September 2, 2025 • 50 mins
The worst thing that can happen in health-care and biomedical research is politics getting involved in choosing what research needs to be done for what disease, Dr. Elias Zerhouni tells Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Sam Fazeli, explaining how mixing science and politics weakens innovation and public trust. On this episode of the Vanguards of Health Care podcast, Zerhouni, a former NIH director and vice chairman of OPKO Health, unpacks his new book Disease Knows No Politics, warns against cutting US research funding and explains why immigration is vital for scientific leadership. He also dives into OPKO and ModeX’s cutting-edge work on multivalent vaccines and multi-specific antibodies that could change the treatment landscape.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Welcome to another episode of Bloomberg Intelligence Vanguards of Healthcare podcast,
where we speak with the leaders at the forefront of
change in the healthcare industry. My name is Sam Fraselli
and I'm a farmer analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, the in
house research arm of Bloomberg. I'm thrilled to welcome Eli S. Zerhuni,
the co founder of Modic Therapeutics and President and vice
(00:39):
chair of the Board of Directors of OpCo Health, to
the program today. Doctor Zerhuni has served as the executive
vice Dean and Dean of Research of the Johns Hopkins
University School of Medicine. He has He was the fifteenth
director of the NIH from two thousand and two to
two thousand and eight, and subsequently served as one of
(01:00):
the first Presidential Science Envoys to foster scientific and technological
collaborations with other nations. Dot Serjuni was President of Global
Research and Development at SANAFI from twenty eleven to twenty eighteen,
responsible for eleven regulatory approvals and commercial launchers, amongst many
other past and president activities. He's a member of the
(01:20):
board of the Danahercoro Corporation b flect On Capital the
Alaska Foundation Research America and the Foundation for NIH And
as of course I said, there is.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
An et cetera.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
At the end of that, Eli says, a background and
experience is very relevant to what too much of what
has been happening in the US in terms of immigration
and general science policy and funding.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
So we're going to talk about these aspects.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Of course, there's a book out there which I'm going
to let Eliots tell us about the one that he's
just written and put out.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
God Disease Knows No.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Politics, which many of these subjects that discussed about, and
at the end of the conversation will obviously of course
talk about OpCo mode and some of the cool things
that they're up to. Right, So, Elias, maybe we started
a little early in your life and you could tell
us what brought you into medicine and science, what was
your key driver in terms of getting you to that point,
(02:15):
and a little bit about your background before coming to
the US and that story, so that we can start
off with a good grounding in that.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Well, you know, I was born in Algeria right during
the War of Independence or just before, and I was
born to a family of seven boys, five at the
time then eventually seven and my father was a teacher
of physics and mathematics, and he was very committed to education,
and so all my youth I've spent time essentially being
(02:45):
focused on education. My mother wanted to really get educated,
but she couldn't under the French colonial system because she
was a girl. And anyway, you know, I grew up
both mostly in the expectation that I would become a mathematician,
physicists and engineer, no inkling whatsoever, that I would end
up in medicine. However, what happened during the war, there
(03:07):
was so much trouble, so much chaos, and so much
killing going around that we couldn't go to school every day,
And so I learned to learn, and my father basically
taught us at home, and I became essentially enamored with
the notion of quantitative sciences. Fast forward, went to the university,
(03:29):
and I went to the countryside as a volunteer in
the countryside, and I really saw what people were suffering
from TB malnutrition, health issues, and it touched me and
I decided to go into medicine. And my father was
completely opposed to that. He thought medicine was a specialty
(03:50):
of road learning and commercial implications of that. He didn't
think it was smart enough.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
What did he want you to be?
Speaker 3 (03:58):
He was interesting in physicist or an engineer or a
mathematician's very Middle Eastern, very Middle Eastern, exactly. And my
mother didn't want me to be a lawyer, didn't want
me to be a doctor anyway. You know, what happened
was I fell in love with the idea of helping people.
And you know, you were a young idealistic and and
I had I recount that in my book. My book
(04:21):
is called Disease Not No Politics, because it recounts my
trajectory of how I ended up in the US and
the positions I ended up being in. But what happened
was that, indeed I went to med school, and indeed
I found it borrowing. I found it really a specialty
of road learning. You could not ask questions every night,
every time you were curious about why is this, and
(04:43):
the teachers would say, listen, you just learned for your tests,
past the test and the license exam and so on.
So I was going to quit. And I had an uncle,
a radiologist who had also fought the French and went
to Sweden and got trained in radiology and and he
showed me the first CAT scan image in the world,
(05:03):
by acquired by Sir Godfrey Hounsfield in the UK. And
he said, you see what that is. I said, well,
it looks like a brain, looks like a head. It
was very coarse, but he said, this is the revolution,
this is a transformation of medicine. You should look into it.
And he explained it to me, you know, with an
X ray tube or running around the head, and then
(05:26):
a computer and algorithms, and so I like the physics
of it, the mathematics, the quantitative nature, but also the
biological aspect. You could see tumors and lesions inside the brain.
That's when I fell in love with the notion of
radiology and medical imaging because it married in my mind
(05:46):
the physical sciences to the biological sciences and the computational sciences.
So I fell in love with that idea. And my dean,
the dean of my medical school, who was a former
NIH trainee and a neuro scientist, so Renown, said, you
know you want to do this, but there's no way
we can teach you this. We can't even afford a
CT scanner here. So you have to go somewhere else,
(06:10):
And I said, how do I do that? He said, well,
you can go to the US if you can pass
the exams, or you can go to France. You can
go to the UK, you can go to Sweden. You
know the usual training ground for that. And he said,
but you can't do it here. You have to find
a solution. So that's when I started learning English. I
(06:32):
didn't speak English at the time, and I self learned.
And this is a secret I shared with the like
the readers, and that is the most important thing I inherited,
was the ability to learn by myself. Because of the war,
it was disturbed. I didn't have, you know, teachers for
(06:52):
every thing. I mean, there were a lot of gaps
in my education, but I filled them by learning by myself,
by looking for the information and so on. So I
knew I could do it, and I did, and I
passed the exams, and the dean wrote to the deans
that he knew at Hopkins, and that's how I ended
up being sent to Hopkins for a short term scholarship.
(07:16):
I only had like three four hundred dollars scholarship. It
was minimal, and the plan was to go learn and
come back. Well, history would have it that the six
month that was supposed to spend there has turned into
fifty years now. Yes, of course, so that's how I
end up in the US.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
So obviously the book, again, I think that the titles
quite telling. This is NOS and no politics. I'm trying
to figure out, actually that sorry, whether it had something
to do with the recent cuts by the administration of
NIH funding NSF. But I can't imagine it has because
that's only been nine months.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Or maybe it did in nine months.
Speaker 3 (07:56):
No, I did. You're completely right, and so the message
were actually something that I wanted to share. Why Because
I came to the US with the notion that the
American healthcare system was the best in the world and
the American research system was the best in the world. Right,
so fast forward fifty years, we're no longer the best
(08:19):
in the world in health care. We're still the best
in the world in medical research. What happened? What happened?
And so I take the reader and myself. The reason
I wrote it is because if a lot of friends
insisted that I do, and I didn't want to write it,
and so I started writing it three years ago, and
they wanted to really essentially have me explain what the
(08:42):
journey was that led me to from nineteen seventy five
all the way to today, in the steps that I
took and the observations or the lessons I learned from.
And one of the lessons was that the worst thing
that happened in health care and biomechal research is when
politics gets involved in picking and choosing what research needs
(09:06):
to be done for what disease. And specifically it was
a stem cell debate at the time, and I was
really really saying when I was the deed for research
at Hopkins that missing that would be a major failure
of our research system because fundamentally, one of the absolutely
(09:29):
core questions in science and biological sciences how does the
cell develop? How do you sam are the results of
one cell multiplying replicating billions of times and here you are?
You know, isn't that a miracle? So programming and reprogramming
(09:51):
of cells was an essential fundamental question. Nobody knew how
that happened, and you knew it from studying and and
extem cells, which obviously was a very political issue, very
contentious and so on. And so the title of the
book comes from the first testimony I gave to Congress
(10:12):
about what my position would be in terms of head
of NIH, that I would not abide by the notion
that politics should drive research. Politics and research and disease
should be separated because as a physician, we first do
(10:33):
no harm to no one. That's the first principle. And
the second principle is if somebody is sick, you need
to help them, You need to do research on their disease.
You need to do it, no matter what the political
implications are. So it wasn't manifesto essentially that I illustrate throughout
the book and it just turns out to be completely
(10:56):
actual today. But it was not intentional. I didn't put
that title because fundamentally it is an underlying tension in
all of healthcare, in all of biomedical research, all of biology.
I mean, look at you know, things like GMOs. You
know the europe doesn't want them, US wants done. But
(11:18):
it's all if political question is not really a scientific question.
The same thing about vaccines. You have now anti vaxxers
and pro vaxxers, and it's not a science question. It's
not a disease question, it's not a public health question.
It is a political question. So I want to put
my finger and and really help people understand how things are,
(11:42):
you know, cross influencing the research policy in the health
care policy because of underlying political considerations.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
There is a saying that I've come across I can't
remember who said it, that if you mix science with politics,
you get politics. And that's the science never wins out
of these conversations.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
Right.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
So, and of course one of the issues that is
interesting to consider is why did we get here?
