Weekly Dose of Optimism #193
Isomorphic, Varda, Pancreatic pt 3, Cerebras IPO, Cowboy Space + Extra Doses
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 193rd Weekly Dose of Optimism.
The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, Demis is going to solve all disease, Varda is making space drugs, pancreatic cancer keeps getting punched in the mouth, we’re turning whole rocket upper stages into space data centers, and the IPO window is OPEN. Y’all mind if the optimists have another good week?
Let’s get to it.
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(1) Isomorphic Labs Raises $2.1 Billion to Solve All Disease
I recently read Sebastian Mallaby’s book on Demis Hassabis and DeepMind, The Infinity Machine, after having already watched the documentary on DeepMind’s development of AlphaFold, The Thinking Game, and a big takeaway for me is that you don’t want to bet against Sir Demis.
In addition to DeepMind, now part of Google, Demis spun out a bio-focused company called Isomorphic Labs whose mission, right there on the homepage, is to “Solve All Disease.” As of today, they have $2.1 billion more in the anti-disease arsenal thanks to a Series B led by Thrive Capital with participation from Google vehicles Alphabet, GV, and CapitalG, and sovereign vehicles, MGX, Temasek, and the UK’s Sovereign AI Fund. It is the second largest biotech round ever, after Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner’s AltosLabs came out with $3 billion in 2022.
Back in Dose #180, we covered IsoDDE, Isomorphic Labs’ unified AI drug design engine that crushed AlphaFold 3 on the hardest protein-ligand benchmarks and, in one of the more striking results, rediscovered cereblon’s second binding pocket from sequence alone, an achievement it took human researchers 15 years to confirm experimentally. Our take then was that the engine was real but the proof would come when AI-designed molecules actually entered humans. The money will go towards that, with the first of their wholly-owned drug candidates expected to enter human trials at the end of this year, and to expand the pipeline, continue to improve IsoDDE, and keep hiring the very best talent.
While there are a number of companies promising to solve drug discovery with AI, Isomorphic Labs seems to have the track record, talent, and war chest to do it.
Nobel Laureate Sir Demis Hassabis has a history of planning to do things that sounded crazy at the time and then doing them, and the craziest part is that if he does it again this time, the thing that sounds crazy that he will actually pull off is solving all disease. God Save the Queen, and all of us as well.
(2) Varda and United Therapeutics Testing Space Drugs
Sana Pashankar for Bloomberg
Isomorphic seems promising for Earth Drugs. But what about Space Drugs?
Way back in June 2023, almost three years ago, I wrote a Deep Dive on not boring capital portfolio company Varda in which we discussed its plans to manufacture drugs in space, where the lack of gravity lets you do things you can’t on earth, and send them back down to earth, where the people who need them are.
After three years of launches and re-entries with defense customers, the company is igniting stage 2 of the plan: start testing space drug manufacturing.
This week, it announced a partnership with $25B publicly-traded pharmaceutical company, United Therapuetics, to “explore the use of microgravity in creating drugs for chronic diseases in a deal that could prove out the value of in-space development for the pharmaceutical industry.”
United makes drugs to treat cancer and high blood pressure in the lungs, and it’s expected that this partnership will start by testing molecular samples of drugs intended to treat lung diseases specifically.
That’s one big step for Space Drugs, and one potentially giant leap for mankind.
(3) Pancreatic Cancer Just Met Its Match
Ruxandra Teslo for Works in Progress
Back on earth… it’s been a bad few weeks for pancreatic cancer, which means it’s been a great few weeks for humans. We led off Dose #190 with a pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine, Dose #191 with pancreatic cancer-detecting AI, and now, Ruxandra Teslo drops a banger on a different pancreatic cancer fighting drug, Revolution Medicines’ daraxonrasib.
Last month, Revolution shared daraxonrasib’s Phase 3 results. The oral, once-daily pill roughly doubled median survival for metastatic pancreatic cancer, pushing it to 13.2 months. More importantly, it represents a new class of drugs that use a “molecular glue” strategy to hit targets that don’t offer the usual drug-binding pocket. Daraxonrasib targets RAS, a cancer-driving protein found in roughly 25% of human cancers and more than 90% of pancreatic cancers, long considered “undruggable.” This isn’t a cure, but it is a crack, an early sign of the undruggable becoming druggable.
Go read Ruxandra’s excellent essay. Get fucked, cancer.
(4) AI Chipmaker Cerebras Climbs 68% After Year’s Biggest IPO
Bloomberg
Do you feel that breeze? That’s the IPO window, baby. It’s wide open.
Yesterday, fast inference chipmaker Cerebras had a very successful IPO, pricing well above initial range at $185, and then closing 68% above that. Bill Gurley has got to be conflicted… on the one hand, the man hates when a company leaves money on the table in an IPO. On the other, his old firm, Benchmark, is going to make an extraordinary ~$5 billion+ at the $311 opening day closing price.
Fervo, the geothermal company whose S-1 we covered recently, also IPO’d this week. Its shares popped 33% on Day 1 from its $27 price, and then jumped another 11% today.
Look, things are a little frothy. I’m not buying Cerebras at $311. But we love to see tech companies win, but I’m also just psyched to see some liquidity flow back to LPs to flow back into venture to fund the next batch of companies whose IPOs we’ll cover right here in the Dose in ~8-10 years.
Plus…
In older recent tech IPO news, Figma defied the SaaSpocalypse / Anthropic design plugin narrative by crushing its first quarter financial results. The stock popped 8%. Not dead.
(5) Cowboy Space Corp. Gets in the Saddle
Speaking of AI infra exuberance, Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt’s space-based energy company, Aetherflux, has rebranded to Cowboy Space Corp, a company that will, of course, be doing orbital data centers.
On the one hand, it’s a little 2026 Mad Libs. On the other, though, it kind of rocks.
Choose Good Quests ✅ - Baiju is Robinhooding himself, stealing his own gains from the fintech app and giving them to the space company. It’s what we want out of our billionaires.
Also, the idea is pretty interesting. Instead of an upper stage that holds and releases a data center payload, the upper stage is the data center payload. That means that Cowboy has to build its own rockets, in competition with SpaceX, but is focusing fully on orbital data centers by making them half of the rocket.
Maybe this is a sign that we’re nearing a peak. Maybe it’s exactly what we need to provide AI with all of the compute it will need. I don’t know.
I think we’re at the point in the cycle where we just sit back, enjoy, crack open a High Life, and root for these crazy Cowboys to wrangle their space GPUs for the benefit of all mankind. Giddy up baby. Yeehaw.
Extra Dose for not boring world subscribers down below. We got…
Science Breakthroughs, Vacuum Energy, Starship v3, Magic Words
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