Some of the really big rounds have been for therapeutics as well. Denali raised a $250M series A a couple years ago.

There is just a ton of money right now.

Even for companies like uBiome whose business strategy is “we’ll sequence your microbiome and <waves hands around furiously>”

I'd put Denali in the "actually does science" category, though. Certainly more than uBiome. They do have a drug in clinical trials, after all.

Trying desperately not to be bitter as I submit yet another grant to keep my lab going, and where $250K a year is a really pretty successful grant portfolio.

It sounds like we've figured out what'll cause the bubble this time around

I think that's a bit cynical of the current round of bio-based funding. It's not wrong, but it's also not the whole picture.

It's only just started, but there is now a light at the end of the genetic/gene-therapy tunnel. With the approval of the first CAR last year (and it's success at curing children of leukemia), there's now a very real environment to produce valuable inventive biological products that are not just chemicals or antibodies.

Kite and Juno sales for ~$10B each earlier this year has done quite a bit for the field. Vapor always follows the good money, but it's not just that the money is cheap.

Maybe you're right that investors are going a little crazy because there's a whiff of success in the air. But even so, throwing money at a company like uBiome based on the stuff you're talking about is just the usual VC herd-following behavior.