Speaker 2 (12:08):
How did we.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Get here the right current conversation about MR and A
vaccines that they're not.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Good for respiratory diseases? Where is that from?
Speaker 1 (12:18):
I mean, we just saved the world from a pandemic
or within the panet maybe over promised, except right, maybe
we all got all carried away with the data that
came out thinking that maybe we've got a vaccine that
prevents transmission, which of course not many vaccines.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
I don't know if any has managed to do.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
That, but yet you still have and you continue to
see reduction in hospitalization of reduction immortality following booster shots,
and still.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
We're having this issue.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
So actually, it's interesting that you had an opportunity to
at least you were proposed the idea of running President
Trump's Operation Warp Speed, which created the vaccine. And so
now we have President Trump, who was in the first
administration obviously driving this and doing an amazing putting an
(13:09):
amazing effort behind getting the vaccine, and now the administration,
at least for the HIHS.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Is against them. So where does this come from?
Speaker 1 (13:18):
And the other one is, of course gain of function,
this thought, this thing that everyone talks a gain of function.
I don't know if half of people who talk about
gain of function actually know what they're talking about. So
where does it come from?
Speaker 2 (13:29):
What happened? When do you see an inflection point?
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Or was it just a gentle slide?
Speaker 3 (13:35):
I think? I think fundamentally it's the social phenomenon of
trust and distrust in institutions that grew during the pandemic.
I mean, the pandemic was not man as well. I mean,
let's face it, all these closures and this mandated activities,
you know, one size fits all responses and preparation, the
(13:57):
lack of preparation for the pandemic, the lack of testing early,
so you had no idea where the disease was and
how it was spreading. So all of that should be
really the object for me of a post mortum, right,
you need to study that.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Ironically though ironically, now that we're shutting funding to pandemic preparedness,
we are shutting funding to testing.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
We don't want to openly test. It's just it's just
there's the two hands don't seem to be wanting to
talk to each other.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
That's exactly right. There is an irrationality going on that
comes from you know, becoming emotional and distrustful and angry
and all that does not really lend itself to good,
good understanding of what the threats are. Right, And I
think I feel the same way that you do, and
unlike flabbergasted because when I took the job as an
(14:49):
ICE director, I met with the president, President Bush. The
first thing he told me he said, listen, I am
completely committed to doubling the NIH budget. Complete a doubling,
make sure that we are the number one in biomedical research,
finding solutions the diseases, and then and then helping with
(15:09):
hiv as fast forward. And now you have an administration
that said I want to cut the budget in half,
stop doing hiv as, stop doing mRNA. I mean, it
sounds like what happened in the Soviet Union with Lisenko,
when Lisenko, a friend of Stalin, said that genetics and
molecular biology are are are bourgeois bourgeois and therefore they
(15:35):
should not be funded. We're so seeing something similar. You know, Oh,
m RNA is suspicious. There's a country, you know, and
there is a long story about anti vaxers wanting to
find fault with the system, and so they disparage the vaccines,
I mean, claiming unbelievable stories like you know, the vaccine
(15:58):
has a chip in it, And all these conspiracy theories
come in the background of distrust of the scientific institutions
and distrust that people like myself and yourself, we're trying
to be rational about this. So what happens is that
you absolutely react like Lisenko did by barring research. That's
the first sign that you're going to lose the supremacy
(16:22):
or the quality of your research enterprise. You're going to
have more and more young people moving away from it.
And then if you cut the budget in half. You know,
people don't appreciate that budgets for research are not subsidies,
they are investments. Their investments in the next generation of scientists.
And if these young scientists see what they see, they're
(16:42):
gonna say, oh, wait a minute, I don't want to
be a scientist anymore. So for a country that's four
percent of the globe population right, twenty five percent of
the global economy, you think you can really sustain the
competition against China with one point four billion or India
one point four billion without preserving your human capital, growing
(17:07):
your seeds of bright future winners of the Nobel Prize. No,
I can't do that. It doesn't happen. So essentially we're
shooting ourselves in the foot by irrational behaviors that do
not allow conversations, do not allow you know, counter arguments.
That's the thing that scares me is that you're not
(17:29):
listening to as Oh, you're you're an elite, You're you're
part of the conspiracy, you're part of the deep state.
But the thing that's amazing to me is that they're
attacking the COVID vaccine as being evil and mr NA
is being evil and it being a big things that
we should not develop. Why should we not develop it? Because,
(17:50):
as dan Ice director said, the American people have lost
trust and if they have lost trust in mr Ani vaccines,
then we should not be funding it because if we
find something that people will not accept it. Right, So
think about the circular argument coming from people who have
disparaged the vaccines all along. But how does that translate
(18:12):
to what President Trump did? Right? So Operation Warp Speed,
he developed his vaccine in nine months, he forced it
on us. He's as criminal as Tony Fauci should be, right,
and so there is a complete contradictory.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Of course he's not, because there was the way that
we managed to reopen society.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
And he probably is the best thing he ever did,
and he should really get a lot of credit for that.
But then his own constituents like Kennedy are removing that
from his legacy because they're saying, this was the biggest
crime committed against against the American people to develop that
vaccines and millions suffered a million I mean completely against
(18:52):
any data. It's a ninety five percent of vaccine. Come on,
I mean vaccine that was as good as that.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
There is a lot of good things that are at
least talked about and some action that's happening with regards
to the make America healthy again. Movement in terms of
the access to junk food, trying to manage and reduce
assuming that that becomes a reality. I mean, those are
good things, but unfortunately we as scientists are our feeling
(19:23):
and actually I used to be one, so I don't
know if I can still claim it. Feeling that this
pressure against science, which just seems incongruous, incredulous about the
whole thing that's always of course, weighs much much more
because that's the engine of innovation.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Making American healthy again is fantastic, It's a great idea.
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
But I don't think the two are there's nothing to
do with each other. The science side should still continue,
and of course, you know, if you look at the
US economy, it is an innovational economy and that's where
I think the pressure is going to come from, talking
about the health care system in general. And of course, now,
first Nih, how do you how are you feeling?
Speaker 2 (20:03):
I mean there's.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
There are lawsuits, court cases some states, some scientists, some
groups of scientists trying to fight back. What are you
seeing on the ground right now?
Speaker 3 (20:15):
Well, I think, first of all, I mean it was
shocking at the beginning. I mean, people didn't believe this
was happening, right, Many people thought, like I did. This
is like penny wise and Pound foolish. You're going to
lose your leadership position in the world. And we're already
in relative terms, not as superior as we used to be.
I mean, China has advanced a lot and is continuing
(20:38):
to advance an invest so it's almost like unilateral disarmament.
You know, you're basically disarming yourself and saying, okay, I'm
okay not being number one anymore. Well, that's a big
mistake in what I know. In terms of scientific competition,
the prime mover advantage is a terrific advantage. So when
(21:01):
you look at AI, when you look at what we
did in biomedical research, ninety nine percent of current drugs
are based on some level of basic research and NIH
and funded by an IH. So you basically cannot imagine
sustaining your position as an innovative economy with that, you know,
(21:22):
investing in it. So that was the number one. Number two.
I think there's been a real over the past few months.
I can tell you I've been solicited to comment and
the book is well received right now because people think
it's it's almost like uncanny timing because it's addressing things
that we were seeing in real time. But I mean
(21:44):
telling you that I'm actually not as pessimistic. I think
that the message is getting through. I don't think this
administration wants to be seen as the one that destroyed
the American science and technology. So you can see pushed
back from Congress. The only area was a pushback, and
I am hopeful actually that the disastrous proposal will be
(22:08):
pushed back and correct it because.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
I mean the reality, Yeah, eliast I think I wonder
what you thought on this. Who can pick up the slack?
Europe I don't think is in a position to pick
up the slack that quickly. I mean, there have been
talks about offering extra grant funding to folks who want
to move over here, but you know, these are people
with families and friends and social lives. You can't just
(22:34):
uproot them and bring them over it because they're upset
about a significant issue which is affecting their livelihoods. But
who do you think will pick up the slack here
if this doesn't get sorted?
Speaker 3 (22:45):
So there would be some picking done by foreign countries
because of certain areas where their Europe is deficient, so
the brain drain will not be a general brain drain.
If I was them, I would look at specific scientists
who do specific things that the Europeans don't do well,
so they will try to import that talent, just like
(23:06):
what we did in the US when we import a
specific talent. But the big impact is what you said
and I know, is they don't have the capacity to
really recruit all the people that we wouldn't be able
to recruit, or we're going to lose. So all in all,
it's not the brain drain that worries me. It's the
brain loss. For one billion dollars of NIH funding, we
(23:27):
support about eight thousand scientists. So for one billion dollar reduction,
we lose eight thousand scientists, mostly from the next generation, younger,
younger ones. Right, So you're talking about reducing the budget
by eighteen billion, and if you look at the direct
funding of scientists for that, you're going to lose about
one hundred and thirty one hundred and fifty thousand scientists
(23:48):
in the US. Right.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
No one can pick that's per annum.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Yeah, no one can pick it up. No one can
pick it up, right, And therefore you know, as you
cut the budget, and you're going to only support half
the people you used to support, which means that you'll
have to really compete with one arm behind your back.
