Can public health make a profit? — with Charlie Petty

Most venture capitalists avoid infectious disease because the sickest patients live in countries that can't pay for expensive medicine—and because a one-time treatment can charge only a fraction of what a lifetime chronic drug can. Then again, one-time treatments for patients aged 18-30 in the developing world can be 10× to 100× cheaper to study than the Big Pharma playbook would have you believe.

I'm joined this week by Charlie Petty, a managing director at the Global Health Investment Corporation—a venture fund that looks for profitable investments in companies developing treatments for the developing world. Their thesis is that you can make money solving problems for huge markets of people who have relatively little money, if you're creative about how markets work.

We talk about what makes his job harder (and easier) than conventional biotech VC, which clinical trials cost an order of magnitude (or more!) less than you'd expect, selling to national and international drug stockpiles, and the looming rise of a “less unipolar” biotech world.

Full transcript at https://developmentandresearch.bio/episode/charlie-petty/