...AND CHEAPER...:

[Former Stanford professor Vijay Pande] said he believes that the fast-declining cost of computing could change medicine the same way that the Industrial Revolution changed how we do just about everything.

Pande said it took 10 years and $3 billion to map the first human genome, and now a person's DNA can be sequenced for $300.

One promising application, he said, is using machine learning or artificial intelligence to try to teach computers to perform tasks such as spotting tumors in medical scans. The idea is not to replace doctors but to give them the tools to work more accurately and efficiently, he said.

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Another potential investment opportunity is in digital therapeutics, in which patients' conditions are monitored remotely with sensors on their smartphones. Software can then coach the patients to control their illnesses through exercise, diet and other behavioral treatments that don't have the harmful side effects of traditional drugs.

Those are just two uses of computers in medicine that Andreessen Horowitz is calling Bio 2.0.

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