Because the complexity of what we do today is greater
than what it was twenty years ago. So you need
(24:14):
actually more people from more fields of science. You know,
people don't appreciate that. One of the reasons I became
a nice director is because I was a big advocate
of merging and converging physical sciences and biological sciences, which
was not the standard at the time. But I did
it at Hopkins. I did it in many ways to
(24:35):
the point where I was noticed as a mover of
what we call convergence today. So today you reduce all
your workforce by half, you need now more multidisciplinary efforts.
What does that need to And your purchasing power is
a lot less than what it is in China. I mean,
you can buy more research, more scientists, more pro in
(25:01):
China with the same budget than you have in the US.
So you know, anybody who sits down and say, okay, well,
let's project forward will tell you this is a problem
that there's not a place of discussion. There's nobody who
says well, tell us what you think. There's just propaganda
going on, and I think at this point I hope
(25:21):
that cooler heads will prevail. I see now patient groups
understanding what will happen to their diseases, so they are acting.
I see a lot of people coming forward and saying, look,
there are things that you're doing that are good, like glow.
You know, chronic diseases. That's great, but you can't really
advance that by essentially slashing your brain in half, your
(25:47):
brain trust in half.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
I mean, as you said patient groups, maybe that's one
way of going about it. I mean, you know, we
have diseases like multiple myeloma that are being treated by
increasingly modern method technologies, like by specific antibodies like cartes.
Now they're not the single unique domain of the United
States insteads of developing them.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
But that's where they take off.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
That's where some of the very early car TI work
from chrimeric anthigen receptor T cells came from engineer tea
cells from Carl Juno's lab, and that ended up being
eight massive slife. Ever, people with my aloman now, starting
from a very early days as Snafi had a myloma
drug and that's that's competing in the market, is doing
(26:35):
or doing You know, they live with their disease. You
have the same story in prostate cancer, you have the
same story. These are the fruits of science, and I
wonder whether there should be more conversation about that rather
than vaccines really helped us in the COVID pandemic, because
that might be now falling on their fears.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
No, I think that worries me about the current leadership.
I mean, instead of looking forward, they're looking backwards by
disparaging whatever was behind them. Oh, research was not reproducible,
it was corrupted, there was di it was okay, fine,
well tell us what you want to do exactly that's
different and better. And that's the thing that's the circular
(27:14):
argument that goes through. For example, look after nine to eleven.
You know, when the towers fell, there was a commission,
the nine to eleven Commission, which was assembled to analyze
why did it happen, how did it happen, how do
we prevent it from happening, how do we make it better?
(27:35):
You know that happened right now, we just had three
thousand and four thousand people dying from that event. Pass forward,
we have a pandemic that killed a million people in
the US, ten million in the world. We have not
a single postmoriling examination or commission saying Okay, what did
(27:55):
we do wrong? What did we do right? Why did
we lose the people that we lost in terms of trust?
And what was the mrn A? What was it wrong?
What was the complication rate, what was the success rate?
How do you organize as a reasonable effort a post
mortel gain of functions? You're talking about gain of functions? Well,
(28:17):
I am worried about gain of function because you know,
if you look at bioterrorism, you could use gain of function.
How do you you know post gain of function fast
m RNA vaccines because as soon as I know what
the what the bioterror agent is and I have a sequence,
I can design vaccines against it in a matter of
(28:38):
forty eight hours. Well, I'm cutting myself from that. I'm
no longer studying this And does that make sense? There's
not even a place to discuss it. So that is
it's a disarmament. It's unilateral disarmament, is what I mean.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
It's interesting. Of course the mr and A angle is
specifically for infectiacies vaccines. From what I am hearing and
understanding cancer applications. Other therapeutic applications are not necessarily the
thing that anybody's worried about. So let's see, of course,
talking about high tech and cutting edge, maybe it's time
to talk a little bit about OpCo modex. You have
(29:19):
some pretty cool technology that you're developing.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Unless you wanted to make.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Some final remarks from the book before we moved on
to a couple of ideas to talk.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
About, No, I think the one thing that I would
like to leave with you is my sense that the
healthcare system, which I thought was the best when I
came to this country is no longer the best. That's
number one I want to talk about that. And number
two the importance of immigration in course sustaining sustaining American
(29:50):
supremacy in science and technology. So for immigration, I think
I told you already that we are demographically disadvantaged as
a country. Three number one. Number two, If you look
at all the graduate programs in the US which are excellent,
half of the students are not US born. If you
look at Nobel prices, half of the Nobel Prizes America
(30:12):
wins are not from US born scientists. If you look
at the economy. Half of the new startups and the
major major technology companies, by tech companies, half of them
are generated by non US born individuals, immigrants and so on.
So I think, I think this anti immigrant, you know,
(30:33):
almost xenophobic approach is self destructive as well. So I'm
giving you example of how many times we shut ourselves
in the foot, and I want to send a strong
message that ninety eight percent of scientific advances are generated
by two percent of scientists. Right, you have to be
very lucky to make a breakthrough discovery or breakthrough advance.
(30:55):
Now that two percent of scientists, that's the most creative part.
You know, because of the size of our population and
then the productivity of our educational system, we are not
able to have that number. We have to import the
best and the brightest and retain them and not let
them go back after we train them. Right, So strategically,
(31:18):
you've got to understand that succeeding in science and technology
depends enormously on enriching your talent pull to the most creative,
most performing scientists. And that is the machine that I
think immigration brings to the world. Where this is a
country where as an immigrant, I would always say thank
(31:40):
you to America because I succeeded because of this culture
of understanding the synergy that exists when you have a
comprehensive approach to scientific excellence. Okay, losing that will be
losing the American dream. Second, I mean I want to
(32:01):
talk about healthcare. I mean, I basically have witness and
I recount the transformation of health care from best to
not so best, not so good in fact, more costly,
more more or less accessible, more punishing to the American patients,
and yet completely captured by special interests and intermediaries who
(32:26):
extract an enormous amount of value without producing any benefit.
And so I want to talk about that, And.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
I say, called pharmacy benefit managers.
Speaker 3 (32:35):
Aren't they all kinds of enough?
Speaker 2 (32:37):
What benefits is in there?
Speaker 3 (32:40):
That's right, but the only one of that. They're not
the whole thing. I mean, it's a great industry that
the health industrial complex is a very powerful complex. Pharmers
part of a benefit manager, insurance companies, large, large monopolistic
health systems who drive you know, healthcare cost in one
region and service. So I described that in my last chapter,
(33:02):
and I say, you know, to me the reason why
we're having a problem is because the American health system
has been overly centralized and overly controlled by a few
people in Congress who are being lobbied, you know, aggressively
by special interests in a way that does not serve
the American patient. In fact, when you look at the
(33:23):
way decisions are made, patients are rarely represented. And you
know what the saying is, if you're not at the table,
you're on the menu. And that's what's happening. The American
patient is right now on the menu of many, many
special interests. They are ruined by the cost of health care.
The medical bills are the number one cause of financial
(33:45):
distress in the US, and it continues and then the
premiums are increasing.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
So what is the solution. How easy is it to
really fix this?
Speaker 3 (33:56):
I don't think it's easy. But I think there's one
observation I made as an incetructor, and that is that
if you go around this country, this country is huge,
right If you look at the UK and there are
eight regions in the UK. If you look at Canada
there are also twelve regions. Germany sixteen regions. We have
one size fits all for three hundred and thirty million people.
(34:17):
When you look at the epdemiology of Mississippi and you
compare it to the epdmology of Minnesota, you're shocked that
the same solution would be applied. It's a completely different map.
So in Mississippi's chronic disease, obesity, diabetes, all of those
in Minnesota is a very, very different epedemiology. So why
(34:40):
are we, as a country of innovation, the country of
you know, experimentation, having the control of this you know,
twenty percent of GDP industry in the hands of a
couple hundred people in Washington. So I'm a big advocate
not for a government run healthcare system, which I think
(35:00):
it doesn't work because they have the same problem. It's
this one size fits all, not adapted to the local
and regional situation. And so what I'm proposing is not
a revolution, but a devolution into specific epidemiologic regions of
the country, into ten twelve regions with you know, you know,
(35:23):
local governors of health if you will, that are multiple states.
Speaker 4 (35:27):
In many cases that really allow experimentation, allow new ways
of providing healthcare, including AI, including things America is good
at that they're very we're very creative.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
There's new ideas that comes up, come up, but we
have no ability to learn from each other because everybody
is following the addictas of Washington, you know, and if
you don't, you're fraud and abuse and therefore you don't
do it. And I have examples after examples of that.
Look at the model I give is one of the
(36:02):
Federal Reserve, one of the Federal Reserve. It's somewhat independent,
it doesn't it's not as prisoner to political influences. Again,
it's disease knows no politics. Healthcare should know no politics too.
And then they have all these economic regions with governors
of the Central Bank that really capture the reality of
(36:23):
the economy in each one of the regions. That is
the general scheme that I'm talking about. We need to
do something like that. Our healthcare system is dysfunctional and
not repair able.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
I hear you, and I think we could sit here
and talk about this for however, we've got about five
to ten minutes left, and if you don't mind, I
like to move you on to mode X, which is,
you know, I'm a drug analyst, and that's what I am,
pharma collegist by training. You've got two things that I'm
particularly interested in talking about. One is the EBV vaccine
(36:59):
that you ebs done virus vaccine, which is it's not
an mr NA vaccine shock horror, it's a standard vaccine.
