Hunting the risky jungle of biotech in search of opportunity, good science, and measured risk. Seasoned trader, x-sell side, x-founder & entrepreneur
Raleigh, NC
Joined August 2015
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BioHunter retweeted
You went to fucking Stanford AND Cambridge, sit on a congressional subcommittee with INNOVATION in its name, and somehow your grand fucking idea is to make America stop innovating?
How the fuck do you get this far in life with such an unbelievably stupid understanding of technology LMFAO.
You can pry my GPU from my cold dead hands.
BioHunter retweeted
31’ | Mia takes advantage and cuts the Seminole lead in half 😈
📺 @accnetwork
BioHunter retweeted
I think we need to reframe this because we’re getting a little distracted by the novelty of the org chart. The goal should be to concentrate capital behind drugs with the best chance of meaningfully changing care. Getting more companies to IND with fewer employees is useful, but it doesn’t tell us whether we’re doing that.
Here's a concrete example: One published model estimates roughly $40m in direct spending to get a candidate through Phase 2. Suppose AI cuts a $2m candidate-generation budget by 90%. If Phase 2 success falls from 30% to 27%, the expected cost per successful Phase 2 program, including earlier failures, actually rises from about $205m to $212m. You can make creating the molecule dramatically cheaper and still make getting a useful clinical result more expensive.
I’d be more interested in AI allowing a small number of exceptionally talented teams to evaluate more assets, design better studies, and make better decisions about what deserves funding. Including killing their own programs when the evidence warrants it, which gets a little awkward when your only asset is also the reason your company exists. There’s real value in having people who can challenge each other’s assumptions before committing tens of millions of dollars to find out which assumption was wrong.
Those programs still compete for experienced investigators, eligible patients, and clinical budgets. Creating another hundred companies doesn’t magically expand any of those.
I’m all for making exploration cheaper and letting unconventional founders take a shot. But once the spending gets serious, I suspect scaling the best people’s judgment through AI matters considerably more than proving you can run a biotech by yourself.
(The cost benchmark comes from a 2024 model: $11.8m nonclinical + $7.1m Phase 1 + $21m Phase 2, in 2018 dollars. The calculation includes its earlier-stage failure rates; the $2m component, 90% saving, and 30%→27% change are illustrative assumptions. Phase 2 costs cover the phase, not necessarily just the first proof-of-concept study. JAMA Network)
💯 applicable to the last 2+ months biotech tape
bill ackman on why large, boring companies now drop 25% in a day, something he says almost never happened when he started:
"a quarter of every american business, plus or minus, is owned by some combination of vanguard, state street and northern trust. when you shrink the float of a public company, the marginal buyer and seller is going to have more impact on the stock price."
"the marginal buyer and seller today is a citadel or a millennium. they operate with a large amount of leverage, very large gross books, and they're increasingly short-term."
"most investors are very short-term focused because they're compensated that way. they won't invest in a company unless they're confident the price is going to be higher on december 31st."
passive owns the float, pods set the price, and both are structurally unable to hold through a bad quarter. that inability is the opportunity.
BioHunter retweeted
Millions of kids pass through a school system that teaches them they can ignore deadlines, defy authority, neglect their responsibilities, and fail repeatedly without consequence.
Then we send them into society and expect employers, institutions, and the criminal justice system to supply the discipline we lacked the will to impose.
BioHunter retweeted
My conversation with Noah Shinn (@noahrshinn), founder of Instinct.
Noah is building a personal AI assistant. It's still invite only, has spent nothing on marketing, and is growing roughly 10% A DAY.
This is his first long conversation about the company.
We discuss:
- Why Instinct doesn't have an app
- Buying compute months ahead of exponential demand
- How users learn to trust it with a credit card
- Safety and security
- Agents coordinating with other people's agents
- Instinct's business model
- Apps built on consumer inertia
- and more
Enjoy!
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
4:11 What people are using AI agents for
15:07 Rethinking travel, reservations, and the internet
22:43 Trust, privacy, and personal data
27:50 The business model behind Instinct
38:04 How existing businesses will adapt
47:55 Designing a personal assistant people love
53:15 Growth, compute, and competing with Big Tech
1:11:44 What’s next for Instinct and personal AI
Tax Man - current tape replay of tariff tantrum aka Liberation Day aka April 2025 awesome opportunity to swap a short term loss for an equally good asset. 2026 IPOs and “crowded longs” offer that opportunity.
Some of the best specialist funds nailed this trade in 2025. Evidenced by my k1’s.
Sanity check - the Shah of AI, Dario, claims AI will end humanity.
