BIG PHARMA IS DYING
Every year it is taking more time and money to develop new drugs. The development of CRISPR gene editing technologies are giving Big Pharma their best shot at treating single-gene diseases (cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia, etc). But most of us do not have single-gene diseases. For investors CRISPR will be a cost-sink with small profits, and Big Pharma will continue to die.
Figure 1. Overall trend in Pharma R & D efficiency (inflation-adjusted) – Nature Reviews, March 2012. When an industry has command of its science, the products they produce become faster, smaller, and cheaper over time. With Big Pharma the trend is the opposite. It currently averages 10-15 years and 2.6 billion dollars to bring a drug to market. Most of these drugs have potentially serious side effects.
The vast majority of chronic patients are older individuals who suffer from age related diseases such as heart attacks, cancer, or dementia. All of these are due to the influence of many genes and sometimes many poor choices, from smoking to consuming junk calories.
That is why there is a new wave of companies based on the combination of omic (genomic, transcriptomic, metabolomic, etc.) technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) to sort through the hundreds of genes and triggers of chronic disease. But they will fail too.
Why? Because they do not have enough omic signal. Except for those afflicted by single-gene diseases and deadly pathogens, aging people are not that different from each other. So their omic signals do not vary enough for the AI software to parse such signals at depth.
Lyceum has far more omic power at its command. How? We use evolution to create extreme animals. Some are extremely healthy with long life spans. Some are weak with short life spans. Then we use these animals to penetrate the omics of chronic disease like no other company can.
We strip genomes and transcriptomes naked, so we can see what they do. Knowing what they do makes developing new drugs for chronic disease feasible, if not straightforward.
Lyceum can develop a generation of drugs that will increase quality of life. These drugs could serve more than a billion patients now suffering from diseases of aging. While improving patient lives, Lyceum will reap the financial benefits of being a leader in pharmaceutical research and development.