It is partnered with merk it's in development, and tell
us a little bit about it. And you know, I
see that you said on there that you've got the
infectious moneyclosis and related cancers.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
There's another area.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
That these this virus has shown its potential relevance, and
that's multiple sclerosis.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
I wonder if you wanted to talk about that a
little bit there.
Speaker 3 (37:29):
Let me talk to you about the central idea of
what I am doing with Modex Therapeutics and OpCo. Okay,
the central ideas as follows. As I was at de Aniation,
we we did a lot of research on what we
call disease pathways disease networks. What you realize is that
there's no single disease that has only a single cause.
(37:50):
It's usually related to networks of molecules that are dysfunctionally,
you know, interacting because of a disease process. So the
first example of that for me was when I looked
at allergy the THH two response, which really relates to
several molecules, IILE thirteen, IILE five, IILE for TSLP, there's
(38:14):
all family. And the thing is that you tend to
attack one target at the time. Yet you realize that
in practice it's not as effiction because you have combination therapies. Right.
So the idea was, can we create molecules that will
be able to be multi specific, multi valent against a
(38:36):
disease pathway, and more efficient than any one of the
combinations that are being used to attack a disease. Right,
So it's you know, as somebody said, well, it's the
concept of multi warheads missiles, right. Instead of having miles
five missiles, you get one with multiple warheads. So that
(38:57):
was the idea of multi specific antibodies. The same idea
came because I was working with Gary Nabel at the
NIH when he was at d NAH and when I
came to Sanofi, I created a breakthrough lab on the
idea of multi valent vaccines. Because you know when you
when you don't use the old technology killed the viruses.
You have to select the intigens, right, and so the
(39:21):
technology platform that we developed was on the particles of
ferretin and then you could plant multiple intigens on it. Now,
why did it make sense for EBV Because EBV had
had a single intigen vaccines developed by GSK against against
a epitop called a GP three fifty and the antigen
(39:45):
GP three fifty and then achieved a seventy five percent protection,
so it wasn't bad. The problem though, is that GP
three fifty protected from entering B cells. The problem is
that the virus also enters epithelials, right, so you had
to block both if you wanted to get sterilizing immunity.
(40:05):
And that's what we did. So we built a multi
vailin vaccine that presented antigens on this ferytine self assemblying
molecule that essentially covers B cells and also epitial cells.
And we showed in animal models and so on that
it was sterilizing, and know it was, it wouldn't really
allow you know, penetration into a reservoir. Essentially, once you
(40:31):
have the reservoir, then the cancer, the cancer develops. It's
just like HPV, and so you need to prevent that
or you need to sterilize that. And so that's what
gave us the eb V approach that we proposed, which
was multi vailed. However, the companies did not want to
(40:52):
develop that. I tried to push it with Sanofi three times,
and three times they say it's no market. Mono nucleosis
is so spread, you know, by the time you have
the vaccine, you know the people have been exposed and
so on and so forth. However, the things change when
a connection to multiple scrolls. This was found, what was reported.
(41:13):
That's when Merk came to us and said, we want
to work with you, and people were talking about mRNA,
you know about oh, why don't you do it with
mRNA because you could do multi valent or having multiple RNAs.
The problem is that mRNA vaccines have one drawback. They
don't seem to trigger memory T cells the way conventional
(41:35):
vaccines do, and so the effect goes away after a
few months, and then you've got to revaccinate again. Right,
So that's what happened with with the COVID. I mean,
you can see that decreasing protection. Not for severe disease
and hospitalization. It was still protective of that, but you
(41:55):
can see people have been vaccinated in over a few months,
they get COVID themselves. So we knew that we needed
something else and that's what that's what is. That's what
the THEBV vaccine became a multi valent, multi specific, multi
antigenic VA vaccine.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
The multi valent platform.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
It's what HHS and Secretary Kennedy keep talking about for vaccines.
Can you are you looking to expand this beyond EBB.
Speaker 3 (42:26):
I don't think that's what they're saying. I mean, they
just proposed a five hundred million dollar research program to
replace the MR and a research programs for what they
called killed or attenuated viruses going back thirty forty ye. Yeah,
going back a while back, thinking that this would be safer, better,
(42:46):
more imminogenic, and more persistent. And yet you know, that's
that has been shown to be true, especially for the
viruses that are invariant like polio or small parks and
things like that. But frankly, it's like past all technology,
which has shown quite a bit of side effects like
(43:07):
the amber ray syndrome reactivation of the attenuated viruses which
we saw in polio. So I don't know. I mean,
it's it's puzzling to me that you stop one area
of research in favor of another one. You pick and choose,
like like the Soviet scientists used to do the Senko.
(43:28):
He banned people who did genetics and evolutionary biology. He
put them in jail, he'd stopped funding them. I mean,
it wasn't just a scientific this, you know, this discordance
or disagreement. It was a political one. And I'm worried
that this is where is going here. You know, anybody
(43:49):
who does mRNA is a political opponent. I mean, that's crazy,
that's madness.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
You have this other technology that I'm quite intrigued by,
which is quite ambitious, the tetraspecific tea cell engager. I
mean that sounds quite technical, but basically I've seen you know,
the c MET drop two, CD three City twenty eight.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
We've gone into the depths of science here.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Now when should we This is for oncology, of course,
and possibly of course if you did CD nineteen or
four utoimmune diseases. Maybe what is the what are the
timelines for us to see data from this and the
EBV vaccine.
Speaker 3 (44:27):
Well, the EBV vaccine is in phase one, finishing phase
one right now, So by the end of the day,
by the end of the year, you should hear whether
we go to phase two or two or not, because
that's what will tell you that Phase one was really
informative in terms of multi specific. What I realized was,
you know, by specifics wouldn't be enough because you got
(44:48):
several signals. When you look at t sell engagements, you
know you have the CD three signal, the CD twenty
eight signal, and then the four one BB signal that
are really important the CD three to activate, CD twenty
eight to enhance perferration O and BB two differentiate. So
what really was our idea was to say we can
(45:10):
devise multi specific antibodies, which was not obvious at the time.
And we said, let's not just go by specifics, but
go more than that. And we discovered a way of
manufacturing not just by specific but also try specific quadry
penton hextas specifics. We can go to six binders six specificities,
(45:32):
right or multi you know, try specific that's dual availment
or whatever. So it's a plug and play technology. But
we realized that, you know, we could actually test it
if we could manufacture it and so on, which we did.
And so the first one, the first protype that went
in is the c metrop two CD three, CD twenty eight,
which is in clinical in phase one development. And so
(45:56):
it's actually going through its fifth level and we're already
seeing biological activity. So hopefully within the year we'll be
able to go into the basket efficacy trial that we
want to go into City in nineteen, City twenty same thing.
It's a quadriy specific with that signal, which you know
(46:17):
can be very helpful in the aplomas but also to
immune disease. And then we have a one that is
really unique, and it's what I would call an immune
system rejuvenator, right because what happens is with age and
with immune suppression, you lose the ability to expand your
T cell populations. And we found a way to actually
(46:38):
regain that capability so that instead of having immune suppression
or less competent immune system, you bring it back to
efficiencies that hasn't been able to have and hopefully you'll
find a recovery of the immune protection that you had
when you were forty years old or thirty years old
(46:59):
or that almost.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
It's a longevity kind of story.
Speaker 3 (47:04):
It faced an immune booster story. Okay, immunology management in
the general time, so you can protect yourself not just
against one disease, but against all immune sensitive diseases. Where
your immune system will be cancer will be infectious disease
where the cancer where your immune system is not capable
(47:25):
of mounting a proper defense.
Speaker 1 (47:29):
So you can make people more reactive to vaccines. Again,
potential in situations where you need to produce cartes and
you're too old and you don't have enough T cells
or sufficient functional, good quality T cells, you could help
them there.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
When do we hear from that program.
Speaker 3 (47:45):
Well, that is basically going into the clinic this year,
we already approved, we've got approval in Australia and we're
moving forward. Probably by October we'll be in phase one November.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
Sounds like twenty twenty six could be quite a busy
air promodex.
Speaker 3 (48:01):
I think it's the inflection are from moderns. I mean,
if we go to phase two for the BV vaccine,
if we get through the escalation and without too much
toxicity and evidence of a good dose from MDX two
thousand and one and no anti anti drug antibodies because
that's important too, then we'll be flying because we know
(48:25):
that we have really overcome the most obvious obstacles, which
is you know, toxicity, manufacturing anyminogenicity, and then the targets
that we're using are validated targets. They're not unvalidated biology.
They're validated biology. So we hope that that combination will
(48:46):
be successful, but we won't know until next year.
Speaker 2 (48:48):
As you said, right, Elies, the lights have gone off
in this Oh they just came back in the room.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
I thought, maybe that's a signal for me to let stop,
because I think we're over time.
Speaker 3 (48:57):
Now.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
Let's see if we can get back together next year to.
Speaker 1 (49:00):
Hopefully celebrate some wings on that pipeline and maybe see
where the world has got to in terms of the
broader conversation we had.
