Johnny Hu, Ph.D.

Principal, Bio + Healthcare
Menlo Ventures

Panel Moderator:

AI for Biotech:
Accelerating Discovery

Panel Summary:

Atom icon for The AI Conference 2023, a groundbreaking two-day event on AGI, LLMs, Infrastructure, Alignment, AI Startups, and Neural Architectures.AI isn’t just speeding up biotech—it’s rewriting the rules. In this panel, experts from Moderna and Pfizer share how generative models are enabling faster target identification, smarter trial design, and next-gen personalized therapies.

Brain icon for The AI Conference 2023, a groundbreaking two-day event on AGI, LLMs, Infrastructure, Alignment, AI Startups, and Neural Architectures.We’ll explore the real-world impact of AI on pipelines, platforms, systems and patient outcomes—and how the most advanced biotechs are building for the future.

Picture of About |  Johnny Hu

About | Johnny Hu

Johnny is a principal at Menlo Ventures, where he invests in biotech and life science companies with a focus on novel therapeutics and technologies for improving medical outcomes. He has firsthand experience working at the bench on engineering new tools for the clinic. While completing his Ph.D., Johnny helped develop gene editing technologies that were licensed by companies such as Editas Medicine (NASDAQ: EDIT) and Beam Therapeutics (NASDAQ: BEAM). He is excited about partnering with founders at the beginning of the company journey to translate groundbreaking science into new medicines.

Prior to Menlo, Johnny was a vice president at Longitude Capital, where he made several investments in early-stage biotech companies. He was a board observer at Lexeo Therapeutics, Endeavor Biomedicines, and Opna IO, and was on the investment team for Amunix Pharmaceuticals. Before Longitude, he was an associate at Omega Funds, where he worked on the firm’s investment in Nuvation Bio (NYSE: NUVB).

Johnny received his Ph.D. from Harvard University as a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. He holds an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Cambridge Scholar, and an A.B., summa cum laude, in Chemical and Physical Biology from Harvard. He relishes the opportunity to continue learning from innovators and to explore new science.

After 14 years in Boston, Johnny now lives with his wife in Seattle, where you can find him road and gravel biking, as well as hiking the Pacific Northwest terrain.