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Dave Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly | The All-In Interview

October 08, 2024 / 01:04:57

This episode features an interview with Dave Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly, discussing the company's significant growth and the impact of GLP-1 drugs on obesity and diabetes. Key topics include the obesity epidemic, the role of GLP-1 drugs, and the future of diabetes treatment.

Dave Ricks shares insights on Eli Lilly's rise from a $70 billion market cap in 2017 to $878 billion today, highlighting the company's leadership in the GLP-1 drug market. He discusses the projected growth of the obesity drug market, which could reach $150 billion annually.

The conversation addresses the alarming obesity rates in the U.S. and globally, with 74% of Americans classified as overweight or obese. Ricks emphasizes the health implications of obesity, including diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, and how GLP-1 drugs can help manage these conditions.

Ricks explains the history and development of GLP-1 drugs, including the challenges faced in creating effective treatments. He discusses the future of obesity treatment and the potential for GLP-1 drugs to address other health issues, such as chronic kidney disease and sleep apnea.

Finally, Ricks touches on the importance of culture at Eli Lilly, the company's commitment to innovation, and the challenges of navigating the healthcare landscape while maintaining ethical practices.

TLDR

Dave Ricks discusses Eli Lilly's growth, GLP-1 drugs, and the obesity epidemic's health implications.

