David Southwell

But if you devote your, if you start with a wide funnel of discovery assets that you're developing and you make the wrong decision on which one to take into the clinic, you're stuck because once you get

a lead drug into the clinic, even if you've got a really interesting set of things behind it.

When you come to raise money, investors have a habit, which is a very natural habit, but CEOs would probably call it a nasty habit of focusing only on your lead asset.

So, you know, as an example, at Velastro, we have our lead asset is a small molecule drug that works in a wide variety of cancers.

with a particular mechanism called KIF-18A inhibition.

But we also have some discovery assets that also work in the wider field of chromosomal instability.

And there are companies very interested in licensing those, but anytime we go and talk to investors, they only care about our lead asset.

So that is of course what we spend most of our time working on.

So there are things that you can change.

If your lead asset goes south, you can twist it around, but it takes years.

And a perfect example of that from a long time ago is Forest Labs, who, of course, as we all know, developed Celexa and Lexapro.

But before that, they had a drug called terodoline that didn't work out at all.

And Howard Solomon managed to weather the storm of going through that to develop

these antidepressants that became the top selling SSRIs in the world.

If you make a mistake and you have to do a pivot, you have to explain that first to your board and then you have to explain it to your investors.

And if you have been telling, if you're often the board, but most certainly investors are a perfect canary in a coal mine.

And oftentimes the investors have been saying for quite a while,

that they think you're crazy to be doing this particular thing, whatever it is.

And you've been saying, no, no, no, you're wrong.

I'm right.