Good applied science in medicine, as in physics, requires a high degree of certainty about the basic facts at hand, and especially about their meaning, and we have not yet reached this point for most of medicine.
Getting a traditional pharmaceutical to the market can cost a billion dollars or more. Newer, more tailored and targeted drugs called biologics are even more complex and expensive. Simple economics dictates that companies and venture funds will invest more in products that can generate a sufficient return.
We should revel in tons and tons and tons of ideas. Some of them will manifest and lead to a drug discovery, and some will not.
In my opinion, in addition to the success we have achieved in launching new Vants and in pursuing development of a variety of drugs, one of our most important achievements has been the growth of Roivant itself as a platform to support the efficient identification and advancement of medicines across all of the companies in the Roivant family.
Fundamental discoveries can and should be made in industry or academies, but to carry that knowledge forward and to develop a new drug to the market has to depend on the resources of industry.
The problem we are trying to solve is that of drugs that would have never seen the light of day for reasons that have nothing to do with the inherent properties of drug candidates themselves and more to do with bureaucratic institutions within which they often sit.
Cadila, India's sixth-largest drugmaker by sales, spent $250 million developing Lipaglyn, a new chemical entity or new discovery, and aims to spend another $150 million to $200 million to launch the drug outside India.
To start with, pharma was an industry based on innovation, drug discovery.
The old ethic for medicine [regarding new drugs] used to be: Is it safe and what are the risks? That is no longer adequate. Now people ask, "What goal are we reaching for?
Companies are actually much better than governments and other bureaucracies at organizing in a holistically efficient way the extremely complex path from the examination of molecules all the way to the delivery of medicines to patients. Already in the conception and selection of research projects, companies would anticipate all the challenges down the line that they will need to overcome in order to achieve actual health impact. Bureaucratic organizations, by contrast, are notoriously bad at this sort of optimizing.
I am very passionate about India's place in bio-pharmaceuticals, and that is what I really want to drive and create leadership for in India because I really think it is possible.
If somebody is working on a new medicine, computer science helps us model those things. We have a whole group here in Seattle called the Institute for Disease Modelling that is a mix of computer science and math-type people, and the progress we're making in polio or plans for malaria or really driven by their deep insights.
