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- We asked venture capitalists what startups they wish they could fund.
- Many had an interest in finding companies that could tackle neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's, though not much has caught their eyes so far.
- "The problem is we don't know enough about how the disease works to really invest in one drug or another," Alexis Borisy, a partner at Third Rock Ventures told Business Insider.
- VCs are also interested in finding ways to treat cancer that come with fewer side effects, as well as more targeted forms of cancer immunotherapy.
On a recent trip to San Francisco, we asked venture capitalists what biotech startups they wish they could fund.
Overwhelmingly, the response had to do with degenerative brain conditions, especially treatments for Alzheimer's.
"I would love to see a technology where you could really tackle Alzheimer's," Tom Heyman, president of Johnson & Johnson Innovation, JJDC told Business Insider. Heyman's inspired by the progress that's gone on when it comes to treating cancer. "When I talk to people I tell them, by 2030, I believe that most cancers will be chronic diseases. Alzheimer's, we're nowhere, just nowhere."
Carol Gallagher, a partner at New Enterprise Associates agreed, but expanded her interest to neurodegenerative diseases as a whole, including Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease.
"I think that is the next frontier that we are trying to understand, but I think that it is a really tough area," Gallagher said.
One of the challenging things is that there's a lot we don't know about how the brain works, including what causes Alzheimer's. Until we do, it's going to be difficult to find a treatment that works - practically all Alzheimer's drugs fail in clinical trials, and there are only four approved treatments for the condition.
"The problem is we don't know enough about how the disease works to really invest in one drug or another," Alexis Borisy, a partner at Third Rock Ventures told Business Insider. "We need to have that understanding at a molecular, mechanistic basis."
Fine-tuning cancer treatments
As cancer becomes more of a chronic disease people can live with for years and even decades after being diagnosed, Gallagher said, it'll be important to find treatments with less dangerous side effects. For example, some of the cell therapies that harness the body's immune system to treat cancer can send patients into remission, but the side effects can be deadly.
"We should all as an industry be keeping an eye on how we keep making therapies less toxic," she said.
Borisy also said his hope is to find companies that will help make immunotherapy-based cancer treatments more precise. Right now, certain immunotherapies work well, but only in a limited percentage of people. Researchers are trying to figure out why some respond and others don't.
Ideally, Borisy said, we could one day figure out why the treatments aren't working for some and instead give a treatment that the patient might be predisposed to respond to better.