YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Telford

lines on the record: 61
first: 2024-01-30
most recent: 2024-01-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Who are pioneers in this type of CAR T cell therapy? And they have the same amount of employees working on delivering these compounds as they have treated patients, so something like 4,000 each. The high touch process expertise and scale you need to deliver these super complex next generation therapies like CARTs, like gene therapies that are somewhat personalized is just way beyond traditional pharma where you make a pill in a factory and then you put the pill on the shelf. You just have a pharmacist give it out. So I think we're going to see a lot more of these type of process-like products that are way beyond just a standard pill and it's much more a whole complex, large, the actual drug itself is a complex product, there's also a whole process around the drug of delivering it to patients in a timely fashion, of manufacturing, which is very complicated. Another good example is radio pharmaceuticals. So a lot of companies have been investing in this lately, buying up biotechs developing these drugs.”
2024-01-30 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Telford - Unlocking Innovation in Pharma - [Invest Like the Best, EP.360] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some type of drug called CAR T cell, which is way more complicated than just a typical pill. It means those are extracts from your body. They're flown to a manufacturing site. They're gene-edited to have this sequence protein inserted into their membranes that binds a specific type of protein found on cancer cells. And it's reinforced into the body, and then it goes and eliminates these pathogenic blood cancer cells. And that's an extremely complicated manufacturing process. You're taking these cells out of a human. You're flying them to another country probably. You're gene editing them, and then you're flying them back, and you have to do that in a very short amount of time. One, because the viability of the product, and two, because these patients have very severe types of cancer. And if you don't get a fast enough, they're going to die. There's a lot of kinks in those processes that need to be ironed out before these technologies become scalable beyond the niche use cases. One interesting example is this company, Bristol Myers, who absolutely bought a company called Cellgene.”
2024-01-30 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Telford - Unlocking Innovation in Pharma - [Invest Like the Best, EP.360] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are going to be really impactful in the next 10, 20 years. You need to look at what is just nascent today in getting approved. So things like gene therapies, we have a few gene therapies that have been approved. So Zol Jensman is a treatment for spinal muscular atrophy. It's really devastating infant neuromuscular disease. Patients who have that disease would die before they were one year old in the most severe type. But now they can be seemingly almost cured with these gene therapies and other modern therapeutics. And that's one example of an early success story, but we haven't had many other examples of gene therapies being commercially successful. But once you have one launch on success, you can then iterate and refine the processes for developing these drugs. And you will have down the line future successes. So I think in another 10 years, another 20 years, we'll see just the process for developing manufacturing gene therapy, so this Kings get worked out, and they'll become applied to many more conditions at a larger scale. Also things like cell therapies. So there's”
2024-01-30 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Telford - Unlocking Innovation in Pharma - [Invest Like the Best, EP.360] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at the history of technologies in biotech, it takes a long time to commercialize something. Going back to the idea of people discovering targets in academia, as soon as you have an idea for a target, it takes something like 20 years for that to turn into a drug, that sort of time period, 20 years plus minus 10 is fairly consistent of how long it takes to translate this sort of idea of how you might treat a disease. And so much of what goes into commercializing and developing a drug is turning it from this idea into a product that is actually manufacturable, scalable, doesn't trigger all these unwanted side effects. And many of these things you don't know about until you've tried it out in humans. So monoclonals now are the top-selling drug in the world, QTRUDA, previously was humura. They're both monoclonal antibodies. And now the processes to develop, produce, and sell those monopoly antibodies at scale are pretty established. But it took a long time to get there. So I think if you want to answer the question of what is the next set of technologies”
2024-01-30 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Telford - Unlocking Innovation in Pharma - [Invest Like the Best, EP.360] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Its efficacy of finding new products because you've exhausted the opportunities to develop new drugs because we've tinkered around a lot of what is easy to find. And then you have in the 80s the biotech industry arose. So just as you have this declining pharmaceutical industry, which is small molecules, medicinal chemistry, you have this rising biotech industry that's built on this idea that you can get bacteria to produce any kind of arbitrary protein by inserting it into its DNA. And that's how you get a lot of those things like the humanized insulin, monochrome antibodies. There's all these like biotech products that are now somewhat still in ascendance. So you have sort of two curves overlapping. The full off of the kind of exhaustion of low hanging fruits in traditional pharmaceuticals and then the growth in what we can do with biotechnology tools like recombinant DNA and more recently CRISPR things like that.”
