Raising Health

Nicolás Abad, founder and CEO of Telepatía, joins a16z to discuss building AI-powered tools for healthcare in Latin America. Inspired by the loss of his father to a preventable medical error, Adbad set out to address one of the region’s most significant challenges: a shortage of doctors, fragmented medical records, and limited healthcare infrastructure across a population of more than 700 million people. Telepatía's first product acts as a clinical copilot, helping physicians document visits, access patient context, and make more informed decisions. The conversation explores healthcare delivery in Latin America, AI-assisted medicine, medical errors, electronic health records, and why Abad believes AI can help expand access to care while improving outcomes. Along the way, he shares his vision for building an “AI doctor for doctors” and the long-term goal of transforming healthcare across the region.

Drug discovery has doubled the flow of candidates, but approvals remain roughly flat. The constraint is development, not discovery. In this episode, a16z General Partner, Jorge Conde talks with Formation Bio cofounder and CEO Ben Liu about building a modern pharma company around clinical execution. They discuss Formation Bio’s hub-and-spoke model for acquiring and advancing assets, how AI compresses trial timelines and costs, picking winners, regulatory strategy, and what it would take to move from about 50 approvals a year to many more. They also touch on global competition and why clinical proof still drives value in today’s market.

For the first time in human history, we can diagnose thousands of genetic diseases—often for under $1,000—but we still can't treat most of them. The problem isn't understanding what's broken; it's delivering the fix to the right cells. Eric Kelsic, CEO of Dyno Therapeutics, joins a16z's Jorge Conde to explain how AI-designed protein shells are solving gene therapy's delivery crisis. They explore why Huntington's patients can now get 15 extra years of healthy life, how Dyno inverted the liver-to-brain delivery ratio by 1000x, and why capsids evolved by nature are now being designed by machine learning models trained on millions of variants. Eric introduces the concept of genetic agency—humanity's first-ever ability to take action at the DNA level—and details why solving delivery for common diseases will make ultra-rare disease treatments economically viable. Plus: what happens when gene therapy requires neurosurgery today but could be a simple injection tomorrow, why recent deaths in clinical trials prove we need better technology now, and how genetic medicine could become as routine as surgery within our lifetimes.

In this episode, Julie Yoo and Jay Rughani are joined by Thatch cofounders Chris Ellis and Adam Stevenson to explore why ICHRA—a more recent policy innovation—might quietly revolutionize employer-sponsored health benefits.

In this episode, Tennr cofounder and CEO Trey Holterman sits down with a16z’s David Haber and Jay Rughani to unpack one of healthcare’s most overlooked pain points: patient referral logistics.

What if we stopped trying to cure disease and started preventing it instead? In this episode, Eric Topol joins general partner Vijay Pande to unpack the future of aging, prevention, and precision health—as explored in Eric's new book, Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity.

Marc Andreessen joins Julie Yoo and Vijay Pande.

Elliot Cohen, cofounder of PillPack, joins Julie Yoo, a16z Bio + Health general partner.