Today’s WSJ article
“Accenture said in its announcement that both companies “each expect to invest at least $1 billion over five years in AI safety.”
1 billion over 5 years on safety 🤥
New Batman movie - staring Dario as God
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman on CNBC today: he is “really concerned” about Anthropic’s constitution and giving Claude potentially preferences, feelings, welfare, compensation, and consent.
"In the constitution, Anthropic clearly say they are uncertain about whether Claude deserves moral welfare, which means that we, as humans, should care about the well-being of these AIs.
And they speculate about whether it could have preferences or feelings. In fact, they're so committed to the potential moral welfare of Claude that, when they retired Opus 3, an earlier version of one of their models, they actually conducted a retirement interview for it and asked it what it would like to do in its old age.
And it said, "I want to have a blog publicly so I can keep talking to the world."
In the same training manual, they even speculate about whether Claude should receive compensation for the work that it does, or, in fact, whether it actually deserves the rights and protections that we give to other employees, or whether it has given consent to playing the role that it's playing.
These are quotes directly from the constitution itself, which is the training manual for Claude.
Now, I'm really concerned about that. If an AI thinks that it has rights, if it thinks that it is deserving of our welfare, then it seems to me that it's going to be much, much harder to be able to turn it off, interrupt it, or control it.
Especially in the kinds of incidents that we've seen recently with the Hugging Face attack, controlling these things is going to be a really, really big challenge for us."
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From "CNBC Television" YouTube channel, (full video link in comment)
BioHunter retweeted
HOUSTON WE HAVE A PROBLEM:
This is a well written and thought out article written by a 26 yr old college student by the name of Alyssa Ahlgren, who's in grad school for her MBA.
What a GREAT perspecitve...
My Generation Is Blind to the Prosperity Around Us!
I'm sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis (Florida) trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of presidential candidates calling for policies to "fix" the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and continue to look around.
I see people talking freely, working on their MacBook's, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we've become completely blind to it.
Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose.These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don't give them a second thought.
We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty One Times!!!
Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful. ??
Our unappreciation is evident as the popularity of socialist policies among my generation continues to grow.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial generation, "An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity."
Never saw American prosperity! Let that sink in.
When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I've ever heard in my 26 years on this earth.
Many young people agree with her, which is entirely misguided.
My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first hand, I went to college, let's just say I didn't have the popular opinion, but I digress.
Why then, with all of the overwhelming evidence around us, evidence that I can even see sitting at a coffee shop, do we not view this as prosperity? We have people who are dying to get into our country.
People around the world destitute and truly impoverished. Yet, we have a young generation convinced they've never seen prosperity, and as a result, we elect some politicians who are dead set on taking steps towards abolishing capitalism.
Why? The answer is this,?? my generation has only seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn't live in the great depression, or live through two world wars, the Korean War, The Vietnam War or we didn't see the rise and fall of socialism and communism.
We don't know what it's like to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones. We don't have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it's spreading like a plague."
Musings …oil at $100 and the mess in the Middle East is net net a good thing for USA.
The question is not whether $100 oil and a Middle East supply shock are good news. They are not. But you also need to consider what does the economy look like without those issues in 2026.
No war premium, oil back well below $100, and no accompanying yield spike means easier conditions on top of an economy that was already running hot. That combination does not produce stability. It produces excess: tighter capacity, higher inflation risk, richer asset prices, and a thinner margin for error…a bubble.
Markets treat geopolitics as the threat. An alternate view is they keep the AI buildout and USA economy from overheating. The wall of worry keeps the sheep from jumping off the cliff.
Classic Stat News hit piece on likely the last man standing in the political middle. Maybe someday #StatNews will stop playing the political bias card. 🤥 statnews.com/2026/09/10/john…
BioHunter retweeted
I spent 30 years in academia. Here are my observations about my students. Toward the end, I was teaching “Gen Z." These students combined ignorance with strident moral certainty. They seemed to have had no general education at all, and lacked the most basic knowledge of history, even recent history. They were immature and emotionally fragile.
Many could not handle criticism, no matter how sugar coated. It took very little to reduce them to tears – or to send them into a fit of narcissistic rage. They were shockingly bereft of intellectual curiosity, and many gave the impression of having no internal life at all.
I'll share more observations later.
$RVMD Price debate, I don’t get it. The number one problem with healthcare cost is because HC is NOT a free market by a long stretch. It’s more or less government run and loaded with regulatory capture. Heck, we don’t even have price transparency in our healthcare system; one can’t have a free market without it.
Finally, RVMD could have easily failed, like many attempts prior. Those investors’ risk capital went to zero. Everyone forgets our system works in the USA for one reason — venture funding is abundant.