Episode

1:04:57
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I'm going all right besties I think that was another epic discussion people love the
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interviews I could hear him talk for hours absolutely we crush your questions admit it we are giving people ground
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truth data to underwrite your own opinion what you guys think that was fun pal Dave Ricks welcome to the Allin
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interview great to be here yeah we had dinner together a couple of months ago and I've been in touch and obviously I'm
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really excited to talk to you uh today about the work you're doing at Eli ly so just for the audience Dave is the CEO of
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Eli ly which is the world's most valuable pharmaceutical company and the leader in the glp1 uh drug Market which
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some analysts have said could grow to as much as 150 billion in annual revenue over the next 10 years really kind of an
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extraordinary story and Dave you became CEO of Lily in January 2017 when Lily had a market cap of just $70 billion
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following a year of 20 billion in revenue and three and a half in operating income and today Lily's Market
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Cap is an astounding $878 billion and the company's projected to do 46 billion in revenue and 15 billion in operating
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income this year and few companies in history I'd say have seen such an extraordinary rise in Revenue profit
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market value at this scale maybe Nvidia recently which I'd say is the only company that kind of beat your
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performance in recent years but I don't know of any that are not founder Le maybe SAA running Microsoft
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but it took him a little bit longer and so today I'm really excited to talk to you about the work you're doing at Lily
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The Chronic health problem of obesity and diabetes gp1s and what's happening in that market what those uh products do
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and The Business of Eli Lily so thanks so much for being here da yeah excited to be here I'm a big fan of the Pod so
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I'm I'm excited to be on that's great um sorry you don't get uh harassed by the other three today it's just me uh so
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this is a an extended science corner for all the Nerds at home that wanted it with a a deep dive on on an amazing
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business so we'll start off by talking about the the The Chronic Health epidemic of obesity according to this
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CDC 74% of Americans are now overweight or clinically obese your statistics might be different this condition is
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driving what is arguably the largest Health epidemic in human history obesity and all the associated diseases like
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type 2 diabetes have so many negative Health implications for our populations and this is dramatically
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over the past 50 years is becoming a global problem so let me pull up a couple of images we can use as we have
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this conversation here Dave and will dialogue about this but obviously what humans eat what we consume has changed
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dramatically particularly here in the US we've seen the American diet a shift to
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a much more kind of caloric lower nutrient density diet over the last 50 years the average daily calorie consumed
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by Americans since 1961 has driven up from 2800 to about 3600 and you know that sounds like a small number but when
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you add it up over 365 days a year it leads to a pretty dramatic increase in in obesity rates this is a great chart
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that shows how the availability of calories and the consumption of calories in a population significantly correlates
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with the rate of obesity in that particular country and the United States obviously has the
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largest caloric supply of any developed nation and also has the highest percentage of people that are overweight
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or obese and I would argue that many of the improvements that we've seen in agricultural technology and many of the
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systems um in in food that have made calories cheaper have resulted in this kind of surplus problem that has led to
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an obesity epidemic and just looking at the US rates over the last 20 25 years you know we see today as I mentioned
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before 75% of people overweight or obese and in this particular slide we're showing 35% of obese and
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severe obese to today 51% of Americans are either obese or severely obese really
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extraordinary and this is not just in the US as the calorie supplies increased around the world we see obesity rates
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climbing in every developed Nation from Brazil to Mexico and now even recently in India and so this is becoming a
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global problem and I think you know Dave maybe you could talk a little bit about
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the scale of the problem I think you've highlighted a lot of this in your investor presentations and and this is
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one of your slides that you've used so maybe you can kind of share how you guys forecast the Obesity epidemic and and
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the effect it's having worldwide yeah that's a great backgrounder to get us kicked off you
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know one thing just pointing out on the data you showed some people notice a difference in the caloric intake numbers
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versus the um kind of the macronutrient micronutrient story you go back yeah so like the the severe obesity particular
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kicking up here on the next slide there um yeah kicking up almost doubling right
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in the last 20 years whereas caloric intake certainly isn't moving at that same rate so you know I think as we
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think about the problem of course um excess calories versus expenditure is a key part but so is probably the ultr
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processed food story which you didn't have data on there but is you know I think in the US we're now eating
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two-thirds of our calories in our country are ultr processed yeah and that compares to like 35% in Europe so that's
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got to be part of this equation as well but no matter the cause like if you go to that first slide I had we now see
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about a billion people on the planet with clinical obesity or overweight and as you're pointing out probably that's
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um going to grow a lot more in the developed or developing world than the developed world there's a function of
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wealth accumulation and um Surplus uh food abundance basically that will drive this
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India I think is 11% of the population's obese but projected to go as much as 30%
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in the next 20 years so on that population base that alone would would add almost half a billion people um to
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this this chart yeah so your projection is obesity worldwide will affect about a
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billion people by 2030 is that right yeah that's right yeah yeah and the problem with obesity is that it has an
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effect on many of uh the the systems of the human body maybe you can highlight kind of how obesity uh you know causes
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many of The Chronic health conditions and ailments that simply weren't around maybe hundred years ago but are
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certainly becoming far more frequent today yeah absolutely I mean the first order effect of course is on your
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metabolic processes in here you like like cardiovascular disease how we process lipids and other energy sources
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that leads to cardiovascular disease and its um other Associated risk like stroke
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um I mean there's a pretty new disease here called under the liver disease which is what's used to be called Nash
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is now confusingly called Mash but it's the same disease it's fatty liver disease and 30 years ago like clinically
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you couldn't really find this in the adult population and now it's one of the most common conditions obese people
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suffer from and it ends up in fibrosis of the liver and as you know like we have a lot of every organ that's
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important we have redundancy and except the liver so when your liver goes south it's a bad news story for human health
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transplant is is the only escape from that um we've got some used to be a that used to be a disease limited to severe
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alcoholism right exactly and and this the Nash word is actually starts with non-alcoholic yeah fatty liver so but
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now there's much more um obesity-driven fatty liver than any other cause as pointing out but it results in
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transplant and terrible uh outcomes long term so so much of the the health problems The Chronic health issues that
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we deal with as a modern society are probably rooted many of them are rooted in the Obesity epidemic yeah so 230
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diseases have have been connected and you have these these ones that are more like directly because of the caloric
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imbalance and fat accumulation and then you have these ones in blue are sort of like derivative like obstructive sleep
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apnea that's like 14 million Americans have cpat machines and why because there's so much um fat accumulation
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around your respiratory system you you wake yourself up at night to breathe and gird of course that's you
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know reflux Etc so these are like more the second order effect and then interestingly you've got the mood
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anxiety pieces here there's an interesting study done by epic you know they're the big health record company
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yeah which is retrospective and not tightly controlled but it showed people on gop1 drugs incron had remarkably
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lower rates of new clinical depression diagnosis which is an interesting thing as well so a lot of lot of
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impact like type two diabetes itself which is an inability for the body to respond with an appropriate amount of
