with @OzAzamTmunity1, @JorgeCondeBio, and @omnivorousread CAR T therapy, the groundbreaking new medicines that uses engineered T-cells to attack cancer, has been so effective in childhood leukemias that we believe it may actually be a potential cure. But this isn't just one new medicine, it's an entirely new therapeutic tool—and a total paradigm shift from most traditional medicines we've seen before. Tmunity CEO Usman "Oz" Azam was previously the head of Cell and Gene Therapies at Novartis, in many ways the first CAR T company and the team brought us blood cancer CAR T-cell therapy Kymriah—the first cell-based gene therapy to be approved in the US. In this conversation, Azam discusses with a16z's general partner Jorge Conde and Hanne Tidnam what CAR T therapy really is and how it all works. The conversation begins with the “patient and cell journey” of this treatment and how this medicine is developed, manufactured, delivered to patients; why exactly it's so different traditional medicines; what it will take to make these new medicines work on more kinds of cancer, scale to more patients, and cost less; and finally, what company building lessons can be learned from building the first CAR T company of its kind from the ground up. This episode was recorded at the annual a16z Summit.

This episode of 16 Minutes on the news from a16z is all about the recent coronavirus outbreak -- or rather, a new type of coronavirus called 2019-nCoV for 2019 novel coronavirus. Since it's an ongoing and fast-developing news cycle, we take a quick snapshot for where we are, what we know, and what we don't know, and discuss the vantage point of where tech comes in. Topics covered include: definition of a virus, categories of coronavirusesorigins and spreadhow this stacks up so far against SARS and MERSspeed of sequencing, implications of genomic infospeed of information sharingR0 ("r-naught"/"nought") and what it measuresdifferent ways to think about how bad a given epidemic iscurrent moves and treatmentsOur a16z guest is Judy Savitskaya on the bio team, in conversation with Sonal Chokshi. Link sources or background readings for this episode:Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) + typesWorld Health Organization (in the United Nations) -- situation report #6, January 26Other background readings / pieces mentioned in this episode: "Scientists are moving at record speed to create new coronavirus vaccines--but they may come too late", Jon Cohen, Science (AAAS), January 27"Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China", The Lancet, January 24"Discovery of a novel coronavirus associated with the recent pneumonia outbreak in humans and its potential bat origin", bioRxiv, January 2 *note - preprint, NOT peer reviewed*"The deceptively simple number sparking coronavirus fears", Ed Yong, The Atlantic, January 28 *this appeared AFTER this episode was recorded, so sharing here as additional reading only*image: CDC