Tyler Crowe

GlaxoSmithKline was doing a $10 billion acquisition, and then Roche was even licensing drugs from other people.

Mentioning Eli Lilly and Merck as well, it seems like everyone is incredibly active at this time, especially in the portfolio of developing drugs.

And that's what I want to dig into a little bit deeper here.

And it's the regulatory part, because it does look like there has been some significant changes, at least in attitude in the FDA in like recent months.

You know, earlier, I think in the past couple of months or so, they've basically reversed three decisions that were related to the treatments for rare and orphan diseases.

And we could get the long part, but the short version of it is that under the former FDA vaccine and biotech drug division leader, his name was Vinay Prasad, basically these drug candidates were rejected because the clinical study did not include comparisons to a placebo.

Now, placebo studies, they're kind of not nearly as common and almost pretty much unheard of in the rare disease area because one, like the populations of these are so small and two, you know, there's often life-threatening diseases.

So there's like this, a very challenging, almost ethical thing to saying like, well, we're going to put you on placebo.

Look, I don't think it's a coincidence that we're seeing this rush to acquire clinical stage treatments, especially in oncology, rare diseases, a lot of those things that sometimes have a hard time getting through the FDA at the exact same time that the FDA has signaled it's being more amenable to working with the industry lately.

Yeah, we were discussing this, I think like maybe it was in the, like back in January, maybe February, where there was this quote from the CEO of Moderna because they were trying to get a new combination COVID flu vaccine through.

And basically the CEO kind of came out rather bluntly and was like, I don't even know if it's worth it to do clinical trials on vaccines right now because of the regulatory burden.

Because, you know, Lou, one thing that companies hate more than regulations is constantly moving and changing regulations.

Coming up after the break, we're going to kind of take a look at the big pharma, what's doing well, what's not, and maybe uncover some of the hidden gems, perhaps, in the pharmaceutical industry.

Guys, one of the perceptions of the pharmaceutical industry or big pharma by its big scary name is that it's a relatively safe industry that's going to probably churn out cash for years on end.

And many of the largest pharma companies are even known as like large dividend payers that have been doing it for a long time.

But I was doing a little bit of like...

testing that theory this morning.

And over the past 10 years, the results have not been as great as the industry's reputation.

I think of like the dozen largest pharma companies worldwide, only three have actually beaten the S&P 500 over the past decade.

Granted, we have had a fantastic past decade for the S&P 500, so it's a pretty high hurdle.