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insulin when there's glucose in the blood itself has a number of follow-on effects obviously diabetes as as many
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know um has become own a chronic Health epidemic it can cause nephropathy so damage to the
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kidneys which has a significant effect on our ability to regulate protein in our body diabetic retinopathy
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hemorrhaging in the eyes uh that ultimately can lead to to blindness so having too much blood sugar and not
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having an ability to produce enough insulin to bring down the blood sugar level can can lead to all these chronic
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health effects which have obious yeah those are the microvascular ones there's the I mean the the risk of
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heart attack if you have type two diabetes is four times people who don't have diabetes yeah so you also have the
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macrovascular events stroke heart attack okay so the treatment for diabetes used
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to be insulin right and insulin and if I remember the history of Eli Lily correctly Eli Lily was the first
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American company uh to produce insulin which was done with initially processing I believe pigs or cows uh to
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to to to get the insulin both yeah yeah it's an interesting story so we were the
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first company period um there's a Danish company Novo who's our competitor in this space we can come back to that
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because it's not a coincidence that I remember the history of of the relationship it's a really
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interesting history between the two companies but kind of intertwined yeah but we we had a like our head of science
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uh met with Toronto this researchers up there who discovered the mo the mechanism of insulin but they couldn't
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make get into a medicine we produced the process that made it available at scale
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which as you're pointing out was derived from like a lot of the you know the history of our industry was like taking
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things in nature and refining them into medicine and that was the case with insulin we took something in nature the
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pancreases of slaughtered meat animals really cows and pigs and essentially refined out of that the protein which is
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insulin and that was the case until 1981 where we had partnered with Genentech to
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do another first which is create the first biotechnology product on planet Earth which was human insulin made in a
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in a bacterial cell yeah so in in that case that was the first Rec combinant biologic product right it was pudding
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the genetic the genetic code from human DNA that codes for human insulin into an
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ecoli bacteria then you put that ecoli bacteria in a giant vat and just like we ferment wine we put sugar in and it
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started to make insulin and that's how we make insulin around the world today is through that recent process right
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yeah that's right still and that was the first DNA based product made and it solved a problem because we were
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actually we had we had per the Obesity discussion Rising type two diabetes rates it used to be type 1 diabetes
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which is the childhood form that's really autoimmune disease um was most of the diabetes that needed insulin but as
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this uh you know abundancy grew and people got heavier we saw earlier and earlier onset type 2 diabetes which is
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the adult form right and we we worried we're going to run out of animals to slaughtered animal pancreases to refine
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so it wasn't just a cool science thing it was actually solving a pretty big public health problem which was the risk
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of scarcity of insulin yeah yeah and so look I mean biotech to the to the rescue
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and we'll talk more about biologic drugs and all the other things that that have
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been addressed with recombinant systems meaning we put DNA in microbes and get those microbes to make a protein for us
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and obviously there's been a lot of advancements in that space it's probably worth you know hundreds of billions of
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dollars today but um let's let's fast forward to what happened after insulin it sounds like in the history of
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of research into diabetes and understanding some of these underlying mechanisms uh there was this discovery
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of glp1 at one point and let me try and explain it and you tell me if I get it right but okay
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glp1 it sounds like is a protein that is expressed by L cells these are little cells in the small intestine of a human
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so when we eat food those cells recognize that there's food in the intestines and they pump out a protein
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called gp1 and that protein goes into the bloodstream and flows all over our body and turns on and off different
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parts of different cells telling them hey there's food in the in the intestines so tells your brain don't be
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hungry but it also has other effects like secreting insulin getting cells to make insulin and as a result glp1 is
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what's called a hormone it's a regulator of all these different cells to do things when our intestines are full of
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food is that an accurate way of kind of describing what a glp what the glp1 protein is yeah that was perfect I would
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just step back one step though and say there's a broad there's like a super family of these things and this going to
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come up later in the when we talk about the drugs which we call incron and this was derived from a even earlier on your
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chart here in the 70s they observed that if you give someone nutrients intervenous meaning it bypasses the GI
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system that you have a higher spike in glucose than if you give it via the GI track so that's a curiosity right which
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is why is that the GI track was doing something and they call that the inchron effect and later we found out that
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there's a whole family a super family really of these hormones signaling tools that are telling your body when you're
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fed to do different things that makes a lot of sense because to survive as humans feeding is like one of the top
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three essential processes next to breathing and other things and so there's a lot of redundancy but also uh
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different hormones for different chores and gop1 was the first one that was made
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into a drug and so in 1987 it was discovered that gp1 actually stimulates insulin production insulin
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secretion and and then it was isolated and um ultimately I mean maybe you can tell us
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the history I think there was a story about Nova Nordisk and noo having some um some role and some of the early work
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with glp1 versus Lily and and tell us a little bit about the history and like what took so long for gp1s to go from
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hey it stimulates insulin secretion in 1987 to kind of getting these first drugs on market for gp1 yeah it's a
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great question both companies played around with this me ISM right after that paper was published in '87 and as I said
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back to the insulin story it's not really an accident because we were two companies very focused on making
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peptides and and diabetes right so this was a good thing to chase but gop1 in its native form is not peptides are a
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small molecule small protein right just just smaller protein yeah less amino acids in a chain um which is what we
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call gop1 really it's smaller than a protein it's a hormone but but also called a peptide but we when you give it
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in its native form as a medicine it has a halflife of like minutes so you'd have
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to have continuous infusion in your life to use gp1s in the human form as it was
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designed and of course we have plenty we can make it ourselves um inside our bodies but if you give it exogenously or
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from outside that you need a drug that lasts longer than a few minutes so you know both companies set to work on that
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problem it was actually Lily that launched the first gp1 drug called exenatide which was this strange Story
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another sidebar of a company discovered that in the saliva of a hila monster so this is the
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the desert yeah in their saliva is a is basically a mimic of the go human gop1 it's close but not identical and the
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amino acid change that it had made for its purposes in saliva actually uh prolonged its action in man to be more
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like six or seven hours so this made for twice a day injection and it was it allowed us to lower blood sugar in
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people with diabetes and it was super successful it also we noticed as happens in drug development that you lost a
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little bit of weight with this and we know in type two diabetes that was good in the background Nova was working on
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their own once a day version and they engineered it versus found it in nature then Lily uh made a once a week form
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called Doula glutide which is now marketed as trulicity and then Nova made a weekly one which is called OIC which
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we all know the name of now and actually you know in kind of uh not to nerd out too much on drug kinetics but by going
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from daily to weekly we were able to dose higher and this is one of these situations where the glucose effect
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occurs at a lower dose than the weight loss effect and we couldn't do that with a daily or twice a day drug because the
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side effects of these drugs which are nausea and diarrhea they're unpleasant are kind of a what we call a peak to
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trough effect so you experience them when there's a big change in the drug in your body but when it's steady state you
