Dr. David Fajgenbaum

The rarer the disease, the more expensive the drug.

There's all these factors that affect how expensive the drug is going to be.

And if you're a drug company, you have to maximize your profit.

So you need to come up with the –

highest price for the highest number of people.

But it might be that a low number of people at a higher price is better than a high number of people at a lower price.

And so you can imagine it gets really complicated really quickly.

And it's all about the first disease you get your approval in.

So companies have to be really thoughtful and strategic to maximize their profits about what their first approval is.

Once they get that first approval, now they have to remember that they can't change the price for the next disease.

And so this is this horrible economic issue, which is just so depressing because like on the other side of these economic issues are people suffering.

Yeah.

The next big milestone was early in the pandemic.

I was actually driving down to Raleigh, North Carolina, had my wife in the car and I'm listening to the radio about this pandemic.

And I'm sitting there thinking, you know.

gosh, this involves the immune becoming activated and causing all these problems.

And gosh, it's going to take us months or years to come up with new drugs.

I really wish there was a lab somewhere out there that was really good with inflammatory stuff and could repurpose drugs and could direct drugs at this thing.

And then I was like, oh, maybe we should do that.

And so we decided to create a program called the Corona Project, where basically we redirected my 15-member lab to focus specifically on COVID