Jacob Kimmel: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay, final question. Pharma is spending billions of dollars per new drug it comes up with. Surely they have noticed that the lack of some general platform or some general model has made it more and more expensive and difficult to come up with new drugs. You say Perturb-seq has existed since 2016. As far as you can tell, you have the most amount of that kind of data which would feed into a general-purpose model. What is the traditional pharma industry on the other coast up to? If I went to the head of R&D at Eli Lilly or Pfizer or something, do they think that this is like they have some different idea of the platform that needs to be built or they're like, “No, we're all in on the bespoke game, bespoke for each drug?” I'll just correct one thing to make sure I'm not overstating. We have way more data for the limited subproblem we're tackling, which is overexpressing TFs in combinations. We have way more data than anyone, full stop, there. But even more specifically, I feel very, very confident we have more data than anyone looking at trying to reprogram a cell's age. That's where we're way larger than the rest of the world. When we think about just general single-cell perturbation data of various flavors, there are other groups which have very large data sets as well. We're still differentiated because we do everything in human cells with the right number of chromosomes, whereas it's very common to do things in cancer cell lines which have 200 chromosomes. Is that human? I don't know. Depends on how you actually quantify these things. So then, if you’re going to go ask the leaders of some of the traditional pharmaceutical firms, "Are you trying to build a general model?" I think some of them have in-house AI innovation teams that are working on this. There are really smart people there. But as a general trend, you can think about some of the modern pharmas a bit like venture capital firms. They've over time externalized a lot of their R&D. They often have divisions of external innovation, which you can think of as the corp dev version of venture capital. They work with the biotech ecosystem to have a number of smaller, nimble firms explore really pioneer ideas, the types of things we're working on, and then eventually partner with them once they have assets that are later downstream. The industry has sort of bifurcated where smaller biotechs like ours take on most of the early discovery. I'm going to get it a little bit wrong from memory, but it's something like 70% of molecules approved in a given year come from originally small biotechs rather than large pharmas, even though you look at the actual dollars of R&D spend on the balance sheet and it's largely in big pharma. Another level of disintermediation.…

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