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Bioinformatics Summer Internship 2024 With Hands-On-Training + Project / Dissertation - 30 Days, 3 Months & 6 Months Duration

Life-sciences start-ups or companies always come with a high risk of failure as often, the science behind a proposed invention isn’t entirely proven, and turns out not to work. Owing to this risk, the traditional way to fund them involves a landmark investor to take a huge equity stake in the business and replace the founder with a seasoned executive and then pumping out tens of millions of dollars into the company over years. But it so happens at times that it often takes more than a decade to generate a return.

Mindful of this reality, Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley’s well-known (and rich) start-up accelerator has come up with a foolproof plan to zero in on the kind of biotech start-ups it could fund with minimised risk. The company is notable for its funding of start-ups like Airbnb, Reddit, Dropbox, and Stripe among others.

In 2014, the start-up incubator founded its first synthetic biology start-up, Ginkgo Bioworks, which bills itself as scaling the process of organism engineering using “software and hardware automation.” The start-up also recently raised $45 million in a Series B round. And ever since, the company has funded dozens more biotech start-ups.

The company now thinks

it has found a new type of biotechnology start-up that it could fund with minimized risk- startups that use the latest computer science technologies such as machine learning, hence growing much more quickly than their counterparts, and thus could be funded more like tech start-ups.

“When I took over YC in 2014 I made a list of things I wanted to get into. Health and synthetic biologies were two of the categories.” Said Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. Thereby stressing that Biotech is now a serious category for the fund.

Altman also said that Y Combinator is about to add another part-time partner with health and biotech expertise to its ranks, alongside existing partner Elizabeth Iorns; although he declined to name them stating that the plans have not yet been finalized.

Considering how unorthodox this move is as biotech is an uneasy fit for a culture steeped in software, and online companies that can turn on a dime, the start-up accelerator’s decision has created much noise.

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