YouSaid · the spoken record

Francis deSouza

lines on the record: 27
first: 2021-08-19
most recent: 2021-08-19
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

“The single biggest thing that's at stake is that we know if we acquire GRIL, tens of thousands of lives will be saved, that wouldn't be saved if we don't acquire Grail. That motivates us deeply. We feel there's a moral imperative we have to push as hard as we can to make sure that everybody understands that and that we do get this test to everyone. We are deeply passionate about equity of access to genomic technologies. It's why we drive the cost of sequencing down so aggressively as we have. And we don't want to get into a world where genomic tests are only available to the self-bay market and the wealthy. And so that's the biggest thing at stake. There's tens of thousands of lives that we could be saving by accelerating the access to this test.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is part of the discussion. Today, we at Illumina and We at America really are the leaders in genomic sequencing. And it's a field that we've been leading for a while, and it's through big investments we make in R&D. BGI does sell sequencers around the world, we believe, and it's been validated in court, they are infringing on RIP, that they're using some of our technology. And it's going to continue to be erased to keep staying ahead of where the market is. If we are blocked from getting into other areas, and BGI is not, it does create an uneven playing field where to the point you made earlier, BGI will just have access to more data to drive more innovation than we will. And if we let that happen, then we risk losing our lead in this very, very important area for the future.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we did a number of things right, especially around innovation, but there are definitely areas I think we could have done better and I think we will work on to do better in the future. One is it turns out it is important to have a presence in DC. Turns out it is important to spend time making sure that the people that are driving policies and regulations really understand A, what's at stake, B, what the market actually looks like. And that's something that I wish we had done more of earlier and something we will start to do more of going forward.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“10 to 15 years on average, the fastest for moms was four years, and yet in less than a year we went from identifying pathogen to having a highly, highly effective vaccine for it. I got goosebumps and got, you know, I was choked up when I saw the first trucks starting to roll. I still get choked up when I think about starting to roll with the Pfizer vaccines that got published. I mean, it truly was just miraculous work that happened.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's been a hugely tragic year. When you think about the last 18 months, so many people have died. There's been so much suffering, this huge human cost, the stress of people being cooped up at home, the pressures of people losing their jobs, the pressure of people that lose their insurance, the enormous frustration of seeing the inequity of access to vaccines, the inequity of access to testing. And it's highlighted just really problematic structural issues about equity in our society here in the US and around the world. And in the midst of that, we've seen people rally and on the front lines have done just heroic work. And part of that are the scientists. It has been just an unbelievable year in terms of medical innovation and scientific innovation. You know, the mRNA vaccines are, it's hard to use any other word other than miraculous. Vaccine development takes”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what we found was, you know, the AI algorithm sort of developed very complex signatures based on methylation patterns that are very, very, very indicative that a person has cancer and also point to where in your body the cancer is. In 93% of the cases that blood test can tell you if you have a cancer what tissue it's in. So it's in the pancreas. And frankly, we still have work to do to understand why. What's the biology that drives those incredibly complicated methylation signatures? Hugely exciting area of research. It also points to the opportunity for a new area for drug targets to say like if those methylation signatures are deeply associated with cancer, then what if you could disrupt them? And so to your point, the more data you have, the smarter we get, and the better our algorithms are that can help us lead the way.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're absolutely right. We weren't looking for it. We were looking to understand the health of the baby and we stumbled upon signs of cancer in the blood, in the mom. And that is going to continue to be true. The more data we collect, the more we'll understand how genomics in your genome translates into health and disease. What's exciting too is that with the advances in machine learning and AI, you can actually find signals that are very powerful before you even understand the biology. And that's what happened here in cancer screening, where initially we thought you would be looking for known mutations in cancer genes. And so we said, we know that these mutations in these genes give you a much higher chance of having cancer. And we did those tests, but at the same time, we unleashed the AI algorithms to say, and look for anything else, and see if there's any other signal that we don't understand, but maybe better.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great observation. There are things that have been developed over the last couple of decades that are now ready for primetime. But there are also a number of things that are really exciting that are much earlier stage, that are in the stage of when we first discover GRIL, where you look at something and you think, wow, this could have a massive impact in the next five to ten years. But alumina, we spend about 18% of our revenue on R&D, which is twice our industry's average. And it's a statement partially to the opportunity in front of us that's just so vast, and we're still so early on.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly it. We have been doing work now since the first human genome was sequenced in the beginning of this century, so two decades now. We've seen the emergence of gene therapies over the last, you know, eighteen months to two years that are having really dramatic results with curing a patient of sickle cell cancer or inherited blindness. We've seen the emergence of CRISPR and gene editing into the clinic in the last couple of years. So again, technology that's been developed over the last couple of decades, whereas now finding clinical applications.