2024-01-30 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Telford - Unlocking Innovation in Pharma - [Invest Like the Best, EP.360] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start his own lab in 1952 and started trying to tinker with natural compounds and use some of the emerging tools of chemistry to just adapt some of these existing compounds that had been discovered already and find new uses for them. So this 50s, there's a lot of opportunity in the sense that you had these newly evolving molecular tools and you had a lot of space to apply those tools to discover a new useful compound. So you started with these functional compounds that we found from nature. We had a lot of starting points. morphine, petty, and atropine that could be tinkered around with to find useful things that are close to those natural compounds, but not exactly the same. There's subtlely different effects. And you had an emerging suite of molecular tools. And then you fast forward over time the kind of low hanging fruit have, to some extent, been exhausted with a lot of those molecular tools were developed in that period of time. So the pharmaceutical industry, as it previously existed, has been declining.”
2024-01-30 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Telford - Unlocking Innovation in Pharma - [Invest Like the Best, EP.360] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That worked for a while limited to infectious diseases for the most part. And then in the sort of 40s and 50s, you start getting people like Jansen coming about. So Jansen was a Belgian doctrine trained in medicine. And his dad was actually one of these importers of some of these natural products, so organ extracts. Jansen recalled when he went to school that in medical school, his contemporaries were making fun of him or being part of a family who sold these sort of ineffective organ extracts. And so the ends had a bit of a chiff over his shoulder, I think, from that. And he wanted to figure out, adapt, how can we actually improve on some of these compounds that Nature has given us? So he went to the US for a while. He realized, I think he went from 1948, there was some labs that were springing up that were trying to do more rational drug design, create their own new drugs rather than just take what existed already in nature. And he brought that idea back to Belgium.”
2024-01-30 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Telford - Unlocking Innovation in Pharma - [Invest Like the Best, EP.360] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of these dye manufacturers were figuring out ways to just adapt dye chemicals and use empotherapeutic purposes. Those companies eventually became more sophisticated at the types of chemical manipulations we could do, the type of extraction we could do and purification of these natural materials. And that started to evolve into what became the pharmaceutical industry around the early 20th century. So then you had some point the golden age of antibiotics. Antibiotics between the two world wars became the first great success story of the pharmaceutical industry. So moving away from products like these natural extracts that didn't really work in most cases towards antibiotics, which had an obvious and noticeable effect on the ability to cure these infectious diseases. And a lot of these antibiotics were found through just experiments going to the wild, find soil samples, find drugs in these soil samples from bacteria, and would purify them.”
2024-01-30 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Telford - Unlocking Innovation in Pharma - [Invest Like the Best, EP.360] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if we go back to, let's say, the end of the 19th century, where you have a really nascent pharmaceutical industry. So you have pharmaceutical companies that came out of apocotheris, which were selling extracts of plants like you might still get today, naturalistic medicine, and extracts of organs. So there was this idea that nature produces some bounty of molecules that are somewhat useful to treat health. But we don't really know what parts of the natural extracts actually treat health. So you have some companies that are extracting just those natural products and selling them in extracts of cyber scrands, whatever. And then you have another sort of set of companies that came out of the chemicals industry, so the dye industry. And around when our ability to understand chemistry and use chemistry to develop our own molecules was developing. So this is back in the”
2024-01-30 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Telford - Unlocking Innovation in Pharma - [Invest Like the Best, EP.360] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into a drug, producing a molecule that can modulate these targets, either inhibit it or increase the activity in a certain way, and then running everything through first these sort of in vitro systems of just basically cells in a petri dish, then up to animal models. So testing them in mice, monkey models of disease potentially, once it's safe enough, then you can go into human trials. You have a steadily escalating sequence of trials starting from phase one, which is just basic safety trials in human volunteers and dosing to phase two, where you try to get a sense of initial efficacy of the drug and then phase three, which confirms the efficacy and safety to the extent we can. And then you have to go to the regulators, FDA, EMA, EMDA, and they'll review the package of information and make a determination for whether or not the drug can be marketed for a certain specific use case, which is called an indication.”
2024-01-30 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Telford - Unlocking Innovation in Pharma - [Invest Like the Best, EP.360] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it starts with academic research. This is mostly funded by government research and it occurs in universities. So the NIH is the biggest funder of biomedical research in the world. And they support scientists trying to understand the basic science of how diseases work. What are the mechanics of diabetes? What are the mechanics of heart disease? What are the different genes, proteins involved in those pathological processes? to some extent how could we modulate those processes to affect disease but that's only really a small part of the story so once you have an idea for how you might intervene in a disease you then have to do a lot of work to convert it into a drug so these initial hypotheses these target specific proteins RNA whatever that you can modulate to affect the disease are then taken up by mostly for-profit biotech companies who then do all the hard work of turning this”
2024-01-30 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Telford - Unlocking Innovation in Pharma - [Invest Like the Best, EP.360] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source