YouSaid · the spoken record

Eli Casdin

lines on the record: 67
first: 2021-07-15
most recent: 2021-07-15
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

“And I think what we say now is biopharma, which is to say that there is no pharmaceutical companies anymore. They are biopharmas. They are biotech and pharma together. And some of those will get there through being pharmas that acquire biotech, and others will be biotechs that become like pharmaceutical companies.”
2021-07-15 · Capital Allocators · Eli Casdin – Casdin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stop selling that product to a million people and sell this new one to 50,000 people. You know, it's sort of, what are you talking about? And so I think pharma in the last 20 years had jettisoned their R&D efforts to focus on distribution of brand. And I think the new products that are coming out are much more targeted, much more high efficacy don't need brand to say this one's better than the other. The data is there and are less of a distribution model because they're very narrow patient populations. So they're wrestling to figure out how they fit in this world. And meanwhile, for them, these biotechs are starting, you know, investors like me are saying don't sell yourself. Don't partner. You don't need them. I'll give you the money. Go at it alone. Build out commercial. Become your own standalone company. And many, many more are going that path. And I think that they don't need pharma in the same way. And so we're in that trend.”
2021-07-15 · Capital Allocators · Eli Casdin – Casdin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a trade-off, but for pharma trying to replace Lipator revenues, this is not a great story. So they're wrestling with how do you run a scaled business when the new products are not scaled products? And so they're trying to acquire lots of them. The other thing to keep in mind, and it's not that pharma doesn't get it or has their head in the sand. And in fact, I learned this from someone who was in the media industry and I was always, we were talking about disruptive technologies and how these large incumbents always get disrupted. And this person mentioned to me, he said, listen, in every one of these large organizations, they always have a division that is right on the cutting edge doing that new science or that new technology or that new model. They just can't get enough airtime with the larger sales force or the commercial, you know, commercial drives a large organization. And if you tell us,”
2021-07-15 · Capital Allocators · Eli Casdin – Casdin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or you don't know the mechanism of your powers of doing a precision medicine trial In the context of breast cancer, the symptom is very similar. There is the mast in the breast, the causes are very different. There could be dozens of different genetic mutations that are causing these cells to grow out of control, and each of those mutations could require a totally different drug. And so if you just develop a drug and you say this should impacts this gene, but I'm going to recruit all women with breast cancer, you're going to have to recruit a lot of women to hopefully catch enough that respond to the drug. But if you go in there with a diagnostic and say, I'm only looking for women who have a BRACA mutation and this parp inhibitor is going to, it reduces the whole scale of the endeavor. Commercially, it also reduces the whole applicability of the drug. Now, there is a debate, and I think it's an accurate one, which is you trade off total addressable market for duration of therapy. You make the money back because the patient lives and uses the drug for a very long time.”
2021-07-15 · Capital Allocators · Eli Casdin – Casdin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's been a sort of big brother little brother relationship with farm and biotech since inception. And that relationship has gone from a dominant big brother to more of a partnered big brother over time as biotech is matured and their technologies have improved. Today, about 70% of innovative drugs are coming out of small biotechs. They're still largely being commercialized by pharma through either acquisition or through a partnership. But the idea of a long duration clinical trial is a product of scale. You're recruiting tons and tons of people. And the reason you're doing that is to get enough statistical significance that you can show the drug works or not. And that's because you don't know specifically who in a patient population is going to respond. And that's because your drug is not that.”
2021-07-15 · Capital Allocators · Eli Casdin – Casdin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's undergone cell therapy, whether it's to fight cancer or to replace some organ under dysfunction. And then this industrial piece turns out that the science is well appreciated. Mendel's peas and, you know, botanists have understood genetics and things for a very long time. But the sales cycle, farmers takes a long time to grow up and believe that these new technologies will improve their yield. You know, these are just pure economic decisions. And so that's taken a longer time to happen, but it's all sort of taken off.”
