David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Right. The gigantic amount of R&D, it literally is $2.3 billion to bring a drug to market on average. You need to make a lot of profit dollars on any given drug to benefit. You don't necessarily need scale of patients, but you do need scale of dollars in order to outrun the fixed costs of R&D. Yup. I think we can say, there's no network economies here pretty safely. I think we can probably also say there's no branding, although Ozempic has become such a buzzword. I think there actually is. Normally, there isn't, but that's one of the breakout things about Ozempic. There actually is brand power. The first time I heard about Mounjaro was 18 months after I'd heard about Ozempic, and I was like, oh, it must be some kind of knockoff. It's my first time studying pharma. I was like, oh, it's probably something crappy that's trying to ride this same wave, but isn't actually the breakthrough molecule. The studies show, Mounjaro helps you lose more weight and has a very similar mechanism, plus another mechanism that together worked, but most people don't know that. Most people know, I read on the cover of the New York Times that Ozempic is a breakthrough, and I heard about it at the Oscars because a joke was made on stage.…

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