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we really reduce those symptoms so it was really novo's Insight that we could push up the dose of semaglutide that
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allowed the Obesity kind of threshold to be pushed and then of course we followed
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that with our latest one tepati which is known as mararo that's actually two hormones together yeah well so so let me
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just um take a step back I just for folks that are listening to really understand this so all proteins are made
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from a chain like a beaded necklace of amino acids being stuck together and when they're put together that chain
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kind of collapses into a a molecule structure a protein structure and that protein has some function because it's
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got shapes and curves on it and it can do things in the body it can bind to things and they can do activities with
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different cells but you don't necessarily need to use that exact chain of amino acids to get part of that
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protein to bind somewhere else in the body you can use things that look like that protein and that's really the
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effort in all of these what are called glp1 agonists which are different than glp1 itself they're different molecules
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they're different proteins but they combined and have the same sort of activity so so there's this discovery
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process this research process as I understand it to to develop and identify new proteins that can have a similar or
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perhaps even a more beneficial effect than gp1s in the body is that is that kindir yeah that's right and I think you
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know this story itself is going from like finding the native human hormone and then we found this accidentally this
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one in nature that was what we call an analog to it so it had a similar function but with a different kinetics
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different absorption rate and then Novo actually uh engineered that in L glutide
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so they designed that in and ever since then we've been Engineering in different
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changes in those amino acids those beads to drive different types of function the latest one being this sort of dual
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acting one we have now which like both ends think of a chain with both ends with active Warhead versus just one in
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right so over time in 1986 we kind of realized hey gp1s stimulate insulin secretion so this is super interesting
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and all this research begins but since then there have been a lot of studies on how gp1s maybe are regulating
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and affecting other organs in the human body and you know I've got this chart up
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here that shows the effect of gp1 um and gp1 analoges on the brain on the heart on the pancreas on the liver
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there are all these kind of interesting follow-on effects the human body is so difficult to kind of map everything but
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there's some intricate relationship and cross-regulatory process that happens between all of these different systems
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of the human body so maybe you can talk about the evolution in our understanding
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on how gp1s and gp1 analoges maybe are affecting other organs in the body not just turning off hunger and not just
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making more insulin yeah so of course it's doing those two things but as you're pointing
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out you know the hormone is basically a messenger right so as as you said earlier it's telling your body you're
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fed and with that um because nutrient absorption is like a survival Instinct and um we're pre-selected for that we're
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good at then processing that signal and acting differently so that includes um you see like heart rate going up and um
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lipid levels dropping uh in your cardiovascular system and that's because you're responding to that food the new
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nutrients entered into into into your body liver is a key part of metabolism so there's tons of cross signaling into
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the into the liver um and the pancreas is the source of insulin amongst other metabolic regulatory hormones so so what
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we don't even fully understand yet though David which is interesting is is that there are primary effects of gop1
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certainly we can reproduce like in a in a a test tube or a cell system but then there's a whole Myriad of other probably
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secondary effects because there might be intermediate signals we don't even know
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about yet in this whole metabolic process so some of the ones listed here I don't think have been proven as Direct
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effects many of the brain ones for instance but uh clearly happen when you overstimulate gop1 or give it
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exogenously as a medicine and uh mostly in our nutrient Rich environment we covered earlier these tend to be good
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things because you're tamping down hunger and you're improving absorption of the
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nutrients you already have yeah so now the topic to jure is hey we could use gp1s not just for the indication of
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obesity and diabetes but perhaps for other health indications and maybe going after other issues that people are
00:23:19
having problems with yeah I think I think there two big stories one is that the other is that it turns out gop1
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isn't the only hormone that matters and you're going to I mean we already have tepati which is a whole another hormone
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called Gip glucagon insulinotropic peptide which is a complicated name but has more of a bias toward fat release
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and basically allowing your fat cells to burn energy earlier in the starvation cycle so as you're hungry kind of
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unleashing fat energy versus just squeezing it out of our muscles um which is what your body does naturally as kind
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of a survival Instinct and then we've combined that into tepati next next up is there's amaline based drugs that's
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another gut hormone uh and glucagon another one so we we've got triple acting and all kinds of different ones
00:24:08
coming and that's a big part of the Innovation story I think we'll figure out through time which ones are best for
00:24:14
what maintenance is a big issue in this class inducing more rapid weight loss in
00:24:19
people who are super obese you know if you have a BMI 50 and you take tepati our drug and you lose on average 23% of
00:24:26
your body weight you're still obese right so we we need more potency for those people but there's many people
00:24:32
have a BMI of 31 and heart risk they can get their BMI to normal on tpde or semaglutide but how do they keep it
00:24:39
there more easily versus a weekly injection so that's another problem being solved the second thing which
00:24:45
you're touching on is all the indications to go after and as I mentioned earlier there's more than 200
00:24:51
diseases that are tagged to obesity do they all cause are they all caused by obesity we don't know that yet they're
00:24:59
correlated but so far um in our studies this category medicine's undefeated we've never had an unsuccessful study in
00:25:07
measuring an outcome in a chronic disease and that's probably because we stacked the ones that were most possible
00:25:12
first or most confident in um but we're working down that list currently Lily has 105 studies going with tepati in
00:25:20
these other diseases wow so this is a massive massive undertaking you know a clinical trial like that takes a 100 or
00:25:28
200 million doll each so you can do the math it's a it's a huge bet that we can convert weight loss into sustained
00:25:35
health benefit in chronic disease yeah so that's I mean I'm doing the math that's 10 to 20 billion dollars you're
00:25:40
spending on clinical trials for and I understand sleep apnea maybe Alzheimer's chronic kidney disease sounds like lots
00:25:48
of different indications where you go after a patient population you try perhaps one of these combo therapies
00:25:56
these new combo therapies that you have Y and yeah right and then you see what the
00:26:02
results are and if it works yeah a doctor can prescribe it right yeah yeah exactly so there's one we just
00:26:08
read out which we'll end up submitting which is um there's a lot of people you and we all may know them in our life who
00:26:13
say oh I was told I have pre-diabetes what is that that's you know otherwise healthy middle-age adults who are
00:26:20
overweight right and what happens diabetes like a lot of diseases it's not a binary function it's a continuous
00:26:26
function you you begin to have resistance to your own insulin because of the stress being put on your fat
00:26:33
cells essentially from overeating and of course reducing obesity might help that
00:26:39
and that's been tried without drugs with you know diet and exercise and it works
00:26:43
so we replicated that we those results and we just read that study out with mjara which showed that three years on
00:26:49
our drug 94% fewer new diagnosis of outright diabetes so that's a huge national health problem and if we can
00:26:56
treat diabetes uh or obesity early in the life we could potentially reduce diabetes Downstream so all there's many
00:27:04
examples of these but we're going for dozens and dozens of these kinds of use cases for the technology so when that
00:27:10
gets approved when you go through your clinical trial you get a positive indication on the the the readout a
00:27:16
doctor can then prescribe that particular drug for that that condition and and then what insurance covers it I
00:27:24
mean just help us understand kind of how how payment happens in this and you know ultimately and we'll talk a
00:27:30
little bit about pricing in a second yeah I mean so that now we move from Clinical experiment and science to the
00:27:38
messy part of Health Care so you know in America um I think we have a a strong bias to reimburse things that are kind
00:27:48
of obvious and when things are new it's harder what we see today with whether it
00:27:54
be Lily's products in this category or noos is really broad acceptance of by insurance and Healthcare practitioners
00:28:03
in treating outright diseases like diabetes type two diabetes and probably like these cardiovascular conditions
00:28:09
we're studying I think they'll be adopted quickly and reimbursed quickly but that's when you already have the
00:28:14
disease of course the real promise here is to prevent those diseases but in almost every case in this country we
00:28:20
don't really pay for prevention right so um people who are obese and don't have those conditions if you're say on
00:28:26
Medicare currently the rule of the federal government is they won't pay for these medications you have to get
00:28:32
diabetes before you can get the drug which sounds pretty stupid and I think it is but you know the evidence
00:28:40
needs needs to build our job is to invest in that evidence base I just spoke about so that we can show time and
00:28:46
time again that all these chronic illnesses can be abated slowed or even eliminated and in some cases even
00:28:53
reversed um if we can get people to lose a dramatic amount of weight safely which
00:28:57