2021-07-15 · Capital Allocators · Eli Casdin – Casdin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“an academic. We are not academics. You know, academics publish a paper. It's debated, and then they move on. Investors get real-time feedback if they're wrong or right. And often you're going down the road highly convicted. This is the way to go. And then you say, you know what? A couple of things have changed. You got to go back the other way. And so you have to adjust. What's interesting is as those drug companies started making these precision medicine products, they needed the diagnostic in the market to use the drugs. And so that pulled for the payers to see the diagnostics. So those things came over. And then the cell therapy, we are now in a cell therapy world where there are approved cell therapies. The technology is getting better. We're seeing a wave of companies specifically in cancer. But, you know, in a decade, you will be much closer to all of us experiencing whether personally or through our extended families.”
2021-07-15 · Capital Allocators · Eli Casdin – Casdin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“diagnostics were technically feasible, the reimbursement industry didn't want to pay for them because their experience was a blood test, pay five bucks for a blood test and here, you know, X what foundation medicine, which is one of the pioneering companies, wants you to pay $3,000. They thought, what are you talking about, you know, to sequence a tumor to match against therapy? So actually the drug companies and the venture capitalists behind those drug companies and the investors and the drug developers and entrepreneurs realized that you have a much higher chance of being successful in clinical development if you use these tools, you know, precision medicine to develop your drugs. And so the therapeutic part of the story actually came before the diagnostic one, which took me a while to adapt. I think the other critical thing when you're investing in these spaces is, again, that sort of timing element. And this is the difference between being an investor.”
2021-07-15 · Capital Allocators · Eli Casdin – Casdin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“outbreak broke, took us seven months to read the genome of the SARS. And you have to read the genome to create an effective vaccine. When COVID broke, it took us two days. That information was digitally sent to Moderna, and it took them two days to create an mRNA vaccine prototype that is identical to the one that we take today. And it took them 45 days to scale it up to medicinal grade product. Never before in history could you have done that and respond. And so everyone understands today the power of what's happening and believes in it. The diagnostic business, and this is sort of the interesting thing when you're investing in sciences and technology, is I had a sort of a linear layered you do diagnostics, then you do the drugs, then you do the cells, then you do everything in industrial biotech and all that stuff. Turns out that while”
2021-07-15 · Capital Allocators · Eli Casdin – Casdin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was sort of the line. And then actually the firm, because we were such large investors in the payers and providers, the hospitals, the insurance, they said, what does this all mean for life expectancy and the insurance model? And I was like, oh my gosh, that's another level. But that was the final chapter to say this has big macro implications. So that was sort of all laid out in that 108 pages. When I first started, I had to convince people that any of this was possible. And I would spend, you know, of a 60-minute meeting. I would spend 58 minutes being like, no, no, the cost curve is changing. The industry is not boom bust. Like just get people to believe where we sit today is, I think, especially in COVID pulled forward a lot of belief up into the current thing. I think people recognize the power of the industry. Just to give you context, we went from in 2003 when the SARS”
2021-07-15 · Capital Allocators · Eli Casdin – Casdin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“leads to better diagnostics, leads to more precision, base clinical trial and development increases predictability, which by the way for an investor, you want to improve your expected return. You want to improve the probability of success. That is directly tied to understanding the mechanism of disease and recruiting patients in, i.e. then leads to higher expected returns, which is part of our thesis was invest in those companies with higher expected returns. The next element was, well, if you start to understand the code in dysfunction, you can understand the code and function like that what is driving the cells to do what they do and be the way they are, which is going to lead to greater control over the cells. And your cell therapy is going to become a thing. And you can correct burnt out T cells, re-engineer them or stem cells, repopulate tissues and things. And so that was the next element.”
