Jacob Kimmel: prediction

Transcript context

…Basically, even if we invent de-aging technology, or especially if we invent de-aging technology, how should we think about the way it will net out in the fraction of GDP that we have to spend on healthcare? Will that increase because everybody's lining up at the doctor's office to get a prescription and you gotta go into the clinic every week? Or will that decrease because the other downstream ailments from aging aren't coming about? I think the latter is much more likely to be the case. Here are some quick heuristics. There are many reasons that healthcare costs so much in the US. One of them is something like Baumol's cost disease, which is very unrelated to pharmaceutical discoveries but is something that we will have to solve in the system. Part of it's the disintermediation of the actual customer and the actual provider. These are things that biotech probably isn't going to be able to solve as an industry alone. That's probably a larger economic problem. But when you think about how this will affect the total amount of healthcare that will need to be delivered. If you have more of these medicines for everyone, medicines that keep you healthier longer rather than medicines that only fix a problem once you're already very sick, I think you actually avoid a lot of the types of administration costs. It’s not just administration like admins at hospitals, but the cost of administering existing medicines and therapies to you. That’s going down. One stat on why I think that's true. Something like a third of all Medicare costs are spent in the final year of life, which is shocking when you realize that the average person on Medicare is probably a decade-plus covered by it. There's an incredible concentration of the actual expenses once someone is already terribly sick. Helping prevent you from ever having to access the intensive healthcare system, something like an inpatient hospital visit, if you can prevent even just a couple of those visits over a long period of someone's life with a medicine like an incretin mimetic, like a reprogramming medicine that keeps your liver, your immune system younger, on net that actually starts to drive healthcare spend down because you're shifting some of that burden from the administration system to the pharmaceutical system. The pharmaceutical system is the only piece of healthcare where technology has made us more efficient. As drugs go generic, the cost of administering a given unit of healthcare is going down. The grand social contract is that they eventually go generic. That's the way our current IP system works. So if you were to get the question of, “When would you like to be born as a patient?” you always want to be born as close to today as possible. Because for a given unit in terms of pharmaceuticals, for a given dollar unit of expense, you can access more pharmaceutical technology today than has ever been possible in history, even as healthcare costs everywhere else in the system have shot up. Pharmaceuticals are the one place where, because of the mechanism of things going generic and the fact that our old medicines continue to work and persist over time, you're able to get more benefit per dollar. 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?”…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.