Speaker 2 (49:07):
So I want to thank you again to make the time.
Speaker 1 (49:09):
I know you're at a conference, and I really appreciate
you making this time and effort, and we'll hopefully touch
base soon.
Speaker 3 (49:16):
Thank you very much.
Welcome to another episode of Bloomberg Intelligence Vanguards of Healthcare podcast,
where we speak with the leaders at the forefront of
change in the healthcare industry. My name is Sam Fraselli
and I'm a farmer analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, the in
house research arm of Bloomberg. I'm thrilled to welcome Eli S. Zerhuni,
the co founder of Modic Therapeutics and President and vice
(00:39):
chair of the Board of Directors of OpCo Health, to
the program today. Doctor Zerhuni has served as the executive
vice Dean and Dean of Research of the Johns Hopkins
University School of Medicine. He has He was the fifteenth
director of the NIH from two thousand and two to
two thousand and eight, and subsequently served as one of
(01:00):
the first Presidential Science Envoys to foster scientific and technological
collaborations with other nations. Dot Serjuni was President of Global
Research and Development at SANAFI from twenty eleven to twenty eighteen,
responsible for eleven regulatory approvals and commercial launchers, amongst many
other past and president activities. He's a member of the
(01:20):
board of the Danahercoro Corporation b flect On Capital the
Alaska Foundation Research America and the Foundation for NIH And
as of course I said, there is.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
An et cetera.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
At the end of that, Eli says, a background and
experience is very relevant to what too much of what
has been happening in the US in terms of immigration
and general science policy and funding.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
So we're going to talk about these aspects.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Of course, there's a book out there which I'm going
to let Eliots tell us about the one that he's
just written and put out.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
God Disease Knows No.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Politics, which many of these subjects that discussed about, and
at the end of the conversation will obviously of course
talk about OpCo mode and some of the cool things
that they're up to. Right, So, Elias, maybe we started
a little early in your life and you could tell
us what brought you into medicine and science, what was
your key driver in terms of getting you to that point,
(02:15):
and a little bit about your background before coming to
the US and that story, so that we can start
off with a good grounding in that.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Well, you know, I was born in Algeria right during
the War of Independence or just before, and I was
born to a family of seven boys, five at the
time then eventually seven and my father was a teacher
of physics and mathematics, and he was very committed to education,
and so all my youth I've spent time essentially being
(02:45):
focused on education. My mother wanted to really get educated,
but she couldn't under the French colonial system because she
was a girl. And anyway, you know, I grew up
both mostly in the expectation that I would become a mathematician,
physicists and engineer, no inkling whatsoever, that I would end
up in medicine. However, what happened during the war, there
(03:07):
was so much trouble, so much chaos, and so much
killing going around that we couldn't go to school every day,
And so I learned to learn, and my father basically
taught us at home, and I became essentially enamored with
the notion of quantitative sciences. Fast forward, went to the university,
(03:29):
and I went to the countryside as a volunteer in
the countryside, and I really saw what people were suffering
from TB malnutrition, health issues, and it touched me and
I decided to go into medicine. And my father was
completely opposed to that. He thought medicine was a specialty
(03:50):
of road learning and commercial implications of that. He didn't
think it was smart enough.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
What did he want you to be?
Speaker 3 (03:58):
He was interesting in physicist or an engineer or a
mathematician's very Middle Eastern, very Middle Eastern, exactly. And my
mother didn't want me to be a lawyer, didn't want
me to be a doctor anyway. You know, what happened
was I fell in love with the idea of helping people.
And you know, you were a young idealistic and and
I had I recount that in my book. My book
(04:21):
is called Disease Not No Politics, because it recounts my
trajectory of how I ended up in the US and
the positions I ended up being in. But what happened
was that, indeed I went to med school, and indeed
I found it borrowing. I found it really a specialty
of road learning. You could not ask questions every night,
every time you were curious about why is this, and
(04:43):
the teachers would say, listen, you just learned for your tests,
past the test and the license exam and so on.
So I was going to quit. And I had an uncle,
a radiologist who had also fought the French and went
to Sweden and got trained in radiology and and he
showed me the first CAT scan image in the world,
(05:03):
by acquired by Sir Godfrey Hounsfield in the UK. And
he said, you see what that is. I said, well,
it looks like a brain, looks like a head. It
was very coarse, but he said, this is the revolution,
this is a transformation of medicine. You should look into it.
And he explained it to me, you know, with an
X ray tube or running around the head, and then
(05:26):
a computer and algorithms, and so I like the physics
of it, the mathematics, the quantitative nature, but also the
biological aspect. You could see tumors and lesions inside the brain.
That's when I fell in love with the notion of
radiology and medical imaging because it married in my mind
(05:46):
the physical sciences to the biological sciences and the computational sciences.
So I fell in love with that idea. And my dean,
the dean of my medical school, who was a former
NIH trainee and a neuro scientist, so Renown, said, you
know you want to do this, but there's no way
we can teach you this. We can't even afford a
CT scanner here. So you have to go somewhere else,
(06:10):
And I said, how do I do that? He said, well,
you can go to the US if you can pass
the exams, or you can go to France. You can
go to the UK, you can go to Sweden. You
know the usual training ground for that. And he said,
but you can't do it here. You have to find
a solution. So that's when I started learning English. I
(06:32):
didn't speak English at the time, and I self learned.
And this is a secret I shared with the like
the readers, and that is the most important thing I inherited,
was the ability to learn by myself. Because of the war,
it was disturbed. I didn't have, you know, teachers for
(06:52):
every thing. I mean, there were a lot of gaps
in my education, but I filled them by learning by myself,
by looking for the information and so on. So I
knew I could do it, and I did, and I
passed the exams, and the dean wrote to the deans
that he knew at Hopkins, and that's how I ended
up being sent to Hopkins for a short term scholarship.
(07:16):
I only had like three four hundred dollars scholarship. It
was minimal, and the plan was to go learn and
come back. Well, history would have it that the six
month that was supposed to spend there has turned into
fifty years now. Yes, of course, so that's how I
end up in the US.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
So obviously the book, again, I think that the titles
quite telling. This is NOS and no politics. I'm trying
to figure out, actually that sorry, whether it had something
to do with the recent cuts by the administration of
NIH funding NSF. But I can't imagine it has because
that's only been nine months.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Or maybe it did in nine months.
Speaker 3 (07:56):
No, I did. You're completely right, and so the message
were actually something that I wanted to share. Why Because
I came to the US with the notion that the
American healthcare system was the best in the world and
the American research system was the best in the world. Right,
so fast forward fifty years, we're no longer the best
(08:19):
in the world in health care. We're still the best
in the world in medical research. What happened? What happened?
And so I take the reader and myself. The reason
I wrote it is because if a lot of friends
insisted that I do, and I didn't want to write it,
and so I started writing it three years ago, and
they wanted to really essentially have me explain what the
(08:42):
journey was that led me to from nineteen seventy five
all the way to today, in the steps that I
took and the observations or the lessons I learned from.
And one of the lessons was that the worst thing
that happened in health care and biomechal research is when
politics gets involved in picking and choosing what research needs
(09:06):
to be done for what disease. And specifically it was
a stem cell debate at the time, and I was
really really saying when I was the deed for research
at Hopkins that missing that would be a major failure
of our research system because fundamentally, one of the absolutely
(09:29):
core questions in science and biological sciences how does the
cell develop? How do you sam are the results of
one cell multiplying replicating billions of times and here you are?
You know, isn't that a miracle? So programming and reprogramming
(09:51):
of cells was an essential fundamental question. Nobody knew how
that happened, and you knew it from studying and and
extem cells, which obviously was a very political issue, very
contentious and so on. And so the title of the
book comes from the first testimony I gave to Congress
(10:12):
about what my position would be in terms of head
of NIH, that I would not abide by the notion
that politics should drive research. Politics and research and disease
should be separated because as a physician, we first do
(10:33):
no harm to no one. That's the first principle. And
the second principle is if somebody is sick, you need
to help them, You need to do research on their disease.
You need to do it, no matter what the political
implications are. So it wasn't manifesto essentially that I illustrate throughout
the book and it just turns out to be completely
(10:56):
actual today. But it was not intentional. I didn't put
that title because fundamentally it is an underlying tension in
all of healthcare, in all of biomedical research, all of biology.
I mean, look at you know, things like GMOs. You
know the europe doesn't want them, US wants done. But
(11:18):
it's all if political question is not really a scientific question.
The same thing about vaccines. You have now anti vaxxers
and pro vaxxers, and it's not a science question. It's
not a disease question, it's not a public health question.
It is a political question. So I want to put
my finger and and really help people understand how things are,
(11:42):
you know, cross influencing the research policy in the health
care policy because of underlying political considerations.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
There is a saying that I've come across I can't
remember who said it, that if you mix science with politics,
you get politics. And that's the science never wins out
of these conversations.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
Right.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
So, and of course one of the issues that is
interesting to consider is why did we get here?
Speaker 2 (12:08):
How did we.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Get here the right current conversation about MR and A
vaccines that they're not.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Good for respiratory diseases? Where is that from?