is what the drugs do that's you know in the process of sort of getting that idea
00:29:03
adopted why why is that um controversial because if I'm an actuary underwriting the long-term cost of a patient or an
00:29:11
individual in a in a in a program in insurance program I'm GNA look at that patient I'm like or that person I'm
00:29:16
gonna say hey if they stay overweight there's going to be four diseases they're going to get over the next 30
00:29:21
years and I'm gonna have to pay for that but if we can get them to lose the weight I'm going to save all this money
00:29:26
shouldn't I want I have a financial incentive an economic incentive to to change that what's what's the
00:29:32
controversy there yeah I think you know that's in process I was actually in a big you know um investor of mind's
00:29:39
office a few weeks back and they said oh the last company in here was a reinsurance company and they're changing
00:29:44
their Actuarial tables yeah for people who have are on these drugs which you know I was like wow you know you're
00:29:51
making a difference when when that's happening but it hasn't trickled through the system I think there's a lot of
00:29:56
still stigma associated with obesity frankly like social stigma and patients report to us a lot of doctors won't even
00:30:03
use these drugs because they're they think it's a it's a product of laziness um and you know why people become obese
00:30:11
we don't really understand completely yet why one person would and one person wouldn't what we do know is once you
00:30:16
become overweight or obese losing that weight as an adult is really difficult some studies show like less than 5% of
00:30:24
people can reach a healthy body weight on diet and exercise once obese so that's a very ineffective standard of
00:30:31
care so today if I want to get tepati for a weight loss which I think you guys called Zep bound right yeah so um can I
00:30:41
go to my my health insurance company and have them pay forward or am I paying out
00:30:45
of pocket depends on who you work for Dave so um right now about 50% of the employer sponsored insurance plans cover
00:30:54
it Lily covers it for we we cover the Nova ones too um because we think obesity is a disease those skew toward
00:31:02
you know companies with money basically um you know I think health benefits are part part of just attracting and
00:31:09
retaining employees so smaller businesses businesses with lower margins like retailers Etc really don't cover
00:31:17
these meds yet I think in five years we'll look back and we'll say that was crazy um once the evidence base is built
00:31:23
up and there's more adoption and less stigma but right now that's the current state so a lot of people do pay out of
00:31:30
pocket and we've got some work to do to help them you know if you're the rule of
00:31:35
the land in the US is if your insurance uh if you're in the federal benefit um you can't even
00:31:41
accept uh savings cards from the manufacturer but for those that have have a commercial benefit like if you
00:31:47
work at an employer large employer like a retailer that doesn't cover it we can actually buy down your out of pocket
00:31:53
cost and we do that and so did I hear correctly that you guys are doing a directed consumer model as well is that
00:31:59
right yeah yeah yeah so to get at this very problem of both stigma and cost you know back um in January we launched what
00:32:08
we call Lily direct so people can go to their doctor or use our tella Health platform we have a bunch of Partners who
00:32:15
will see you as a physician and their obesity specialist and they'll send the prescription to Lily and we'll fulfill
00:32:21
it directly via male DTC this solves two problems one is people can go to a place
00:32:26
where they're not stigmatized for being over and two they always get it at the same price and it's the lowest price
00:32:31
available to them there's a lot of confusion in retail pharmacy about what people should pay and there's some
00:32:36
pharmacies marking these drugs up because of the supply issues is it a thousand bucks a month is that right for
00:32:43
um t for list price list price we have a a savings card program that's about $600
00:32:50
per month and then we also just launched in the lowest two doses uh a vial form which is a little easier for us to make
00:32:57
we can get into the supply issues here maybe in this discussion too and that's um
00:33:03
399 basically and 550 for those two doses so almost you know 60% off still a lot so what about the criticism and the
00:33:13
research that has shown that if you go off of one of these drugs the weight comes back and as a result we're kind of
00:33:20
going from a chronically ill population to a chronically drug dependent population how do we address that
00:33:27
concern and you know what is the change that's needed over time for that not to be the case isn't there an economic
00:33:34
incentive for Lily to always be you know hoping that more people need the drug more frequently because that's how you
00:33:40
guys make money and you know how do we kind of talk about that change that's that's coming and and whether you need
00:33:45
to be on it forever yeah yeah well I mean our mission is to is not what you said our mission is to solve human
00:33:52
health problems and ideally that would be here where people could have a course of therapy and then not have to take
00:33:58
medicine the the physiology of gop1 and Gip right now that's not how it works right if if you don't have them on board
00:34:07
your body res restores itself to its previous position we yeah there is a theory that if you sustain low body
00:34:15
weight for long enough you can kind of reset your thermostat in a way and your body will stop trying to defend what it
00:34:23
perceives as a starvation state which is you you're not carrying as much weight as you nor normally would but you know
00:34:29
we haven't had these drugs around long enough to prove that out we also know that some people um lose weight and then
00:34:36
do change everything about their life to sustain that body weight and go off successfully that's not uncommon but
00:34:42
it's not the most um probable outcome for most so for now we need to take the drugs longterm but we are working on
00:34:50
drugs in our pipeline that do uh seek to reset uh the metabolic switch and using
00:34:57
like the Y is a mechanism it's a brain mechanism that's thought that maybe you could have a treatment course lose
00:35:02
weight and then reset um your your self sort of that thermostat if you will of what your body's supposed to weigh um
00:35:11
we're working on this problem but understanding is like your base metabolism drops so the number of
00:35:17
calories per day that your body is burning to live goes down so if you stop taking the drug and the hunger switch
00:35:24
gets slightly turned back on even if you eat a healthy normally number of calories per day 1500 2, 2500 you start
00:35:31
to gain weight again because your metabolism has declined but what I've heard from a lot of friends um I don't
00:35:37
want to call everyone a biohacker but it definitely seems to be in kind of the people that like to mess around and try
00:35:42
new things uh crowd is to kind of go on and off so people are trying lower doses
00:35:48
they're they're trying the drug for a period of time they do it once a month once a week and then they kind of
00:35:52
maintain a healthy weight without needing to be kind of um on the the typical regular Cadence of the drug is
00:35:58
that something you guys are seeing more frequently is that the steady state do you think over
00:36:03
time we definitely see that in in in the clinic and in in in practice by people and you know back to the cost of course
00:36:11
people want to spend less money and if that works for them you know there certainly um and it's under do Dr
00:36:16
supervision we have no problem with that we need to do more studies in the space
00:36:20
um you know what you have one drug on here or not on here which is coming and it may be the most important drug
00:36:26
because of the scale uh ability which is it's called ororon it's a it's a chemical drug so here not an
00:36:32
amino acid but a organic chemistry that mimics that mimics the activating uh part of the peptide um and so it's a
00:36:42
it's an oral gop1 um in our hands it's about as good as as highd do semaglutide and w're we're doing phase three right
00:36:51
now um so that will'll start to read out next year the benefit of this is one it's oral so it's a little easier to
00:36:57
take you don't have to refrigerate you don't have to worry about the injection you know some people don't like to
00:37:01
inject but the real thing is this is a this is a product for the masses because the systems we make these these drugs in
00:37:09
now are complicated to scale and that's why there's been shortages you know we have approvals in more than 40 countries
00:37:15
we haven't even launched in that's not a normal thing for for a company that wants to Max you can't make enough
00:37:20
product we can't make enough right and because we want to satisfy the markets we've already launched in so or for
00:37:26
apron which is this phase three project is super key in that um we could both Supply you know people who could get
00:37:34
away with just the worn hormone drug glp1 and we're studying it as a maintenance option as well which makes
00:37:41
kind of sense to go through the injection lose more weight and then keep it off with something uh a little easier
00:37:47
to take what's your sense on how this is going to affect the food industry so a lot of analysts have talked about hey
00:37:53
food companies are going to get damaged by this I'm going to I'm an investor in a company called super gut and we have a
00:37:59
high resistance starch fiber product that we're now selling and having a lot of success selling as a complement to
00:38:04
glp1 so you're you're on a gp1 or GP drug you take this product and it kind of can help you during that period of
00:38:12
time and it's a new category that seems to be growing a lot of companies are launching around this similar concept
00:38:17
now do you think this is changing the food industry in the United States and in the west and ultimately around the
00:38:22
world and I don't know if you talk talk do you talk to CEOs of food companies do
00:38:26
they call you you doing to our business like yeah I've got I've got a couple on my board even but so you know I I I
00:38:35
think there are um certainly displacing effects of this this category and I think it's great news overall first is
00:38:42
the health things we talked about so people will need you know uh less diabetes products for sure they'll need
00:38:48
less other medicines we're do even doing study in like OA pain in the knee because a lot of knee Replacements are
00:38:55
in obese people and they get get painful early in life uh knee pain and we hope to show you can prolong that so that's a
00:39:03
sort of a knock on effect and then of course food would be the next one you think about I think you might know about
00:39:08
the study but last year Walmart did the sort of what's in the cart study for people on OIC or Monaro and it showed
00:39:14
they were buying about a third less calories so that's a lot but that's consistent with how the drugs work but
00:39:20
interestingly also few were salty snack foods yes they buying more fruits and vegetables shopping at the edge of the
00:39:26
store versus the center so that's happening probably because we only have 10 or 11 million Americans on these
00:39:33
drugs it's not happening in an economic scale that's really changing food companies um bottom lines but you know
00:39:41
enterprising companies like the one you mentioned you know protein shake companies there's a lot of things
00:39:46
happening I went to a a Quick Serve restaurant it was in California a few weeks back and they actually had a like
00:39:52
a gop1 side menu that's what it was called yeah exactly on these drugs use these uh so you know it is it's having a
00:40:00
big social uh footprint yeah well I mean here's your stock price so Eli LLY stock
00:40:07
I think may outperform I don't know it's probably pretty close I with Nvidia it's
00:40:12
it's an an extraordinary stratospheric rise and then just to look at how the business operates today so you have this
00:40:19
portfolio of products that you're developing but in the last quarter um you did 11 billion in Revenue
00:40:28
and generated um 3 billion net profit I think it's 3.7 of of operating profit one of the the the key criticisms um and
00:40:37
this is one of the things I wanted to get into was how do you address and how do you deal with the political heat
00:40:45
associated with your success so you guys are operating a business that is having
00:40:49
an extraordinary impact on people's lives but you're also making an incredible amount of money and in this
00:40:54
environment today that may be more challenging to deal with than it ever has been certain Senators that we shall
00:41:03
