Welcome to The Long Run. This is a podcast for biotech adventurers. I'm your host, Luke Timmerman. Today's guest is Jeremy Levin.
Jeremy is the executive chairman and founder of New York-based Ovid Therapeutics. He's also a member of the board of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization and is a past chairman.
Jeremy reads widely and thinks deeply about many subjects, including how biotechnology can live up to its potential to uplift humanity. I enjoy talking with him about the conditions that create success in the industry and how things might be changed to get biotech back into a more stable place with more public confidence and trust.
Jeremy has sharpened his thinking and sought to share some of it in a new book out today called Biotech in the Balance: Saving a Strategic Industry in an Age of Distrust. It's for biotech executives, policymakers, or any curious citizen interested in how we better harness biotechnology for the betterment of the maximum number of people around the world. It's officially released on May 19th, and you can check the show notes on Timmerman Report for a link on how to order a copy.
One of the things that I like about this book is that it's not just a laundry list of what's wrong. It contains 10 commitments. These are practical suggestions of things companies can do to make for a healthier industry and to create a more stable, thriving industry that really earns more public support. I hope you enjoy this conversation and that it might even serve as a conversation starter in your own circles. Now, a word from the sponsor of the show.
AlphaSense is an AI-powered market intelligence platform designed to help investors and operators find critical insights faster. Think of it as a search engine for the entire financial and life sciences landscape, aggregating over 500 million documents across company filings, clinical trial registries, FDA documents, earnings calls, expert transcripts, broker research, and industry publications into one unified searchable platform.
For those researching biotech, medtech, and the broader life sciences landscape, it's a game-changer. Purpose-built to surface the clinical, regulatory, and commercial insights that matter most. You can use smart summaries to instantly synthesize thousands of pages of trial data, regulatory filings, and KOL commentary, while channel checks and expert insights help you understand how therapies are actually being adopted in the real world across physicians, payers, and hospital systems, not just how they're all modeled on paper.
Instead of spending hours digging through 10-Ks, AlphaSense surfaces the alpha, the specific insights that move the needle in seconds. To experience it firsthand, you can start a free trial at alpha-sense.com/thelongrun, all one word. That's alpha-sense.com/thelongrun.
And bioanalysis should not rely on which scientists at the CRO you get. These are assays, not consulting. Your results should be the same, regardless of who does the work. "We love working with our CRO when we get the right PI" is a red flag, not a compliment. And if the quality of your bioanalysis depends on which principal investigator happens to be assigned to your study, you don't have a CRO partnership, you have a lottery ticket.
Dash was built around automation and standardized workflows specifically to eliminate that variability. Every study gets the same rigor and the same rapid turnaround in days, not weeks, across ELISA, MSD, LCMS, and PCR. GLP-compliant, transparent pricing, guaranteed outcomes. You shouldn't have to ask who's running your study. You should just get great data. Visit www.dash.bio. Now, please enjoy this conversation with Jeremy Levin on The Long Run.
Jeremy Levin, welcome to The Long Run.
Luke, thank you very much for having me.
So, Jeremy, I want to first ask, what was it that compelled you, that really kind of lit the fire in your belly to write a book about Biotech in the Balance?
The book has a lead-up to it. It didn't come out of the blue. It started in 2020 when I watched COVID wash over us. And as I did that, I saw something remarkable, a whole change affecting the industry. And I got 47 different CEOs and others to write a book with me, each one writing a chapter about their experience.
Fast forward now, five years later, and we're watching an enormous change washing over the nation, actually the world, and within the industry. And again, at a conference out in Greece, actually, I asked the CEOs to step forward and to write about their experiences. It was really striking. There were 100 people in the room. They were all talking about how worried they were, how concerned they were, what it meant to them, and why they were doing this, why they were worried.
And I said, "Okay, I've done this before. Let's produce a book of all our thinking." But we have to do it quickly because it's meaningless if you don't do it rapidly. Six weeks later, I had six essays. Not enough for a book. And I asked them all why. And they said, "Well, you know, we're worried. We don't know what's going to happen." There were all sorts of reasons why not.
And I felt that this was an imperative. Luke, we've seen the most extraordinary outpouring of science. We've seen the most extraordinary changes that have happened in the world that drives in innovation. And yet, what I was feeling, what they were feeling, and what they were not comfortable expressing, was that the system underlying it was shaking.
That doesn't mean that the biotech industry is destroyed, or that it could be destroyed. It could be destroyed by neglect. But the next step is to explain to people that it exists as a problem, we need to solve it, and we have time to solve it. So, it became imperative that we write about it now, and that I write about it, and I did. That's why it happened now, but it was triggered by what I just described to you.
Well, let's expand a little bit on what everyone's worried about in the biotech executive ranks. Your subtitle here is Saving a Strategic Industry in an Age of Distrust. So, can you elaborate on that? What's the problem here? What's really gone wrong for the industry the last five to ten years?
