Hi everyone!

Alok here, founder and CEO of Vibe Bio. 

As we move through 2024, I’m thrilled with the extraordinary work our team is doing to change how we finance drug development: from funding next-generation therapies to helping others identify the highest potential cures in their development pipelines. 

My Story

The origin of Vibe is deeply personal. The inspiration behind the company stemmed from the challenges my daughter faced at birth when she was diagnosed with two rare disorders without dedicated treatments. I became obsessed with understanding why. Why, despite the enormous sums of money flowing into drug R&D, diseases like hers don’t have the capital they deserve. Conventional wisdom states that the ‘small market’ of rare disease makes investing unjustifiable. The truth: over 30 million people in the US are affected by rare diseases, many of them children. That’s at least 1 in 10 Americans! And that figure doesn’t even account for the impact on families and the resources they dedicate to these patients. 

Given the significant impact to the health of American citizens, why aren’t there more rare disease drugs? I became obsessed with this question and sought to ‘find a cure’ for this systemic institutional failure. I talked to thousands of drug development experts, biotech investors, and scientific founders to understand the shape of the landscape. 

What did I learn? 

Tl;dr: drug development is very complex, and human bias influences key decisions.

Human Bias Limits Our Ability to Find Cures

Drug development is incredibly complex, requiring expert input from numerous disciplines to evaluate hundreds of program characteristics to accurately assess a drug’s potential for success. The industry’s current approach—relying on the collective opinions of many experts—falls short because humans struggle to comprehend and process such complexity. Whether pursuing treatments for common or rare diseases, we all need a better way to make data-driven decisions about the risks and rewards of a program.

Consider the sheer volume and complexity of data related to a drug: chemistry, biology, physiology, pharmacology, genomics, toxicology, biostatistics, clinical research, regulatory affairs, bioinformatics, immunology, and health economics, just to name a few! This totality exceeds human cognitive capacity, making it impossible to understand and integrate all the relevant information efficiently. 

Furthermore, every human has some level of inherent bias that can sway multi-million dollar decisions, potentially affecting the lives of patients who are in search of treatments. Human biases, shaped by institutional incentives or personal experiences (or both), can lead to oversimplified judgments or conclusions. For example, in biotech VC, we’ve seen good biotechs get overlooked because the investment team hadn’t heard of the disease, didn’t recognize the team, or ‘hated’ the modality.

AI Can Lead to Better Decisions, Faster

Whether you’re in a pharma company, a hedge fund, or a venture capital firm, there’s a lot of complexity that goes into evaluating a drug asset. The current process is analog: very manual, human-driven, and heavily influenced by internal biases.

With AI, we have the potential to improve how we evaluate drugs and pipelines and, thus, our capital allocation decisions.

This philosophical approach is emergent: multiple firms, including Google Ventures, EQT, SignalFire, and 776 have built proprietary AI platforms for their own tech-focused investing.

I believe AI can do the same in biotech.

That’s where Vibe Bio comes in. We’ve built a proprietary AI platform called VibeOne that automates the asset evaluation and due diligence process of drug programs. This pipeline analysis platform allows us to assess a drug’s risks and forecast its potential, enabling us to make unbiased, quantitative decisions. The software’s unique ability to evaluate any disease area, any modality, and any stage of development makes it versatile and impactful across the lifecycle of a drug program. By teaching the software to model the evaluation process used by human experts, we’ve transformed the due diligence process for drug hunters and investors. 

“I’ve been most impressed with the speed & accuracy: analysis that would previously take six months to accomplish can now be done in hours to days!”

Vibe Bio: Venture Fund and AI Software Company

“Why do both?” After all, building software or running a venture fund is hard enough as it is.

We set out to fund new candidate medicines through our venture fund. Given the complexity of a drug and the volume of diseases (13K+ known!), we knew that software was critical in being successful. The software we built pioneers the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in strategic decision making. VibeOne operates like an experienced drug hunter to help us find critical data on a program or disease, evaluate scientific risks, generate reports, and forecast the PoS of a pipeline. Of course, strategic pharmaceutical decisions take place both in biotech VC and in the boardroom. As an AI company, we’re partnering with biopharma and financial institutions to make better, faster decisions about programs by using AI to understand, interpret, and quantify science leveraging scalable, unbiased modern technology. 

Our portfolio companies are selected with a focus on three core pillars: people, potential, and program. We prioritize strong leadership teams who demonstrate not only expertise but also the ability to drive innovation and navigate complex industry challenges. We assess each company’s long-term potential, ensuring their science and business strategies are prepared to scale and make a significant impact. Using VibeOne and internal human experts, we rigorously evaluate the scientific and technical merit of their programs, selecting companies that are advancing novel, high-potential solutions with a clear pathway to development and commercialization.

For both our portfolio companies and our partners, VibeOne significantly improves decision quality by informing portfolio prioritization, R&D planning, and competitive landscapes. We also leverage our technology to help our portfolio companies and clients decide which diseases they should pursue, equipped with an understanding of the competitiveness of their own programs in the broader therapeutic landscape.

AI Uncovers Previously Hidden Insights

One of the biggest challenges in the industry is understanding complex drug landscapes, especially when limited by time and insufficient resources. We’re already witnessing significant interest from established biopharma companies and hedge funds that are eager to use our software for this purpose. 

The real-world impact of our technology is profound. Recently, we demonstrated our software to a leading pharmaceutical company focusing on neurological diseases. They were amazed at how our AI could offer insights into the nuances of their drug programs that were previously unknown. VibeOne also helped the team discover innovative approaches to analyzing and assessing their drugs’ potential in other indications. The technology revealed new potential applications and provided strategic insights to improve their chances of success.

My Vision for the Future

For the next few years, my goal is for Vibe to enable the best candidate drugs to get a shot on goal. We envision a world where our technology empowers early-stage venture investments but also drives strategic portfolio & investment decisions across the industry. We will demonstrate how software can enable an unbiased, quantitative decision-making process and improve the success rate of drugs in development.

Analogies for this exist in other parts of our economy. We already have FICO and Moody’s, which offer transparency into the financial risks & rewards of funding different consumer, corporate, and government products. What if we could do the same in biotech? I believe VibeOne has the potential to provide this assessment and highlight the drug programs with the highest potential to succeed. Such a capability would unlock new capital flows and investments into breakthrough treatments as well as enable the exploration of clinical opportunities in new indications. Ultimately, more intelligently-directed capital will lead to new treatments for patients.

I am optimistic about the future. If you share my passion and want to learn more, please contact us today as we’d love to discuss ways we can work together. 

Please join us on our journey to find every cure for every community.

Alok Tayi