Speaker 1 (12:18):
I mean, we just saved the world from a pandemic
or within the panet maybe over promised, except right, maybe
we all got all carried away with the data that
came out thinking that maybe we've got a vaccine that
prevents transmission, which of course not many vaccines.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
I don't know if any has managed to do.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
That, but yet you still have and you continue to
see reduction in hospitalization of reduction immortality following booster shots,
and still.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
We're having this issue.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
So actually, it's interesting that you had an opportunity to
at least you were proposed the idea of running President
Trump's Operation Warp Speed, which created the vaccine. And so
now we have President Trump, who was in the first
administration obviously driving this and doing an amazing putting an
(13:09):
amazing effort behind getting the vaccine, and now the administration,
at least for the HIHS.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Is against them. So where does this come from?
Speaker 1 (13:18):
And the other one is, of course gain of function,
this thought, this thing that everyone talks a gain of function.
I don't know if half of people who talk about
gain of function actually know what they're talking about. So
where does it come from?
Speaker 2 (13:29):
What happened? When do you see an inflection point?
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Or was it just a gentle slide?
Speaker 3 (13:35):
I think? I think fundamentally it's the social phenomenon of
trust and distrust in institutions that grew during the pandemic.
I mean, the pandemic was not man as well. I mean,
let's face it, all these closures and this mandated activities,
you know, one size fits all responses and preparation, the
(13:57):
lack of preparation for the pandemic, the lack of testing early,
so you had no idea where the disease was and
how it was spreading. So all of that should be
really the object for me of a post mortum, right,
you need to study that.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Ironically though ironically, now that we're shutting funding to pandemic preparedness,
we are shutting funding to testing.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
We don't want to openly test. It's just it's just
there's the two hands don't seem to be wanting to
talk to each other.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
That's exactly right. There is an irrationality going on that
comes from you know, becoming emotional and distrustful and angry
and all that does not really lend itself to good,
good understanding of what the threats are. Right, And I
think I feel the same way that you do, and
unlike flabbergasted because when I took the job as an
(14:49):
ICE director, I met with the president, President Bush. The
first thing he told me he said, listen, I am
completely committed to doubling the NIH budget. Complete a doubling,
make sure that we are the number one in biomedical research,
finding solutions the diseases, and then and then helping with
(15:09):
hiv as fast forward. And now you have an administration
that said I want to cut the budget in half,
stop doing hiv as, stop doing mRNA. I mean, it
sounds like what happened in the Soviet Union with Lisenko,
when Lisenko, a friend of Stalin, said that genetics and
molecular biology are are are bourgeois bourgeois and therefore they
(15:35):
should not be funded. We're so seeing something similar. You know, Oh,
m RNA is suspicious. There's a country, you know, and
there is a long story about anti vaxers wanting to
find fault with the system, and so they disparage the vaccines,
I mean, claiming unbelievable stories like you know, the vaccine
(15:58):
has a chip in it, And all these conspiracy theories
come in the background of distrust of the scientific institutions
and distrust that people like myself and yourself, we're trying
to be rational about this. So what happens is that
you absolutely react like Lisenko did by barring research. That's
the first sign that you're going to lose the supremacy
(16:22):
or the quality of your research enterprise. You're going to
have more and more young people moving away from it.
And then if you cut the budget in half. You know,
people don't appreciate that budgets for research are not subsidies,
they are investments. Their investments in the next generation of scientists.
And if these young scientists see what they see, they're
(16:42):
gonna say, oh, wait a minute, I don't want to
be a scientist anymore. So for a country that's four
percent of the globe population right, twenty five percent of
the global economy, you think you can really sustain the
competition against China with one point four billion or India
one point four billion without preserving your human capital, growing
(17:07):
your seeds of bright future winners of the Nobel Prize. No,
I can't do that. It doesn't happen. So essentially we're
shooting ourselves in the foot by irrational behaviors that do
not allow conversations, do not allow you know, counter arguments.
That's the thing that scares me is that you're not
(17:29):
listening to as Oh, you're you're an elite, You're you're
part of the conspiracy, you're part of the deep state.
But the thing that's amazing to me is that they're
attacking the COVID vaccine as being evil and mr NA
is being evil and it being a big things that
we should not develop. Why should we not develop it? Because,
(17:50):
as dan Ice director said, the American people have lost
trust and if they have lost trust in mr Ani vaccines,
then we should not be funding it because if we
find something that people will not accept it. Right, So
think about the circular argument coming from people who have
disparaged the vaccines all along. But how does that translate
(18:12):
to what President Trump did? Right? So Operation Warp Speed,
he developed his vaccine in nine months, he forced it
on us. He's as criminal as Tony Fauci should be, right,
and so there is a complete contradictory.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Of course he's not, because there was the way that
we managed to reopen society.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
And he probably is the best thing he ever did,
and he should really get a lot of credit for that.
But then his own constituents like Kennedy are removing that
from his legacy because they're saying, this was the biggest
crime committed against against the American people to develop that
vaccines and millions suffered a million I mean completely against
(18:52):
any data. It's a ninety five percent of vaccine. Come on,
I mean vaccine that was as good as that.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
There is a lot of good things that are at
least talked about and some action that's happening with regards
to the make America healthy again. Movement in terms of
the access to junk food, trying to manage and reduce
assuming that that becomes a reality. I mean, those are
good things, but unfortunately we as scientists are our feeling
(19:23):
and actually I used to be one, so I don't
know if I can still claim it. Feeling that this
pressure against science, which just seems incongruous, incredulous about the
whole thing that's always of course, weighs much much more
because that's the engine of innovation.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Making American healthy again is fantastic, It's a great idea.
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
But I don't think the two are there's nothing to
do with each other. The science side should still continue,
and of course, you know, if you look at the
US economy, it is an innovational economy and that's where
I think the pressure is going to come from, talking
about the health care system in general. And of course, now,
first Nih, how do you how are you feeling?
Speaker 2 (20:03):
I mean there's.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
There are lawsuits, court cases some states, some scientists, some
groups of scientists trying to fight back. What are you
seeing on the ground right now?
Speaker 3 (20:15):
Well, I think, first of all, I mean it was
shocking at the beginning. I mean, people didn't believe this
was happening, right, Many people thought, like I did. This
is like penny wise and Pound foolish. You're going to
lose your leadership position in the world. And we're already
in relative terms, not as superior as we used to be.
I mean, China has advanced a lot and is continuing
(20:38):
to advance an invest so it's almost like unilateral disarmament.
You know, you're basically disarming yourself and saying, okay, I'm
okay not being number one anymore. Well, that's a big
mistake in what I know. In terms of scientific competition,
the prime mover advantage is a terrific advantage. So when
(21:01):
you look at AI, when you look at what we
did in biomedical research, ninety nine percent of current drugs
are based on some level of basic research and NIH
and funded by an IH. So you basically cannot imagine
sustaining your position as an innovative economy with that, you know,
(21:22):
investing in it. So that was the number one. Number two.
I think there's been a real over the past few months.
I can tell you I've been solicited to comment and
the book is well received right now because people think
it's it's almost like uncanny timing because it's addressing things
that we were seeing in real time. But I mean
(21:44):
telling you that I'm actually not as pessimistic. I think
that the message is getting through. I don't think this
administration wants to be seen as the one that destroyed
the American science and technology. So you can see pushed
back from Congress. The only area was a pushback, and
I am hopeful actually that the disastrous proposal will be
(22:08):
pushed back and correct it because.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
I mean the reality, Yeah, eliast I think I wonder
what you thought on this. Who can pick up the slack?
Europe I don't think is in a position to pick
up the slack that quickly. I mean, there have been
talks about offering extra grant funding to folks who want
to move over here, but you know, these are people
with families and friends and social lives. You can't just
(22:34):
uproot them and bring them over it because they're upset
about a significant issue which is affecting their livelihoods. But
who do you think will pick up the slack here
if this doesn't get sorted?
Speaker 3 (22:45):
So there would be some picking done by foreign countries
because of certain areas where their Europe is deficient, so
the brain drain will not be a general brain drain.
If I was them, I would look at specific scientists
who do specific things that the Europeans don't do well,
so they will try to import that talent, just like
(23:06):
what we did in the US when we import a
specific talent. But the big impact is what you said
and I know, is they don't have the capacity to
really recruit all the people that we wouldn't be able
to recruit, or we're going to lose. So all in all,
it's not the brain drain that worries me. It's the
brain loss. For one billion dollars of NIH funding, we
(23:27):
support about eight thousand scientists. So for one billion dollar reduction,
we lose eight thousand scientists, mostly from the next generation, younger,
younger ones. Right, So you're talking about reducing the budget
by eighteen billion, and if you look at the direct
funding of scientists for that, you're going to lose about
one hundred and thirty one hundred and fifty thousand scientists
(23:48):
in the US. Right.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
No one can pick that's per annum.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Yeah, no one can pick it up. No one can
pick it up, right, And therefore you know, as you
cut the budget, and you're going to only support half
the people you used to support, which means that you'll
have to really compete with one arm behind your back.
Because the complexity of what we do today is greater
than what it was twenty years ago. So you need
(24:14):
actually more people from more fields of science. You know,
people don't appreciate that. One of the reasons I became
a nice director is because I was a big advocate
of merging and converging physical sciences and biological sciences, which
was not the standard at the time. But I did
it at Hopkins. I did it in many ways to
(24:35):
the point where I was noticed as a mover of
what we call convergence today. So today you reduce all
your workforce by half, you need now more multidisciplinary efforts.
