What Does The Cure Of Parkinson Means To Investors

Hi, Ed Golod, Speedcasts here again with Andy Lee COO and Co-founder of Vincere Biosciences. Mr. Lee today, how are you doing? Well,

How are you? Good.

Today is my favorite topic. Show me the money. You know, when I saw the Jerry Maguire movie, I had that expression 30 years earlier, but I never patented but you have heard that story for me. So, we are going to talk about money today. Money is good, not greed, money is good. It drives the world. We have been talking quite a bit about Parkinson’s, the platform has developed the tools he is developed, the advantages that you have the mechanisms being bio and tech and complex AI, you are really a call generation for that, oh, cure for a disease, curing many organs. It is almost a trillion-dollar business. Spell it out for me if I was investing in this small, medium, or large. How would I understand the optics of the return? Which are a lot more intense than I think people understand them to be?

That is a good question. And I am going to start broad with an overview of the way the drug development ecosystem works. In general, if you think about a cure for Parkinson’s, something that stops, the progression of the disease is estimated to be worth somewhere north of $100 billion. And so that is the commercial value once an approved drug is being sold through doctors to patients. That is the incentive that the pharmaceutical companies must either invent or purchase something that can do that. A typical process, especially in the last 10 years or so, is that farmers are leaning more heavily on external innovation rather than internal invention. And they’re looking for things right around the first inhuman trial, you may have heard of the FDA in clinical trials of phase one, where you test for safety phase two, where you get a proof of concept that works in a small set of patients to phase three, where you show that it works in a large number of patients. And so somewhere around that phase one trial, farmers want to in licensed promising drugs. Well, for similar diseases of neurodegeneration for Parkinson’s disease, drugs, like what we are creating, the industry average is about $500 million for that, to end license, a drug that does that. So that then you can take it to the finance for the pharma makes sense, they buy something for five hundred million. If it works, it is one hundred billion, they know they are going to have to buy, you know, ten of these, and hopefully one of them works, and they still make good money on the other side. For going now on the earliest side of scientific discovery, where people are just taking basic science to produce the building blocks of what happens. This is entirely funded by government grants, where the NIH and NSF are funding $60 billion a year of basic research to universities.

Yes, and you are funded by grants. And what I love more than anything, is you are funded by the Michael J. Fox Foundation. And everybody in the world knows Muhammad Ali, who died a pocket since he was my hero who I met and sat and had a conversation with he is on your website. And everybody knows Michael J. Fox Back to the Future. So, this opens another conversation on how you are getting your money. And then how does it translate to an investor saying, hey, what do I get in three years, five years, seven years, you are not your mother’s or grandfather’s drug company here.

How does it translate to an investor?

Now, and so that leads nicely to this. The gap that Vincere Biosciences amongst the set of biotech companies that bridge between the grant-funded basic research that happens in the millions of dollars per year of study kind of range to the pharma in licensing, which is in the hundreds of millions of dollar range. And in that middle, you’ve got biotech companies in the 10s of millions of dollars range that are taking these new discoveries out of academia, or in our case, a lot of it done with internal research, that we’re doing that basic science ourselves to develop that from an idea into a drug, and then sell that drug to the pharma for that final commercial translation. And so, you have this gap where you can go from, you know, tens of millions of investments to hundreds of millions of dollars in returns within a, you know, two three-year timespans. From that, we have a clever idea this is going to work till we get it to humans to start to prove that that is the sentence that is the Show Me the Money sentence as a layperson, but I do have a biochemical engineering background, you just said something, nobody hears, nobody’s talking about this, two or three years for a ten to one or twenty times return, and not 10 years to get to market.

And on top of that, you have ten tools that you build to find the cure for Parkinson’s. They are monetizable, and we are monetizing them. Now, on top of that, you have a platform, not just a cure for Parkinson’s, which means it then is an anti-aging mechanism for heart and kidney and diabetes, and liver, you really are a change in thinking. You are the new generation of curing a disease. I am an excitable guy; I am a New York guy. I am a little wild. This is the wildest thing I have heard. But the most proper, disciplined, and effective way to do something. So, I have that right, or am I just excited to be here?

Now you do. It is it. It is overly exciting because you have each of these drugs has the potential to treat many diseases. So, you have a multiplier effect there. And the world has changed dramatically in the last few years that if you are not running your business in an AI-enabled way, you have no chance of competing, that is a de facto standard self-driving car. I mean, we can go on for hours about exactly.

And yet, you would be surprised how many of the big farmers are not doing it, how many Biotechs. Or you are still trying to take a drug out of an academic lab and carry it through just develop this one thing. And you can hit some singles and doubles that way. But you need that automation, if you are going to do this over and over and over in a repeatable invention, kind of
Absolutely. And I have been 3738 years in selling tech three businesses. I am deep into AI ml with clients. And you are right. You take anything out of academia, you need a shoehorn and a jackhammer, let alone Oh, why don’t we go cure Parkinson’s, and build an AI engine that has never been seen before? And that is why you are not a bio company. And you are not a tech company. And you are not an incubator company? You are almost three times three? Yes, absolutely.

And because we do that full stack, AI-enabled drug discovery in-house, we invented the tools, we’re inventing the drugs, we’re doing the development all the way through, we’re able to find the efficiencies, fill the gaps, and push these things through in a way that you just you can’t do if you’re pure AI, you can’t do if you’re a pure bot. And very few people can speak both languages.

So let me distill this down into dollars and cents. So, A, you are backed by a million and a half by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, which is amazing. B, you have a platform C you have ten tools that you build through the platform, which are now monetizing, you have a way to work on Ageing, which is the backbone of the Parkinson’s problem, which can impact ten different body parts and organs. within that substructure. There’s diabetes and dementia, and I can go on and on and on. You are not creating a pill to cure Parkinson’s; you are working on a comprehensive approach to the whole body. But Parkinson’s was the best way to open the door. And that is the way science works is trial and method. And it is extremely focused and narrow. from an investor perspective, you put in $1. And in two or three years, you get back $20. Do I want that? Or do I want to put in $100, and in nine years or 11 years, I might get back, you know, $200 or three hundred, or maybe not? You are the new generation and making money you are like Bitcoin, a new way to you know, a new way to pay people, you are a new way to invest, and generate, return, and save millions of lives. It is highly emotional for me because we have a family with this problem. We have friends with this problem. And it is intense and to make money with it. You could tell from my voice that; I want everybody to know about this. And we get paid simply and make a cure for Parkinson’s. I collaborate with you in a client relationship. And that is what we do. Nothing wrong with making money.

This is Ed Golod, SpeedCasts. Thank you for joining me today.