Evidence-driven updates across biotech and AI

Articles, whitepapers and podcasts from our team and advisors.

Podcasts
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AI, LABI, and How we Invest: A Conversation with Neel Madhukar, PhD and Themasap Khan, PhD

Neel Madhukar, PhD, Chief Technology Officer of Luma Group’s proprietary AI model, LABI, discusses the genesis of the program and how it impacts day-to-day processes at Luma Group. Neel and Themasap discuss what we are building at Luma Group to change the game for biotech investing.

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Whitepapers

God Bless the Private Sector: How Private Funding is Bridging the Gap

Publicly funded basic research has long served as the foundation for breakthroughs. Yet proposed federal cuts, including reductions to the NSF and NIH, now threaten the early-stage research that the private sector traditionally does not fund. These changes have already stalled projects, eliminated jobs, and raised concerns about broader delays in scientific progress. At the same time, the United States faces intensifying competition with China, whose sustained investment in early-stage biotech has accelerated its global share of drug development. Although the US retains leadership in total R&D value, the trend signals growing vulnerability, one seemingly at odds with the administration’s broader “America First” agenda. The launch of the Genesis Mission, with its emphasis on AI-enabled science and biotechnology as a domain of national importance, hints at a potential restructuring rather than an abandonment of federal scientific priorities. In this environment, the private sector has emerged as an essential stabilizing force. As public funding recedes, venture capital and philanthropy must intervene earlier in the research lifecycle. This shift can bring rigorous private-sector diligence to basic science, likely focusing resources on fewer projects but with greater efficiency. To handle this complexity, biology-specific AI tools will shift from optional luxuries to indispensable necessities. Ultimately, this disruption offers a chance to modernize our infrastructure: building a resilient ecosystem capable of expanding, not just restoring, American scientific progress.

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Articles

Delivering on the Promise of Precision Medicine: Our Investment in Aeovian Pharmaceuticals

The promise of precision medicine has been to deliver safer, more effective treatments by tailoring them to the unique biology of disease. Historically, most treatments have only provided patients with symptomatic relief and rarely corrected the underlying disease biology, leaving them inadequately addressed. In 2003, the mapping of the human genome gave scientists a foundation to understand the link between genetic mutations and disease. Researchers have since continued to map other advanced “omics” such as proteomics and metabolomics. These high-resolution biological maps provide the tools to understand biology in finer resolution and to identify which genes and pathways result in disease. These mapping techniques allow researchers to develop drugs directly targeted to treat diseases and, in some cases, correct the underlying disease pathways.

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Whitepapers

God Bless the Private Sector: How Private Funding is Bridging the Gap

Publicly funded basic research has long served as the foundation for breakthroughs. Yet proposed federal cuts, including reductions to the NSF and NIH, now threaten the early-stage research that the private sector traditionally does not fund. These changes have already stalled projects, eliminated jobs, and raised concerns about broader delays in scientific progress. At the same time, the United States faces intensifying competition with China, whose sustained investment in early-stage biotech has accelerated its global share of drug development. Although the US retains leadership in total R&D value, the trend signals growing vulnerability, one seemingly at odds with the administration’s broader “America First” agenda. The launch of the Genesis Mission, with its emphasis on AI-enabled science and biotechnology as a domain of national importance, hints at a potential restructuring rather than an abandonment of federal scientific priorities. In this environment, the private sector has emerged as an essential stabilizing force. As public funding recedes, venture capital and philanthropy must intervene earlier in the research lifecycle. This shift can bring rigorous private-sector diligence to basic science, likely focusing resources on fewer projects but with greater efficiency. To handle this complexity, biology-specific AI tools will shift from optional luxuries to indispensable necessities. Ultimately, this disruption offers a chance to modernize our infrastructure: building a resilient ecosystem capable of expanding, not just restoring, American scientific progress.