not name would look at this and say hey you're making an 81% gross margin selling these products to sick people
00:41:09
how can you justify that so maybe talk a little bit about how you deal with the political environment in the US around
00:41:16
the world as you are successful and are projected to Triple the business over the next couple of years here yeah well
00:41:23
it's it's obviously a top of list issue for me every day maybe a couple things there Dave so I mean first of all this
00:41:29
is a very long investment cycle business um as we talked about earlier like we launched the first gp1 drug in the world
00:41:35
in 2005 and since that time we've been working for you know this kind of performance because we took risk against
00:41:43
that idea right and refined it and worked that problem and that it you know I think that time scale is hard for
00:41:49
people to think about but also you know the dollar scale of the R&D this year we'll spend over 11 billion dollars on
00:41:56
R&D which is a meaningful uh it's like a nation state scale like that's more than
00:42:01
the country of Germany um so we we're pushing forward new medicines based on the revenue of today's medicines and
00:42:10
that virtuous cycle is sometimes just hard to articulate but when you get it right you can have a big societal impact
00:42:15
so that's the first thing secondly you know I think the pressure is a privilege in a way it means we made something
00:42:21
useful enough that a lot of people needed and want it and now our job is to work with you know the Healthcare System
00:42:27
to sustainably adopt it and we do see that as our responsibility to work with you know politicians if that's who we
00:42:34
work with or um health plans or employers to find a way to get this medicine which we think is amazing to
00:42:41
eptide to so many people um and do it in a way that's sustainable now hopefully we've created enough value that the
00:42:49
certainly the the people are getting the drug or benefiting that the health plans
00:42:53
are actually lowering costs in the long term even that there may be an increase in short term and that we make a
00:42:59
reasonable profit for our shareholders and sustain R&D for the future so I think that's what's happening here I
00:43:05
think this week actually Nova nordis our competitor was hauled before Congress to
00:43:09
talk about this issue there's a lot of other dysfunctions in the US system that we could talk about in terms of how
00:43:15
inefficient healthc care is I mean here is a medicine that could augment 100 200
00:43:22
adult diseases in a meaningful way it's expensive yes probably net pricing uh for us you know is going to be something
00:43:30
like three $4,000 a year in the steady state per person but I think we'll create more value than that we'll save
00:43:37
the system more money than that per year per user that's what we should be aiming
00:43:41
for I think what's interesting about it is the the the pro the biologic products
00:43:46
are the the molecules are advancing and they're advancing in a in a a pretty kind of steady
00:43:53
way the issue I think with insulin and and there's obviously been a lot of legislation and Regulatory and political
00:44:01
scrutiny around insulin pricing is it's the same molecule and the price has just
00:44:07
gone up right this is this is the old kind of pharmaceutical companies or bad story is they've got a product that they
00:44:13
make for 10 cents and then they sell it for 10 bucks then someone says let's charge 100 they're like okay let's
00:44:17
charge 100 and so it's classified as price gouging in this particular Market you guys are certainly making a healthy
00:44:24
Market but the products are also advancing there's new combination therapies coming out and uh the oral
00:44:30
therapy so there's a lot of investment in improving the overall landscape of what's possible yeah let me address that
00:44:36
because I I took over in early 17 as you mentioned and like that the insulin pricing Scandal which Novo and Lily were
00:44:42
also Center of right was um hot and heavy and I so I took a lot of personal lessons from that but you know every day
00:44:52
since that we had reduced the price of insulin even though you know we have this weird system in the US where a lot
00:44:59
of our two-thirds of actually our gross price goes to pbms and insurance company
00:45:05
so right of the gross price that's often quoted the net for us is about a third of that and in insulin it was even more
00:45:13
where does that money go well it's used often to cross- subsidize other things in healthcare so we have to unwind that
00:45:19
system if we really want to value innovation and then the other thing which is in this chart is and I
00:45:24
mentioned is some of that revenue from insulin we Ed to invest in the next generation of therapy whether it be
00:45:29
insulins which we're still investing in new insulins or gop1 drugs which of course we did um and that is hard to
00:45:36
articulate in the moment but it actually produces good economic and social value
00:45:40
later yeah here though we we took those lessons we launched at a 20% discount to
00:45:45
Nova's product even though we have better efficacy data and we've only cut the price since then and I think um we
00:45:51
see a kind of a generational opportunity for the company to both be have the best
00:45:57
product so efficacy and quality but also mass production and that requires a pricing strategy consistent with that
00:46:04
well you've also invested a lot in manufacturing in the United States right didn't you just do like A5 billion doll
00:46:09
investment in Indiana to build new facilities um yeah we're building the largest API site in the history of the
00:46:14
United States in Indiana yeah so it's h so I mean that's got to feel good to the
00:46:18
politicians too that this isn't like yeah uh optimizing for cost but there's also infrastructure being built so I've
00:46:25
got a lot of numbers on forast breakdown of product I think like what's interesting is just I don't know if
00:46:30
these numbers seem right but the analysts are projecting that you're 20126 operating income numbers could
00:46:37
grow to $32 billion I mean it's just such an incredible rise and that obviously is the the pipeline of
00:46:43
indications the pipeline of combo therapies new modalities and that's up from 7 billion
00:46:51
last year I believe right so a 4X in 3 years at the scale of operating income is really
00:46:57
incredible I hope they're right yeah Ian good for you hard on this I heard that there was like internal forecasts that I
00:47:07
won't reveal my source uh and all the forecasts got kind of blown out like the forecasts were too conservative in terms
00:47:15
of where you guys are at with tepati so um I wouldn't be surprised if you did so
00:47:20
if we look look at the breakdown of Lily's portfolio of Revenue today uh it's very obvious that what we've just
00:47:28
been talking about the gp1 Gip drugs are the vast majority of the portfolio and expect it to be the vast contributor of
00:47:36
growth in the years ahead but maybe you can tell me a little bit tell us a little bit about how you think about the
00:47:43
portfolio of other opportunities to address disease and how you're investing there and how you know when you've got
00:47:49
such a blockbuster like this and you've got a runaway train and you can't keep up with demand how do you dedicate
00:47:54
resources to the rest of the portfolio and how do you think about that as a CEO as a leader in getting your team to
00:48:00
focus on other things that are also very important yeah I think I mean that's a key thing we spend a lot of time with
00:48:07
our board on you know on the one hand um I think there's a lot of business books
00:48:12
you could read that say well double down on your winners right and just keep going but unlike other Industries you
00:48:17
know D we don't really have a franchise value at the end of the patent life right there when when drugs go off
00:48:24
patent you have to actually have a better drug that competes with almost free yeah and that's probably possible
00:48:31
one or two times here we're talking about monjaro trulicity our last or gop1 only
00:48:37
and semaglutide gop1 only will go generic and we think we have enough differentiation to keep growing through
00:48:42
that but at some point that story runs out right and so on a time scale of decades you need other lines in the
00:48:50
water um in a lot of ways this is like an options business you know we we we have to lay down bets across variety of
00:48:57
things they have to be you know real unmet medical needs that you can get paid if you have a solution for but also
00:49:04
you know the technology bet is it going to work and how to attack that so my mindset is we have to walk and chew gum
00:49:11
at the same time here we have to execute like nobody else against this enormous kind of not not even generational maybe
00:49:18
longer opportunity to build the company affect human health and return Capital to shareholders at the same time we l
00:49:26
has been around 148 years um I think we have an obligation to our newest employee just joined to have a business
00:49:33
by the time they get to a senior level and we certainly have a role in the world at changing human health so we are
00:49:39
investing pretty broadly in cancer and Immunology maybe in brain disease is the most important area we can invest more
00:49:46
in um because I think that's actually becoming more tractable and is about 40% of global suffering is some form of a
00:49:54
brain or or um Neuroscience dis disease and we have a lot of expertise there so a little bit of balance and a lot of
00:50:01
focus simultaneously and we divide our organization so that we have four Business Leaders and one of them is this
00:50:09
franchise we were just talking about weight loss and cardiometabolic health three others have other agendas and
00:50:15
their job is to compete and win that way I'm proud that actually in Q2 Q2 are non
00:50:20
incron our non tepati uh business grew 17% on a pretty big base so a healthy business as well more on the scale of a
00:50:29
regular Pharma company not the super sized thing we become what are what science are you excited about I don't
00:50:35
know if you're a big science nerd um as much but yeah like yeah so the inchron products are um you know uh it's peptide
00:50:43
manufacturing but obviously there's uh cell therapies so programming cells to go into the body and do things there's
00:50:49
Gene therapies where we have all sorts of mechanisms for altering gene expression and making you know prent
00:50:56
changes in in in human cells and um and then there's all this interesting stuff in that that I'm super fascinated by and
00:51:05
excited by like yamanaka factors these factors that can have a profound effect on the epigenome uh which can ultimately
00:51:12
change how how cells behave and radically affect the process of Aging or what we consider to be aging what else
00:51:19
are you excited about what's exciting in the portfolio and how do you invest internally versus do m&a versus venture
00:51:25
to kind of access those in you know areas yeah well let me talk about the science and I'll get to the investment
00:51:30
strategy but we've talked about diseases here but you know we think about our our
00:51:35
role is like having a pallet of ways to make medicines which are basically you know new molecular matter against uh a
00:51:43
set of diseases we know something about that's sort of when those things converge we do well so what's in the
00:51:48
pallet I think that's been expanding rapidly lately and I think this whole new field of genetic medicine which you
00:51:55
talked about um like xvivo gene therapy where you edit cells and they go do things like cares or uh Gene edits
00:52:03
themselves or Gene inserts which are exciting you know we had a um medicine where we announced results this year
00:52:10
that is focused on inner ear diseases of deafness basically congenital deafness disorders that are
00:52:18
monogenic um and we we've treated patients that have gone from like six eight years of life no hearing at all to
00:52:23
now hearing I mean this is it is LA like when you see it but the you know I think
00:52:29
the thing that excites me is when you can do amazing things at massive scale so those two techniques car and gene
00:52:35
therapy it's hard to think of like super scaled millions of people benefiting one
00:52:41
new family of medicines I'm excited about the so-called sna this is where we can knock down
00:52:47
proteins that are aberant or causing problems and do it pretty safely and surgically um and do it very
00:52:55
infrequently so like we have a project in phase three right now that knocks down the production of something called
00:53:02
LP little a which is a lipoprotein particle that's probably thought to be about 25% of the remnant reasons why we
00:53:09
still have cardiovascular disease and there's no medicine for it today this is promises to be a once a year dose and so
