David Rosenthal: observation

Transcript context

…Seems pretty straightforward. In fact, why don't you just go eat some GLP-1? Just get it into your body however you want. I'm sure it'll work out. Right, no big deal. The problem is GLP-1 only stays active in your body for about five minutes before your body completely metabolizes it and breaks it down. In a normal healthy person, you're just producing GLP-1 all the time, and it's regulating your Insulin production, et cetera. In Type 2 Diabetes, that gets disrupted. You can't just put more regular human GLP-1 in the body, or it's going to go away immediately. A whole lot of people across the industry bang their heads against the wall. Nobody can figure out how to make this work. The industry and the academic research community pretty much abandons it as a drug candidate. But Lotte is like, if we could make it work, this would really, really help people and be a great drug. She faces a lot of pressure inside the company, outside the company. Why are you still hanging on to this? Why are you still pursuing this path? Finally, a few years later in the mid 90s, the management actually gives her an ultimatum. They're like, you either need to crack this and get an actual drug candidate in the pipeline within a year, or we're going to shut down this whole program. Remember, Novo Nordisk, the world class most focused on pure play Diabetes research company in the world. Even they are like, yeah, we're almost ready to abandon this whole thing. Crazy. What year is this?…

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