Capital Lab·Today’s Innovation Observation Focus on cutting-edge technology innovation and traditional industry upgrading In 2011, Netscape founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen put forward a famous point of view: “Software is eating the world.”

There is no doubt that his prediction has already come true.

And technology is constantly evolving. After software "eats" the world, where will the next similar basic technology be?

In a recent article, the world's top venture capital Andreessen Horowitz Fund (a16z for short) put forward a new point of view: biology is "eating" the world.

Interestingly, Marc Andreessen is the co-founder of this fund.

Capital Lab teases out several key points worth paying attention to from this article: 1. Biology has evolved into an engineering discipline and will fundamentally change the way we diagnose, treat, and manage disease.

2. Future drug discovery and development will be a modular, programmable, and iterable process.

3. With the help of software and artificial intelligence, biologically related therapies will also evolve.

4. The development of technology will promote changes in the entire medical system and bring new opportunities to startups.

5. Biology will affect all industries and become an integral and important part of the development process of each industry.

6. In the field of biology, both entrepreneurs and investors need to establish deep professional knowledge and experience, as well as interdisciplinary and inter-industry learning capabilities.

This article was co-authored by several general partners of the fund, Jorge Conde, Vijay Pande, and Julie Yoo***: We are at the beginning of a new era in which biology has transformed from an empirical science to an engineering discipline.

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After thousands of years of using artificial methods to control or manipulate biology, we are finally beginning to use nature's own mechanisms to design, implement, and transform biology through bioengineering.

Biological engineering capabilities will fundamentally change the way we diagnose, treat and manage disease.

In the early 1980s, the first major leaps forward were made in recombinant DNA technology and the first biological drugs.

Today, from bacteria engineered to produce new chemicals and proteins to cells engineered to attack cancer, modern tools such as CRISPR and gene circuitry allow us to create new technologies with ever-increasing precision and sophistication.

Sex programs biology.

At the same time, the explosion of “programmable medicines” (in the form of genes, cells, microorganisms, and even mobile apps and software that can improve our own health) has put us closer than ever to medicine’s holy grail, a cure.

Because these new drugs are inherently engineered and programmable systems, drug discovery and development will shift from a customized process to an iterative one.

We can now design a molecule for a specific target or even a platform on which many future drugs can be built.

Like software upgrades, programmable drugs make it increasingly possible to improve a given drug in the next generation.

For example, each new version of CAR T-cells will be more complex than the previous generation.

And the modularity of these drugs means that new applications will be easier to build and reuse common components like Lego bricks: Once we learn how to deliver genes to specific cells in specific diseases, we will be more likely to be able to combine different

Genes are passed to different cells for another disease.

Not only is biology evolving, but so are therapies.

Now you can download a therapy to manage complex chronic conditions, such as diabetes or behavioral disorders, that may be better than any existing medication.

For complex conditions, software may be our best way to influence biology.

Not only do these digital health therapies have the potential to make you better, but the therapies themselves get better over time.

All of these capabilities are based on our ability to generate unprecedented data, coupled with advanced computing tools that make sense of that data.

Biology is incredibly complex, even beyond the ability of the human mind to fully comprehend, but artificial intelligence (AI)-based platforms have the potential to connect dots that previously seemed like noise, generate new discoveries, and even change the nature of discovery itself.

This will drive the development of new treatments and next-generation diagnostics, allowing us to detect diseases such as cancer early and stop them before they even begin.