What does that need to And your purchasing power is
a lot less than what it is in China. I mean,
you can buy more research, more scientists, more pro in
(25:01):
China with the same budget than you have in the US.
So you know, anybody who sits down and say, okay, well,
let's project forward will tell you this is a problem
that there's not a place of discussion. There's nobody who
says well, tell us what you think. There's just propaganda
going on, and I think at this point I hope
(25:21):
that cooler heads will prevail. I see now patient groups
understanding what will happen to their diseases, so they are acting.
I see a lot of people coming forward and saying, look,
there are things that you're doing that are good, like glow.
You know, chronic diseases. That's great, but you can't really
advance that by essentially slashing your brain in half, your
(25:47):
brain trust in half.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
I mean, as you said patient groups, maybe that's one
way of going about it. I mean, you know, we
have diseases like multiple myeloma that are being treated by
increasingly modern method technologies, like by specific antibodies like cartes.
Now they're not the single unique domain of the United
States insteads of developing them.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
But that's where they take off.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
That's where some of the very early car TI work
from chrimeric anthigen receptor T cells came from engineer tea
cells from Carl Juno's lab, and that ended up being
eight massive slife. Ever, people with my aloman now, starting
from a very early days as Snafi had a myloma
drug and that's that's competing in the market, is doing
(26:35):
or doing You know, they live with their disease. You
have the same story in prostate cancer, you have the
same story. These are the fruits of science, and I
wonder whether there should be more conversation about that rather
than vaccines really helped us in the COVID pandemic, because
that might be now falling on their fears.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
No, I think that worries me about the current leadership.
I mean, instead of looking forward, they're looking backwards by
disparaging whatever was behind them. Oh, research was not reproducible,
it was corrupted, there was di it was okay, fine,
well tell us what you want to do exactly that's
different and better. And that's the thing that's the circular
(27:14):
argument that goes through. For example, look after nine to eleven.
You know, when the towers fell, there was a commission,
the nine to eleven Commission, which was assembled to analyze
why did it happen, how did it happen, how do
we prevent it from happening, how do we make it better?
(27:35):
You know that happened right now, we just had three
thousand and four thousand people dying from that event. Pass forward,
we have a pandemic that killed a million people in
the US, ten million in the world. We have not
a single postmoriling examination or commission saying Okay, what did
(27:55):
we do wrong? What did we do right? Why did
we lose the people that we lost in terms of trust?
And what was the mrn A? What was it wrong?
What was the complication rate, what was the success rate?
How do you organize as a reasonable effort a post
mortel gain of functions? You're talking about gain of functions? Well,
(28:17):
I am worried about gain of function because you know,
if you look at bioterrorism, you could use gain of function.
How do you you know post gain of function fast
m RNA vaccines because as soon as I know what
the what the bioterror agent is and I have a sequence,
I can design vaccines against it in a matter of
(28:38):
forty eight hours. Well, I'm cutting myself from that. I'm
no longer studying this And does that make sense? There's
not even a place to discuss it. So that is
it's a disarmament. It's unilateral disarmament, is what I mean.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
It's interesting. Of course the mr and A angle is
specifically for infectiacies vaccines. From what I am hearing and
understanding cancer applications. Other therapeutic applications are not necessarily the
thing that anybody's worried about. So let's see, of course,
talking about high tech and cutting edge, maybe it's time
to talk a little bit about OpCo modex. You have
(29:19):
some pretty cool technology that you're developing.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Unless you wanted to make.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Some final remarks from the book before we moved on
to a couple of ideas to talk.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
About, No, I think the one thing that I would
like to leave with you is my sense that the
healthcare system, which I thought was the best when I
came to this country is no longer the best. That's
number one I want to talk about that. And number
two the importance of immigration in course sustaining sustaining American
(29:50):
supremacy in science and technology. So for immigration, I think
I told you already that we are demographically disadvantaged as
a country. Three number one. Number two, If you look
at all the graduate programs in the US which are excellent,
half of the students are not US born. If you
look at Nobel prices, half of the Nobel Prizes America
(30:12):
wins are not from US born scientists. If you look
at the economy. Half of the new startups and the
major major technology companies, by tech companies, half of them
are generated by non US born individuals, immigrants and so on.
So I think, I think this anti immigrant, you know,
(30:33):
almost xenophobic approach is self destructive as well. So I'm
giving you example of how many times we shut ourselves
in the foot, and I want to send a strong
message that ninety eight percent of scientific advances are generated
by two percent of scientists. Right, you have to be
very lucky to make a breakthrough discovery or breakthrough advance.
(30:55):
Now that two percent of scientists, that's the most creative part.
You know, because of the size of our population and
then the productivity of our educational system, we are not
able to have that number. We have to import the
best and the brightest and retain them and not let
them go back after we train them. Right, So strategically,
(31:18):
you've got to understand that succeeding in science and technology
depends enormously on enriching your talent pull to the most creative,
most performing scientists. And that is the machine that I
think immigration brings to the world. Where this is a
country where as an immigrant, I would always say thank
(31:40):
you to America because I succeeded because of this culture
of understanding the synergy that exists when you have a
comprehensive approach to scientific excellence. Okay, losing that will be
losing the American dream. Second, I mean I want to
(32:01):
talk about healthcare. I mean, I basically have witness and
I recount the transformation of health care from best to
not so best, not so good in fact, more costly,
more more or less accessible, more punishing to the American patients,
and yet completely captured by special interests and intermediaries who
(32:26):
extract an enormous amount of value without producing any benefit.
And so I want to talk about that, And.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
I say, called pharmacy benefit managers.
Speaker 3 (32:35):
Aren't they all kinds of enough?
Speaker 2 (32:37):
What benefits is in there?
Speaker 3 (32:40):
That's right, but the only one of that. They're not
the whole thing. I mean, it's a great industry that
the health industrial complex is a very powerful complex. Pharmers
part of a benefit manager, insurance companies, large, large monopolistic
health systems who drive you know, healthcare cost in one
region and service. So I described that in my last chapter,
(33:02):
and I say, you know, to me the reason why
we're having a problem is because the American health system
has been overly centralized and overly controlled by a few
people in Congress who are being lobbied, you know, aggressively
by special interests in a way that does not serve
the American patient. In fact, when you look at the
(33:23):
way decisions are made, patients are rarely represented. And you
know what the saying is, if you're not at the table,
you're on the menu. And that's what's happening. The American
patient is right now on the menu of many, many
special interests. They are ruined by the cost of health care.
The medical bills are the number one cause of financial
(33:45):
distress in the US, and it continues and then the
premiums are increasing.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
So what is the solution. How easy is it to
really fix this?
Speaker 3 (33:56):
I don't think it's easy. But I think there's one
observation I made as an incetructor, and that is that
if you go around this country, this country is huge,
right If you look at the UK and there are
eight regions in the UK. If you look at Canada
there are also twelve regions. Germany sixteen regions. We have
one size fits all for three hundred and thirty million people.
(34:17):
When you look at the epdemiology of Mississippi and you
compare it to the epdmology of Minnesota, you're shocked that
the same solution would be applied. It's a completely different map.
So in Mississippi's chronic disease, obesity, diabetes, all of those
in Minnesota is a very, very different epedemiology. So why
(34:40):
are we, as a country of innovation, the country of
you know, experimentation, having the control of this you know,
twenty percent of GDP industry in the hands of a
couple hundred people in Washington. So I'm a big advocate
not for a government run healthcare system, which I think
(35:00):
it doesn't work because they have the same problem. It's
this one size fits all, not adapted to the local
and regional situation. And so what I'm proposing is not
a revolution, but a devolution into specific epidemiologic regions of
the country, into ten twelve regions with you know, you know,
(35:23):
local governors of health if you will, that are multiple states.
Speaker 4 (35:27):
In many cases that really allow experimentation, allow new ways
of providing healthcare, including AI, including things America is good
at that they're very we're very creative.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
There's new ideas that comes up, come up, but we
have no ability to learn from each other because everybody
is following the addictas of Washington, you know, and if
you don't, you're fraud and abuse and therefore you don't
do it. And I have examples after examples of that.
Look at the model I give is one of the
(36:02):
Federal Reserve, one of the Federal Reserve. It's somewhat independent,
it doesn't it's not as prisoner to political influences. Again,
it's disease knows no politics. Healthcare should know no politics too.
And then they have all these economic regions with governors
of the Central Bank that really capture the reality of
(36:23):
the economy in each one of the regions. That is
the general scheme that I'm talking about. We need to
do something like that. Our healthcare system is dysfunctional and
not repair able.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
I hear you, and I think we could sit here
and talk about this for however, we've got about five
to ten minutes left, and if you don't mind, I
like to move you on to mode X, which is,
you know, I'm a drug analyst, and that's what I am,
pharma collegist by training. You've got two things that I'm
particularly interested in talking about. One is the EBV vaccine
(36:59):
that you ebs done virus vaccine, which is it's not
an mr NA vaccine shock horror, it's a standard vaccine.
