Jacob Kimmel

And that's actually increased in terms of the narrow scope of what medicines are addressing as we've gone forward in time.

And so this is sort of an ironic situation where we've gone from addressing pretty broad categories of disease like infectious disease to narrower and narrower genetically defined diseases that have small patient populations.

Because these only affect a few people, if you think about the value function of a medicine is how many years of healthy life does it give how many people?

If how many people is pretty small, it just really bounds the amount of value you're able to generate.

So you need to then be able to find medicines that treat most people.

All of us will one day get sick and die.

So arguably the TAM for any really successful medicine could be everybody on planet Earth.

So we need to find a way to be able to route toward medicines that address these very large populations.

The second piece then is how do we actually build models that enable us to take the success in one medicine we've developed and lead that to an increased probability of success on the next medicine?

Traditionally, we haven't been able to do that.

Maybe you're better at making an antibody for gene Y because you made one for gene X five years ago, but it turns out making an antibody isn't really the hard part of drug discovery.

Figuring out what to make an antibody to target is the hard thing about drug discovery.

What gene do I intervene upon in order to actually treat a disease in a given patient?

Most of the time, we just don't know.

And so that's why, even if a given drug firm becomes very good at making antibodies to gene X, they have a successful approval, when they then go to treat disease Y, they don't necessarily know what gene to go after.

And most of the risk is not in how do I make an antibody to treat my particular target.

It's in figuring out what to target in the first place.

Yeah.

In this particular case, if

we bound ourselves to, we must use small molecules as our modality, then there are lots of targets which are very difficult to drug.