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Podcasts
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Reimagining Chronic Care: A Conversation with Ritish Patnaik of Curve Biosciences

Dr. Themasap Khan, co-founder and partner, sat down with Ritish Patnaik, CEO and co-founder of Curve Biosciences, to discuss his career, the journey to co-founding Curve, the company’s transformative impact, and what’s next. Beyond delving into Curve’s groundbreaking science, Ritish shares leadership insights and advice for navigating the world of biotech, explaining how his life experience pushed him to biotech.

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Articles

The Next Frontier in Chronic Disease Monitoring: Our Investment in Curve Biosciences

Despite remarkable medical advances, real-time monitoring of organ health remains out of reach. Curve Biosciences is closing this gap with Whole-Body Intelligence™—a platform built on the world’s largest curated tissue atlas that maps how disease reshapes each organ at the molecular level. By tracing these precise signatures in blood, Curve delivers liquid biopsy tests that move beyond cancer to detect and monitor disease across the full spectrum of organ health. Its first product, a liver test, is already demonstrating superior accuracy and the potential to transform early detection and chronic disease management.

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Whitepapers

The Limits of Generic LLMs: Why Biotech Needs Purpose-Built Tools

Healthcare is one of the most data-rich and capital-intensive sectors yet remains decades behind in analytics. High-stakes decisions rely on incomplete data and systems that are slow, manual, error-prone, and expensive. The result is billion-dollar missteps, extended timelines in an industry already operating on decade-long horizons, and delays in bringing life-saving medicines to patients. Despite rapid advances in LLMs, these breakthroughs have yet to meaningfully change how strategic decisions are made in biotech. Today’s LLMs are fluent language tools. They can summarize dense papers, extract entities, or polish prose, but language is not the same as evidence-backed strategy. Biotech demands reasoning across fragmented, multi-modal data: trials, patient outcomes, regulatory precedent, and competitive context, all shifting in real time. Addressing this call for platforms that are purpose-built for biotech, fluent in the networked language of biology, and capable of turning vast, messy evidence into actionable, trusted insights. Only with tools like these will strategic decisions in biotech and healthcare match the rigor the field demands. In this whitepaper, we (1) examine how strategic decisions in biotech are made today, (2) show where today’s LLMs help and where they fail, (3) propose a bio-native architecture built on a shared data foundation, multi-hop reasoning, and UX-driven validation loops, and (4) introduce LABI, Luma Group’s AI for Biotech Intelligence, and how we aim to apply these principles in practice.

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Whitepapers

The Case for Venture Capital in Biotechnology

There are many perceptions of what a venture capitalist (VC) is. In the biotech space, VCs are enigmatic because many of us never imagined becoming VCs, and many future VCs might have no idea they’re headed down that path either. My story, like many in biotech, started with a passion to help sick people. I was fortunate to discover my passion at the age of six, when I told my parents that I wanted to be a genetic engineer. I didn’t fully understand what that entailed, but the film Jurassic Park sparked my curiosity. I was fascinated by the idea that nature had invented biological Legos called DNA that could be assembled to create humans, sea slugs, bananas, bacteria, mold, and, most intriguingly, entirely new life forms. Less than two decades later, I received my PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology. I loved deciphering nature’s clues and genetic codes to figure out the “how” and “why” in nature’s playbook. However, I didn’t yet know how to translate this knowledge from the lab into life-saving therapies. I continued my research journey post-PhD and eventually landed an industry postdoc position at Pfizer. At Pfizer, I soaked up every fact, lesson, piece of jargon, and process required to take an initial discovery and turn it into a drug. At this moment, something clicked for me: my true passion wasn’t just making discoveries; it was figuring out how to transform those discoveries into medicines capable of helping patients. My time at Pfizer also made it clear that I wasn’t ready to join an organization as large as Pfizer long-term. Thankfully, after years of trying different career trajectories and with the help of some great mentors, it became clear that biotech venture capital uniquely aligned both my personal goals: contributing to life-changing therapies, and professional goals: being able to earn a living while pursuing my personal passion. As they say, “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

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