It is partnered with merk it's in development, and tell
us a little bit about it. And you know, I
see that you said on there that you've got the
infectious moneyclosis and related cancers.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
There's another area.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
That these this virus has shown its potential relevance, and
that's multiple sclerosis.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
I wonder if you wanted to talk about that a
little bit there.
Speaker 3 (37:29):
Let me talk to you about the central idea of
what I am doing with Modex Therapeutics and OpCo. Okay,
the central ideas as follows. As I was at de Aniation,
we we did a lot of research on what we
call disease pathways disease networks. What you realize is that
there's no single disease that has only a single cause.
(37:50):
It's usually related to networks of molecules that are dysfunctionally,
you know, interacting because of a disease process. So the
first example of that for me was when I looked
at allergy the THH two response, which really relates to
several molecules, IILE thirteen, IILE five, IILE for TSLP, there's
(38:14):
all family. And the thing is that you tend to
attack one target at the time. Yet you realize that
in practice it's not as effiction because you have combination therapies. Right.
So the idea was, can we create molecules that will
be able to be multi specific, multi valent against a
(38:36):
disease pathway, and more efficient than any one of the
combinations that are being used to attack a disease. Right,
So it's you know, as somebody said, well, it's the
concept of multi warheads missiles, right. Instead of having miles
five missiles, you get one with multiple warheads. So that
(38:57):
was the idea of multi specific antibodies. The same idea
came because I was working with Gary Nabel at the
NIH when he was at d NAH and when I
came to Sanofi, I created a breakthrough lab on the
idea of multi valent vaccines. Because you know when you
when you don't use the old technology killed the viruses.
You have to select the intigens, right, and so the
(39:21):
technology platform that we developed was on the particles of
ferretin and then you could plant multiple intigens on it. Now,
why did it make sense for EBV Because EBV had
had a single intigen vaccines developed by GSK against against
a epitop called a GP three fifty and the antigen
(39:45):
GP three fifty and then achieved a seventy five percent protection,
so it wasn't bad. The problem though, is that GP
three fifty protected from entering B cells. The problem is
that the virus also enters epithelials, right, so you had
to block both if you wanted to get sterilizing immunity.
(40:05):
And that's what we did. So we built a multi
vailin vaccine that presented antigens on this ferytine self assemblying
molecule that essentially covers B cells and also epitial cells.
And we showed in animal models and so on that
it was sterilizing, and know it was, it wouldn't really
allow you know, penetration into a reservoir. Essentially, once you
(40:31):
have the reservoir, then the cancer, the cancer develops. It's
just like HPV, and so you need to prevent that
or you need to sterilize that. And so that's what
gave us the eb V approach that we proposed, which
was multi vailed. However, the companies did not want to
(40:52):
develop that. I tried to push it with Sanofi three times,
and three times they say it's no market. Mono nucleosis
is so spread, you know, by the time you have
the vaccine, you know the people have been exposed and
so on and so forth. However, the things change when
a connection to multiple scrolls. This was found, what was reported.
(41:13):
That's when Merk came to us and said, we want
to work with you, and people were talking about mRNA,
you know about oh, why don't you do it with
mRNA because you could do multi valent or having multiple RNAs.
The problem is that mRNA vaccines have one drawback. They
don't seem to trigger memory T cells the way conventional
(41:35):
vaccines do, and so the effect goes away after a
few months, and then you've got to revaccinate again. Right,
So that's what happened with with the COVID. I mean,
you can see that decreasing protection. Not for severe disease
and hospitalization. It was still protective of that, but you
(41:55):
can see people have been vaccinated in over a few months,
they get COVID themselves. So we knew that we needed
something else and that's what that's what is. That's what
the THEBV vaccine became a multi valent, multi specific, multi
antigenic VA vaccine.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
The multi valent platform.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
It's what HHS and Secretary Kennedy keep talking about for vaccines.
Can you are you looking to expand this beyond EBB.
Speaker 3 (42:26):
I don't think that's what they're saying. I mean, they
just proposed a five hundred million dollar research program to
replace the MR and a research programs for what they
called killed or attenuated viruses going back thirty forty ye. Yeah,
going back a while back, thinking that this would be safer, better,
(42:46):
more imminogenic, and more persistent. And yet you know, that's
that has been shown to be true, especially for the
viruses that are invariant like polio or small parks and
things like that. But frankly, it's like past all technology,
which has shown quite a bit of side effects like
(43:07):
the amber ray syndrome reactivation of the attenuated viruses which
we saw in polio. So I don't know. I mean,
it's it's puzzling to me that you stop one area
of research in favor of another one. You pick and choose,
like like the Soviet scientists used to do the Senko.
(43:28):
He banned people who did genetics and evolutionary biology. He
put them in jail, he'd stopped funding them. I mean,
it wasn't just a scientific this, you know, this discordance
or disagreement. It was a political one. And I'm worried
that this is where is going here. You know, anybody
(43:49):
who does mRNA is a political opponent. I mean, that's crazy,
that's madness.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
You have this other technology that I'm quite intrigued by,
which is quite ambitious, the tetraspecific tea cell engager. I
mean that sounds quite technical, but basically I've seen you know,
the c MET drop two, CD three City twenty eight.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
We've gone into the depths of science here.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Now when should we This is for oncology, of course,
and possibly of course if you did CD nineteen or
four utoimmune diseases. Maybe what is the what are the
timelines for us to see data from this and the
EBV vaccine.
Speaker 3 (44:27):
Well, the EBV vaccine is in phase one, finishing phase
one right now, So by the end of the day,
by the end of the year, you should hear whether
we go to phase two or two or not, because
that's what will tell you that Phase one was really
informative in terms of multi specific. What I realized was,
you know, by specifics wouldn't be enough because you got
(44:48):
several signals. When you look at t sell engagements, you
know you have the CD three signal, the CD twenty
eight signal, and then the four one BB signal that
are really important the CD three to activate, CD twenty
eight to enhance perferration O and BB two differentiate. So
what really was our idea was to say we can
(45:10):
devise multi specific antibodies, which was not obvious at the time.
And we said, let's not just go by specifics, but
go more than that. And we discovered a way of
manufacturing not just by specific but also try specific quadry
penton hextas specifics. We can go to six binders six specificities,
(45:32):
right or multi you know, try specific that's dual availment
or whatever. So it's a plug and play technology. But
we realized that, you know, we could actually test it
if we could manufacture it and so on, which we did.
And so the first one, the first protype that went
in is the c metrop two CD three, CD twenty eight,
which is in clinical in phase one development. And so
(45:56):
it's actually going through its fifth level and we're already
seeing biological activity. So hopefully within the year we'll be
able to go into the basket efficacy trial that we
want to go into City in nineteen, City twenty same thing.
It's a quadriy specific with that signal, which you know
(46:17):
can be very helpful in the aplomas but also to
immune disease. And then we have a one that is
really unique, and it's what I would call an immune
system rejuvenator, right because what happens is with age and
with immune suppression, you lose the ability to expand your
T cell populations. And we found a way to actually
(46:38):
regain that capability so that instead of having immune suppression
or less competent immune system, you bring it back to
efficiencies that hasn't been able to have and hopefully you'll
find a recovery of the immune protection that you had
when you were forty years old or thirty years old
(46:59):
or that almost.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
It's a longevity kind of story.
Speaker 3 (47:04):
It faced an immune booster story. Okay, immunology management in
the general time, so you can protect yourself not just
against one disease, but against all immune sensitive diseases. Where
your immune system will be cancer will be infectious disease
where the cancer where your immune system is not capable
(47:25):
of mounting a proper defense.
Speaker 1 (47:29):
So you can make people more reactive to vaccines. Again,
potential in situations where you need to produce cartes and
you're too old and you don't have enough T cells
or sufficient functional, good quality T cells, you could help
them there.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
When do we hear from that program.
Speaker 3 (47:45):
Well, that is basically going into the clinic this year,
we already approved, we've got approval in Australia and we're
moving forward. Probably by October we'll be in phase one November.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
Sounds like twenty twenty six could be quite a busy
air promodex.
Speaker 3 (48:01):
I think it's the inflection are from moderns. I mean,
if we go to phase two for the BV vaccine,
if we get through the escalation and without too much
toxicity and evidence of a good dose from MDX two
thousand and one and no anti anti drug antibodies because
that's important too, then we'll be flying because we know
(48:25):
that we have really overcome the most obvious obstacles, which
is you know, toxicity, manufacturing anyminogenicity, and then the targets
that we're using are validated targets. They're not unvalidated biology.
They're validated biology. So we hope that that combination will
(48:46):
be successful, but we won't know until next year.
Speaker 2 (48:48):
As you said, right, Elies, the lights have gone off
in this Oh they just came back in the room.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
I thought, maybe that's a signal for me to let stop,
because I think we're over time.
Speaker 3 (48:57):
Now.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
Let's see if we can get back together next year to.
Speaker 1 (49:00):
Hopefully celebrate some wings on that pipeline and maybe see
where the world has got to in terms of the
broader conversation we had.
Speaker 2 (49:07):
So I want to thank you again to make the time.
Speaker 1 (49:09):
I know you're at a conference, and I really appreciate
you making this time and effort, and we'll hopefully touch
base soon.
Speaker 3 (49:16):
Thank you very much.
Host
Jonathan Palmer
Popular Podcasts
My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com