00:53:18
you take this once a year and it's catalytic in sales and it works and just keeps knocking down this protein so if
00:53:23
that translates into outcomes I think that makes for a big very scalable business we could treat millions or a
00:53:29
billion people with a medicine like that and have a big big effect so we're playing around with that toolbox um
00:53:36
extensively these days so scale has to scale matters right and then well that's our Str I think that's what a Lily's for
00:53:43
right is to make things that aren't Boutique but things that are everywhere so you know how do we do this I mean we
00:53:50
we we have focused maybe more than anyone else on a lot of small deals that starts with our corpor Venture group so
00:53:57
we have one of the most scaled corporate Venture operations in all of corporate America hundreds and hundreds of bets
00:54:04
that are small in size usually we go with you know with GPS as an LP and invest in small biotechs pre pre uh
00:54:12
public and there we don't have to be so right mostly we're trying to learn and follow science and have a seat at the
00:54:18
board or a seat at the table so that when things start to turn we can move early um we do a lot of m&a last year
00:54:26
sorry you're both you're both an LP in Venture funds and you write checks direct is that right yeah both ways yeah
00:54:33
okay okay we also have a interesting project we're growing I'm qu called catalyze 360 and here the idea is beyond
00:54:40
money what else can we do to help incubate small companies and so we have both space but also a service layer
00:54:47
we're offering sometimes in a Cost Plus way or sometimes for Downstream royalties where you know we're a big
00:54:53
capable company when you're building a new company like you've been doing in in um a like sometimes you need something
00:54:59
that's a pain in the ass to go build you have to either buy a consultant or hire
00:55:02
one person and you only need them for a few few months so here we're stepping in
00:55:07
and say well we'll give you that consult if you need to interpret a talkx result
00:55:10
like you can just call Lily's experts so we're like a service layer to cultivate
00:55:15
kind of this ecosystem around us and then we do m&a we buy companies last year about two dozen which was the most
00:55:22
of any Pharma company but actually with some of the least Capital deployed so we're making um I think we spent three
00:55:28
billion dollars on 24 companies so we're making lots of small bets right and I think that is interesting because the
00:55:35
longer we have uh residents you know sort of uh in a partnership or we own something we can add more value it also
00:55:43
allows us to trade in front of the drisking event when things get drisk in our sector there's a huge inflection in
00:55:50
value yeah and so you're basically paying the last shareholders not yourself um we think we can bet better
00:55:56
than the market on what those the probability of something converting to to a success is and if we're right about
00:56:03
that we'll we'll be better off buying early yeah well so as a lot is changing at the company and you're you're at the
00:56:10
scale you're at and growing as fast as you are how do you think about and this was an important one I wanted to talk
00:56:16
about leadership and culture I've uh uh someone that works with me at ohal uh her name's uh Megan she worked at at
00:56:24
Lily for years and so we had a long chat about this interview a few days ago and
00:56:27
she talked to me about how great the culture is and 10,000 people on campus in Indianapolis and it feels like a
00:56:32
college campus there's a track and field there's a bar on campus all these sort of things that make it a great place to
00:56:38
work and she was really torn by the way in making a choice to go back to Lily or
00:56:41
joining me so I apologize that we that we took her but um uh but uh um maybe tell me a little bit about how you kind
00:56:48
of think about culture keeping people uh aligned motivated keep the performance culture strong as you're kind of trying
00:56:54
to execute at this extraordinary skill scale yeah exceptional question I mean that's of the things I worry about
00:57:01
longterm this is one of them how do we keep what's so good about how we operate yeah I mean the background of the
00:57:06
company is important it's an old company right and it was family run for a hundred years like it was one of the few
00:57:12
exceptions in Corporate America where the third generation didn't totally screw it up actually they made it quite
00:57:17
quite a bit quite a bit better um and because of that I think there's a lot of loyalty and social cohesion in the
00:57:25
company as you mentioned like we like coming to work and being together it's a friendly place but also scientifically
00:57:31
super rigorous um and that's a that's often not two things that fly well together so I think it's got a a lot of
00:57:38
exceptional attributes when I started though I think in my kind of view of like when you're running a big ship like
00:57:43
this probably changing the culture is like beyond your your capability but what you can do is like exent turn up
00:57:51
the things that are good and turn down the things that are less good and we've been cultivating that so like one thing
00:57:56
that was less good but is now really clicking for us is sort of like use our scale or enterprise-wide capability as a
00:58:04
as a benefit not a not a a detractor so many companies get big and get bureaucratic and terrible like I mean
00:58:11
they just can't get out of their own way totally and we really lean into okay it's everyone's job to solve for Lily
00:58:17
first it's everyone's job to get the patient healthy now let's talk about our departments as a derivative of that not
00:58:24
the main goal and somehow those things get flipped around in big companies and people focus on how they look or who's
00:58:30
which Department's best and none of that matters and we have to emphasize that another thing I've really focused on is
00:58:36
speed at scale and we measure that rigorously that's more of an engineering thing I mean we really track things very
00:58:43
carefully on speed and we've moved the drug development timeline which the industry is about nine years from first
00:58:50
human dose to FDA approval and when I started ours was about 11 and now we're 6.1 so how did you how did you how did
00:58:58
you incentivize that how did you reward that and create the model for individuals to contribute to that goal
00:59:04
yeah kind of one big idea and then a thousand little things the big idea is like this ratchet mindset that every
00:59:10
time we beat a timeline that becomes the new norm and so we like just re Benchmark
00:59:16
internally and when we were at 11 and every was as at nine everyone wants to jump to be okay let's be industry
00:59:22
average but that's actually quite hard in a big company so we just said okay if it we have a submission document to get
00:59:28
in and it used to be our standard was 120 days from when you had the data to when you send it to the FDA we're now
00:59:34
doing that routinely inside of two weeks so we've basically taken 80% of the time
00:59:39
out but that came in lots of little bites but overarching everyone who works in development knows it's about time to
00:59:45
patient that's the that's the big idea solve for that so yeah that's you know those are some of the kind of culture
00:59:53
Dynamics we we deal with and of course we want to attract new people we've expanded dramatically on the coast our
00:59:58
science operations like if you go you know South San Francisco is now a pretty big campus for us we just built a huge
01:00:04
building in seport Boston that'll hold 500 genetic scientists so for some domains we need to go where the people
01:00:11
are um and be more of a kind of a Mothership of satellites versus having everyone here in Indianapolis and do you
01:00:18
and I know we got to wrap in a minute but and do you worry about AI there's a lot of startups with very smart people
01:00:23
that have built uh llms and other models that are now trying to apply those learnings and develop new systems for
01:00:30
discovery of molecules that will have some particular action and doing it all in silico rather than searching through
01:00:37
the domain space of molecules that we're either synthesizing or discovering in nature and is that a partnership for you
01:00:43
at Lily because you guys can operate at scale and manufacture and distribute and
01:00:47
Market or is that a disruptive force that could really damage the the 20- year out kind of horizon for Lily's
01:00:54
business how much do you really think or worry about this oh we spent a lot of time on this you
01:00:59
know of course we have our own efforts um pretty significant AI efforts internally and a lot of Partnerships
01:01:05
including with you know open Ai and Microsoft Amazon Etc um all basically all the the large scale players Google
01:01:14
isomorphic so we have to pay a lot of attention to it here's what I noticed so far is there's a lot of money I think
01:01:20
last year five billion with a B went into new venture-backed tech bios you you know that's what they like to call
01:01:27
themselves and that money is coming not So Much from the traditional bio VC world but from the tech world s people
01:01:35
got a lot more lot more to Splash around right that's right but a lot of those I
01:01:39
think if you look at their their pitch decks they're really saying oh we're gonna invent we're going to run the
01:01:44
whole process in silico and I I think that's really naive actually and what I think will end up in
01:01:53
the medium term being very valuable is more the tool Builder approach like we can take a process like adme so that's
01:01:59
where you're trying to optimize chemical properties of a drug like we're talking
01:02:03
about gop1 so it's not twice a day it's once a week and there I think by chunking problems smaller the machines
01:02:10
can really help a lot more we have more data on some specific acute use cases and um we can have a tighter Loop
01:02:17
between the experiment in the on the bench and the data process behind the the model learning the idea that you're
01:02:25
going to throw on you know turn a switch on a computer and it's going to think about something and invent you know the
01:02:30
next Prozac I don't know I I think we're a long way from that day yeah but we we're paying attention to all of it yeah
01:02:36
so wet lab and Clinic integration is critical it's not all going to be in silico there's going to
01:02:41
be a good chunk of the time yeah it's a co-pilot model where the machine can do predictions probably now where we see
01:02:47
the most value is eliminating bad ideas that humans don't see but in hindsight look obvious so like because it can
01:02:54
integrate a lot of multi Source data and say the probability of this working based on prior experiments is like 2%
01:03:01
yeah and there's human factors where scientists like they their last idea the most but also we have trouble seeing
01:03:07
across all this fi domains of data machines are good at that that that can add value immediately awesome well are
01:03:13
you glad you took the job seven and a half years ago and uh what are you most happy about and what's the biggest
01:03:18
disappointment last uh last question here as we wrap up yeah of course I mean what an honor to the company like this
01:03:26
at this moment um we all need to get better all the time I mean I I find myself disappointed
01:03:31
mostly by but not being prepared not thinking in advance of of things but you know it's um when you miss we become a
01:03:39
kind of a yeah that looks obvious in hindsight which we all have it's a complicated business you know I should
01:03:45
give myself Grace on it but it happens more often than I would hope and I I think that staying humble about that is
01:03:52
like one of the most important things that successful CEOs can do I mean you always have to learn and you always have
01:03:57
to learn from your own mistakes that's something we talk about a lot here I you know I think it's it's cool that we
01:04:03
become more of a cultural icon that's cool but it's also a big responsibility because like you said with the Lily
01:04:10
direct and you know being more of a consumer household name people expect a lot more of us and we've got to change
01:04:17
from being just like a Midwestern quiet medicine company to something a lot more
01:04:22
and we're not there yet we have to we have to get better so yeah more to do no great well thanks so much for taking the
01:04:29
time to chat with me today Dave it's been an honor and a pleasure and I wish you the best of luck with Lily congrats
01:04:35
on on all the success thanks a lot we'll have to have have you come out to our lab sometime I will yeah no I'm uh next
01:04:41
time I'm in the midwest I will certainly kick you up on that I'd love to come visit be awesome
01:04:47
[Music] awesome I'm going all in

