David Southwell

And then of course, now you're dealing with international

reimbursement.

And I'm also on the board of PTC Therapeutics, which I've been on the board of for 20 years, and they've got many drugs on the market internationally.

And over there, the reimbursement is often driven by one government.

So you have one customer, and that customer can pull down a pretty attractive price.

But then again, that creates the problem of most favoured nation status.

So

If you have a drug and you've negotiated a price that works really well, given the volume that you have in a particular European country, if all of a sudden you have to charge that price in the US, it could drive you out of business.

So there are so many different variables, but I think any biotech CEO who honestly says that they sleep well at night is probably naive.

Well, I think you just try to control the controllables.

You hope that you're working with people who feel the same way, most notably boards.

If you're a CEO, you ultimately report to the board and you need to be transparent about the risks.

If you're taking a major risk on something, maybe you're launching a new therapeutic and you need to price it.

you know, if you launch it and you price it, it's very difficult to significantly raise the price.

If you price it too low, it's very difficult to raise the price.

If you price it too high, you can certainly lower the price.

And that creates an unfortunate incentive with a lot of companies to start out with a very high price, which is, which is just, it's unfortunate for the world that we live in.

But there are,

There are things that you can change and there are things that you can't.

Pricing a drug is something where if you make a mistake, you can adjust for it.