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've also donated sequencers and consumables to over 10 countries in Africa. I know we were in Mozambique the other day training teams on the ground on how to use sequencing. And some of these countries have never had sequencing before. We're used in India to track how the variants are emerging there. And so we've seen this whole field of genomic epidemiology emerge. And we've seen genomics enter the vernacular of the culture where people are talking about variants and mutations. They're very aware of what genomics does. We've seen other fields accelerate too. The whole area of genomic vaccines, mRNA vaccines. You know, we worked with Moderna and BioNTech. Moderna, their entire vaccine development program is based on the data that comes off Illumina Machines. And mRNA vaccines for COVID are only the first step for them. They're working on cancer vaccines and malaria vaccines. We've also seen acceleration in the use of liquid biopsies for cancer patients. And that's using blood tests instead of tissue.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can absolutely speed things up once you have a product by working on things like reimbursement and regulatory pathways and education. A lot of times you have to educate the doctors on what the test is, when it can be used, how it can be used. And so this is a market where bringing the product out is in some sense just the beginning of the journey. Now, you brought up a really good point about the pandemic. I believe the pandemic has accelerated the field of genomics by five plus years. Our team was actually called into Wuhan at the end of 2019, and the first viral genome of Sars-Covi2, that was published on Jan 10th, was done on Lumina Sequencers out of Shanghai. Since then, have been involved not just in China, but around the world, in doing surveillance of how this virus is evolving. So when you hear about the delta and the other variants, a lot of that is done on alumina sequencers.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm definitely spending a lot of time focusing on things that'll impact us sort of in the three plus year time frame. In a lot of cases, we help accelerate the market in a particular direction by the investments we make in our technology. So we spend a lot of time thinking about what products can we bring in the markets we're in to accelerate it, but also what work do we need to do from a reimbursement perspective, a regulatory perspective, a physician education perspective so the doctors know to order those tests to accelerate those markets. And then we look at what are the breakthrough markets that are emerging, and that's what led to the acquisition of GRIL.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Getting this test out as quickly as possible and to get this beyond the self pay market where it is today. So today, because Grail doesn't really have the reimbursement in place or the teams that can drive it, the test is offered as a self-pay test. And if you go to their website, you'll see it costs $945 for the test. It's a life-saving test, but a lot of people can't afford, especially regularly in $945 test. What we don't want is this test withheld from communities that already are underserved from a healthcare perspective. And so there was a lot of interest in seeing how can accelerate getting this test out to as many people as quickly as possible.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was definitely a novel experience. We at Illumina, we're sort of an engineering science company, and so we don't spend much time in DC, but it's clear that there's a need to. What I heard in DC were a few things. One, I think there was just a almost a little bit of shock and awe that a test like this exists. One member of Congress who actually has a medical background, I think two minutes in, his first words were like, wow, this is doable. And although the Grail test has been on the market now for a few weeks, they don't really have a substantial marketing department to get the word out. And so most people don't know the Grail tests exist. There was a huge amount of pride that this test was developed here in America and that Stu American companies were talking about. And then there was just honestly a lot of disbelief around how this process is playing out. They were confused about what is happening from a regulatory perspective. There's a huge amount of support.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think everybody was surprised by the actions of the FTC on this deal. I think the prevailing wisdom and the economic experts tell us that this is not typical for the FTC to do. Again, they've not successfully challenged a vertical merger in 40 plus years. And then the way it's playing out in Europe is also not typical. The European Commission actually has no jurisdiction as a whole or in any of its 27 countries because GRIL does know business in Europe and has no plans to do business in Europe for a while. But the European Commission invoked Article 22, which is something they've really never done before.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And two, the work that Illumina does to put reimbursement in place, to establish regulatory pathways, is work that every other company in the space can leverage, and so once a billing code is established by CMS. That's a billing code that any of our competitors can use without necessarily having done any of the heavy lifting to get that code. And so what we saw in both the NIPT space and in the cancer therapy selection space is that competition flourished. We also have a very strong incentive at Illumina to make sure competition flourishes. In both NIPT and in cancer therapy selection, if you combine them, we make 10 times as much revenue selling sequencers to our competitors than we do from selling our own test. And so we have a powerful economic incentive to make sure there's a lot of competition because our core business is to sell the sequencers.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have been delivering clinical tests since 2013 when we entered the non-invasive prenatal testing NIPT space. And then a few years later, we entered the clinical space for therapy selection for cancer patients. And what we saw in both of those cases, and we'll start with an IPT, is that once we bought our way into that space, the number of players in that space went up to compete with our offering. A lot of them use our technology to compete with our test. The number of tests ordered by pregnant moms went up. The price to the consumer of the test went down. Reimbursement went up, and the sequencing price that we charge our competitors went down. And so it was vastly procompetitive. And the same thing happened in the cancer therapy selection space. Now, why is that? It's because the venture community tells us that once we enter a space, first of all, it validates the space to say, okay, this is real and it's happening.