2021-07-15 · Capital Allocators · Eli Casdin – Casdin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in diagnosing disease, we're not just going to be diagnosing on symptoms, but we're going to understand the molecular underpinnings of it, the sort of computer code, if you will, of what's wrong. Once you understand the computer code, you can design something much more specifically to fix flawed code, sort of precision in a precision medicine way, and you can design clinical trials in a much more organized way, which was basically the early thesis of biotech. One of the big insights that I've had over the years is there is for big technology waves, there's no wrong idea. There's just timing. Someone said this at Alliance Bernstein, and I later learned that it was a Howard Marks comment, but the difference between two early and wrong is slight, right? And so precision medicine had been an early promise of biotech back in the 90s, and I had heard a lot about it. So I said, oh, maybe this will actually make precision medicine happen. So that was technology improvement.”
2021-07-15 · Capital Allocators · Eli Casdin – Casdin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Day it would have taken you three, four, five years and cost you 300 plus million. It was done in a room full of 100 machines and postdocs moving samples back and forth. It can now be done in a day on one machine for 500 bucks. And that trajectory became very clear to me that that was happening. And so the question then was, well, if you change the cost curve for analyzing and manipulating molecular biology, therefore you increase the understanding. And oh by the way, the industry has gone from boom bust, pharma's going to assume the whole thing to actually there is an industry. There's the gentex and the biogens. This is a real self-sustaining industry with revenue. And the science is at a point far more we don't know than do, but we know enough. What with this low cost technology will happen? And so I started to piece it out. And basically the thesis was, well, we're going to...”
2021-07-15 · Capital Allocators · Eli Casdin – Casdin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is just interviewing like this and asking questions. And actually, it's a very powerful engagement with a company. Liance Bernsey, when I joined, had 800 billion under management. That was definitely enough to get you in the door at a company. But when you talk to someone in the context of you're doing a sort of a study of the industry and it's a different participation, you're not sort of just capital, you're part of the industry. And I think maybe my genius at that moment was an ability to get people to communicate with me and talk and listen, but then to string together what seemed like disparate pieces into a cohesive thesis. And that thesis was and is that the technologies post curve for analyzing and manipulating molecular biology, DNA specifically, had come crashing down just for context, the human genome was finished in 03, cost the government about $3 billion and took about 13 years to do. If you had started in that.”
2021-07-15 · Capital Allocators · Eli Casdin – Casdin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first element is that it wasn't a sort of wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. Aha, it was the product of interviewing every person I could talk to. I have a sort of talk to anyone at least once policy. Good companies, bad ones, key opinion leaders, you know, basic researchers policy, a tool provider, a diagnostic company, a payer. I had been born with a good last name in life sciences, but had no connectivity to the tech industry per se. But Alliance Bernstein, we were the top shareholder in Intel and Google and Amazon. And so I could pick up the phone and call these firms. And I remember calling Intel and I said, are you guys thinking about genomics? Well, we got a guy on the 11th floor, Wolf Pinfield. He's thinking about it. So I spent at least two plus years.”
2021-07-15 · Capital Allocators · Eli Casdin – Casdin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, thank you for doing this. So I have sort of a long history, a windy road that led me to this seat as a portfolio manager, investor in life sciences, both in the public markets and the private markets. I'm a native New Yorker. I grew up on the Upper West Side to a family that was from my birth in the capital markets investing. My father was an early investor in cable TV. He started a discount brokeraging business in the early 70s when they...”
2021-07-15 · Capital Allocators · Eli Casdin – Casdin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On today's manager meeting, Joel Wittenberg speaks with Eli Kasten. Joel is the former chief investment officer of the WK Kellogg Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic foundations in the United States. Eli is the founder and chief investment officer of Kazden Capital, a $3.5 billion investment firm focused on investments in life sciences. Their conversation starts with Eli's thematic case for biotech and the role of big pharma. They turn to the firm's assessment of company management teams, private market strategy, internal management of research and decision-making processes, and the future of Kazden Capital. And first, I chat with Joel about how he came to invest with Kazden and the fit of the strategy in Kellogg's portfolio. Joel, great to see you”
2021-07-15 · Capital Allocators · Eli Casdin – Casdin Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.02) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source