John Burn-Murdoch

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Hello and welcome to Your Radical Questions, where I put your questions to one of our radical guests.

This is your chance to engage directly with the brilliant minds that we have on this podcast and ask them about their ideas for the future.

My name's John Byrne Murdoch, standing in for them all this week.

I'm a columnist and chief data reporter for the Financial Times.

I've just finished up a brilliant conversation with Sir John Bell, who is Emeritus Regis Professor of Medicine at Oxford University.

And if you haven't heard that conversation yet, I'd encourage you to go and listen.

Professor Sir John has advised the UK government on life sciences, pharmaceutical strategy and COVID testing and played a pivotal role in the development of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine during the pandemic.

He's currently a partner at Population Health Partners, a firm focused on investing in and advising life science companies.

and he previously served on the board of pharmaceutical company Roche.

And he joins me now.

Welcome back, Professor Sir John Bell.

Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here.

Well, we've got a really interesting question to start off with, which I think gets into the nitty gritty of some of this stuff.

So when we're talking about personalised medicine, the listener Ruxandra asks, one of the big questions for her is how do these truly personalised therapies fit alongside our current regulatory framework around clinical trials?

So she's spoken in her work in this space, she's spoken to very wealthy people who have the financial means to pursue these avenues for themselves or their own families, so really high net worth individuals.

But even among this group, regulatory requirements mean some therapies are effectively unaffordable.

So surely unless we change how the clinical trial part of this works, we're only going to see the very richest people able to really benefit from the revolutionary treatments.

One thing that strikes me on that one is, how do we think about side effects with a truly N equals one personalised treatment?

And again, it feels like these things, even with all those caveats, are still very, very expensive at the moment.