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Episode Highlights

  • The Impact of Diet
    The American diet has shifted dramatically, leading to increased obesity rates.
    “The average daily calorie consumed by Americans has driven up significantly.”
    @ 02m 55s
    October 08, 2024
  • Insulin's Evolution
    Eli Lilly was the first American company to produce insulin, revolutionizing diabetes treatment.
    “We were the first company period to produce insulin.”
    @ 10m 20s
    October 08, 2024
  • GLP-1 Discovery
    GLP-1, a hormone that regulates insulin, was discovered to have significant effects.
    “GLP-1 stimulates insulin production and secretion.”
    @ 13m 26s
    October 08, 2024
  • Engineering Hormones for Health
    Discover how engineered hormones like GLP-1 are changing the landscape of obesity treatment.
    “We could use GLP-1s not just for obesity and diabetes but for other health indications.”
    @ 23m 06s
    October 08, 2024
  • The Cost of Clinical Trials
    The financial stakes of clinical trials for obesity drugs are staggering, reaching billions.
    “That's 10 to 20 billion dollars you're spending on clinical trials.”
    @ 25m 39s
    October 08, 2024
  • The Challenge of Obesity Treatment
    Understanding the complexities of obesity treatment and the need for long-term solutions.
    “Losing weight as an adult is really difficult.”
    @ 30m 18s
    October 08, 2024
  • The Future of Weight Loss Drugs
    New oral medications may revolutionize weight loss treatment, making it more accessible.
    “It's an oral GLP-1 in our hands, it's about as good as high-dose semaglutide.”
    @ 36m 45s
    October 08, 2024
  • Eli Lilly's Revenue Surge
    Eli Lilly reports $11 billion in revenue, raising questions about profit margins and ethics.
    “You're making an 81% gross margin selling these products to sick people.”
    @ 41m 04s
    October 08, 2024
  • Investing in Future Therapies
    Eli Lilly plans to invest heavily in R&D for new therapies, spending over $11 billion.
    “This year we'll spend over 11 billion dollars on R&D.”
    @ 41m 56s
    October 08, 2024
  • Advancements in Genetic Medicine
    Exciting developments in gene therapy and its potential to change lives.
    “We’ve treated patients that have gone from no hearing to now hearing.”
    @ 52m 23s
    October 08, 2024
  • Transforming Company Culture
    Changing the culture is challenging, but focusing on patient health is key.
    “It's everyone's job to solve for Lily.”
    @ 58m 15s
    October 08, 2024
  • AI in Drug Discovery
    The role of AI in drug discovery is complex, with both opportunities and challenges.
    “Is that a partnership for you at Lily?”
    @ 01h 00m 43s
    October 08, 2024

Episode Quotes

  • This is becoming a global problem.
    Dave Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly | The All-In Interview
  • The human body is so difficult to kind of map everything.
    Dave Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly | The All-In Interview
  • We could potentially reduce diabetes downstream.
    Dave Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly | The All-In Interview
  • Our mission is to solve human health problems.
    Dave Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly | The All-In Interview
  • We have to walk and chew gum at the same time.
    Dave Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly | The All-In Interview
  • We have to emphasize that none of that matters.
    Dave Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly | The All-In Interview

Key Moments

  • Epic Discussion00:04
  • Welcome Dave Ricks00:18
  • Obesity Crisis02:10
  • GLP-1 Insights13:26
  • Hormone Engineering20:16
  • Obesity and Diabetes23:10
  • Investment in R&D41:53
  • Speed Improvement58:36

Tension Over Time

Words per Minute Over Time

Vibes Breakdown