Opportunities in Public Health Investing with Gurdane Bhutani and Zeshan Muhammedi

Village Global Podcast

Gurdane Bhutani and Zeshan Muhammedi are co-founders and GPs at MBX, a VC firm investing in early-stage bio/healthtech companies tackling major public health threats. Prior to that they co-founded healthcare and life-science venture capital firm FundRx, where they championed the firm's build-out of its community-driven investment infrastructure, modeled on the scientific peer-review process.
Takeaways:
- Pharma companies have realized that it makes sense to develop drugs that will have a population-level health benefit rather than developing drugs for small numbers of people that cost exorbitant amounts.
- Noise pollution is actually a big public health issue that is linked to various diseases. Companies are working on making society less noisy using things like concrete that is quieter when cars drive over it.
- Gurdane and Zeshan have learned from working together for a long time how to engage in productive disagreement well by acknowledging what their respective strengths and weaknesses are and weighing the strength of one person’s enthusiasm against the strength of the other person’s skepticism.
- Genomics has been a huge story in medicine in the last several decades but hasn’t lived up to its promise because we’ve been missing an understanding of how environmental triggers drive diseases that our genes prime us for.
- In the future, given changes at the FDA and EPA, drugs and chemical products will be tested on “organoids on a chip” or high-throughput systems that can give us higher fidelity data than actual tests on living animals.
- Studies are often powered to look for benefits of a drug rather than find rare long tail side effects. It often takes years and years for the downsides of a treatment to become apparent.
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