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the FTC has actually in the last 40 years never been able to successfully challenge a vertical merger. So if a company is buying another company that's not in its space. What the FTC is saying is that by us getting into this space, we will reduce innovation in the cancer screening space and that we will have an incentive to raise prices of sequencing for other players. Now, that's just fundamentally not correct because there are no other players. Grell is the only player in that space, and they launched their product a few weeks ago. And in fact, there's nobody even developing a product like that. There are startups that have announced that they're working on single cancer blood tests for screens or maybe up to eight to ten, but they're a while away from getting into the market and nobody's done 50. And so first of all, there's no competition in that market to foreclose on. Secondly, they argue that competition may be chilled. And that's not at all been the experience.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“140 countries around the world. We have the teams that can work on reimbursement and regulatory approval, and so we can dramatically accelerate getting this test into the hands of people whose lives it could save.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We also know that if you catch cancers early, the patients have a much higher chance of survival. In a lot of cancers, you'll see the odds of survival can get higher, and up to 90 plus percent if you catch it in stage one or stage two. The challenge is that 71% of people who die of cancer die to cancers that have no screen. In fact, 45 out of the 50 cancers that Grail screens for have no screen today, like pancreatic cancer, for example. And so there's no ability to catch it early. And so when Grail published their data in the end of 2019, we realized this was a huge breakthrough and that this would save a lot of lives. And that's sort of how we initiated the process to acquire Grail. And what we want to do is bring the Grail test to market as fast as possible to people around the US and around the world. Grail has a terrific technology and an alumina, we have the commercial presence in over 100.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where we realize that we could be seeing the signals of cancer in a blood test. And so we quickly put a team on it, aluminum, and this was in the 2014-2015 timeframe. They worked for over a year and came back and said, yeah, it looks like we're seeing signals for cancer, but there is a lot of work that needs to be done between where we are now and actually having a safe test that we can bring to market. We need to do some very large clinical studies, and we need to hone the test and understand what's”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, Illumina for the first decade plus of our existence. We used to sell genomic analysis tools into the research market. And then in 2013, we entered the clinical market for the first time through the acquisition of a company called Veronada that did non-invasive prenatal testing. Now, the way started was we were processing samples from pregnant mothers in our non-invasive prenatal testing lab. And one of our scientists, this incredibly brilliant woman, noticed that although the fetal DNA in the blood was normal and healthy, there was something unusual about the maternal DNA. And so she alerted us, we alerted the doctors to say, look, something seems to be off with the mothers here. And the doctors got back to us and said, no, all the bombs are fine, but we'll stay in touch with them and see how they do. And in all of those cases, the mothers went on to find that they had cancer and didn't know it. And I remember clearly the meeting at Illumina, and I still get goosebumps when I think about it.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there are some really important differences between healthcare and tech, and primarily one of the biggest differences is just the stakes, right? For what you do in healthcare, you are directly impacting the lives of people. And so we feel an incredible sense of urgency. You can actually impact lives more quickly. Having said that, you also want to move carefully and you want to make sure that you've done all the right things such that what you put in the market is actually helping and not hurting. Doing the work around the studies, doing the work around the regulatory approval, and then also the way healthcare is set up, you need to do work with the reimbursement entities to make sure that they have the data such that an innovation you bring to market is actually accessible to the community and reached by the communities that you intend to help. And so we share the sense of urgency, but I think there is more work that gets done in healthcare before an innovation.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We know if we acquire Graill, tens of thousands of lives will be saved, that wouldn't be saved if we don't acquire Grail. That motivates us deeply.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember clearly the meeting at Illumina and I still get goosebumps when I think about it where we realize that we could be seeing the signals of cancer in a blood test. We were processing samples from pregnant mothers. One of our scientists noticed that there was something unusual about the maternal DNA. And in all of those cases, the mothers went on to find that they had cancer and didn't know it. What the FDC is saying is that by us getting into this space, we will reduce innovation in the cancer screening space. Now, that's just fundamentally not correct. Our team was actually called into Wuhan at the end of 2019, and the first viral genome of SARS-CoV-2, that was published on Jan 10th, was done on Lumina sequencers. We worked with Moderna and BioNTech. Their entire vaccine development program is based on the data that comes off Illumina Machines.”
2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
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2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
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2021-08-19 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How mission fuels risk-taking, with Illumina CEO Francis deSouza · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT