MD PhD
    @patricksmalone
    Oct 20, 2022
    some news...PUMPED to join the team @KdT_Ventures investing in early-stage frontier science. humbled to have the opportunity to build alongside some of the nicest, most passionate and intellectually curious investors and founders out there
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    Patrick Malone, MD PhD
    @patricksmalone
    Nov 25, 2023
    1. platforms were favored in 2019-2021, but since 2021, venture financing has favored assets over platforms 2. as much as I would love to see pharma M&A as an exit path for biotech platforms in addition to IPO, there is little enterprise value of a platform acquisition for
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    Garry Tan
    Y Combinator
    @garrytan
    Nov 25, 2023
    Platforms in biotech are an idea whose time has come To date most have exited not as platforms but as individual drugs, but given there are so many promising approaches it will be a massive boon to humanity if this next generation of biotech platforms bear fruit
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    Patrick Malone, MD PhD
    @patricksmalone
    Jul 18, 2022
    despite the (appropriate) excitement around AI-driven drug discovery, we are still quite early. by my count, only 8 assets have progressed to clinical stage (recursion x2, benevolentAI x2, relay x2, valo x2, exscientia). any i'm missing?
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    Patrick Malone, MD PhD
    @patricksmalone
    Feb 18, 2024
    despite advances in protein folding models like AlphaFold, we haven't actually discovered that much new about the underlying principles of protein folding. these models accurately predict the structure a given protein sequence will fold into, without knowing that much about the
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    Nature Biotechnology
    @NatureBiotech
    Feb 16, 2024
    Protein design: the experts speak go.nature.com/3OL7YfK
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    Patrick Malone, MD PhD
    @patricksmalone
    Feb 17, 2023
    prediction: an AI system will soon perform an end-to-end scientific project with little/no human intervention formulating a hypothesis, designing and executing experiments to test that hypothesis, analyzing and interpreting the data, and writing up/publishing the findings
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