Well, it actually started a longer and much before that, Luke. Our industry is an industry which is essentially one that has grown up entrepreneurially, out of San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, crazy people doing wonderful things, exploring biology. And during that period of time, you had an outpouring of science of the last 40-50 years.
And indeed, the industry coasted behind and became kind of a junior partner to the pharmaceutical industry who initially rejected it. And then finally, the pharma industry became dependent on it because 70% of all the drugs that we produce actually come from the industry. This was in many ways a fundamental error.
Because what happened during that period of time is in the public eye, we became indistinguishable from the pharmaceutical industry. In actual fact, if you were to ask most people in the street what is biotechnology, I don't think they could answer you. They'll say, "What's that?" But if you ask somebody when they go to the CVS and have to shell out a dollar for their drugs, they're going to say, "You're the pharmaceutical industry."
If you ask them about the insurance companies that don't cover their drugs, they're going to say, "You're the pharmaceutical company." If you ask them about price rise, about the industry, and you say, "What is it they do price rises, and I have to take their drugs." This is a fundamental fault line that existed for a long time before the current crisis that we face.
In the meantime, it simply set the stage. What happened was the industry became indistinguishable in the minds of the public about behavior in a sector that they increasingly didn't like. As we enter into this period of the last five years, and then much more acutely over this last several years, what has happened is that the intrusion of political decision-making into not just a portion of what we do, but the entire infrastructure.
NIH, radical reductions in spending. Reorganization, dramatic reorganization at the FDA, which we can all argue that you need reorganization, but anybody who's done a reorganization says, you explain why, you show what you're doing, and then you take it in a stepwise fashion. In the FDA's case, we've seen a situation where 90% of the leaders have changed in a year and a bit. That's extraordinary. You couldn't do that in a company without rattling it to its core.
And then you look at the other end of it, the public health end of it, and you look at the CDC, and you watch extraordinary statements of questioning of science, vaccines. These are not changes that are adaptable to easily. They are effectively rocking the system, and in fact bending it to break.
Now, there's several things in what I've just said, many different things. But the point being that this change didn't come suddenly out of the blue. It came because of all that I've described to you before. That is that the public eye looks at this industry as indistinguishable from the pharma industry, and therefore provided a political piñata to people trying to get elected by essentially saying, I know that if I support what the public says, which is to hammer this industry, I'll get votes.
The consequence of this for us are dramatic. But the consequence for the nation is dramatic because as you think this through, I said to you earlier on, we said 70% of new medicines come from this country. The science is phenomenal, but the system is being not just rattled, the system is actually buckling.
In the meantime, that represents an astonishing threat to a core part of what has built up from that wonderful entrepreneurial crazy group of fantastic VCs, CEOs, scientists who built Genentech, Chiron, Amgen, etc. All through to this moment where you have thousands of companies, a thousand really solid ones that are really struggling to produce and make new interesting medicines.
That's an industry. That industry isn't seen by the public, and yet that is an incredibly strategic industry. These are little companies that people have never heard of. And they're the ones that developed the new medicines. And we're running the risk of killing the golden goose. And exactly right. You will kill them in this country, but look, innovation won't stop. It'll just migrate. Capital will look for places to invest. It won't necessarily stop investing, it just might not be investing here in the United States.
Well, I see that's already happening particularly in China, and we can talk about that in a minute. But the situation you described, I mean, I've been covering the biotechnology industry now for 25 years, and I have seen and chronicled this decline in public trust. It's a very long, steady decline.
There were a couple of accelerating events that really harmed the public perception. I think of the first one was when Martin Shkreli came along and put a face on price gouging and he was very unapologetic and it attracted a lot of attention about that. That was 10 plus years ago. That was 2015. Yeah, that was 2015. That was during the Obama administration and he created a lot of outrage and but I remember not a lot happened. It didn't the public hostility didn't immediately translate into hostile policies that hurt companies.
That's and then COVID came along. That was the second accelerator. For a while there was a moment when the industry was appreciated. A very brief moment. And then it turned public opinion turned hard against both biotech and pharmaceuticals and we can talk about the cuz this is an important juncture I think. I think we're still living in this post-COVID era of distrust. And but now it's actually beginning to translate into policies that are harmful.
Can I just bring you back to Shkreli for a second? 2015 was the canary in the coal mine moment. We as an industry should have understood something fundamental. Shkreli had nothing to do with biotech, nothing. The guy was taking an old medicine, jacking up the price and enraging policymakers.
So what you had there for the first time, something that had nothing and I mean nothing to do with biotech and yet we were all hammered, the public companies got clobbered, Secretary Clinton comments at that time caused massive changes in valuations etc. Why was that? You have to ask yourself the question, why did we not wake up at that moment and say, "My lord, this is something which is really a canary in the coal mine. Shkreli's got nothing to do with us. We need to work on getting back to having the public say, 'This is a really different industry.'" We didn't. So, we're at fault there, to be perfectly honest.
But the industry did not say, "Hey, we invent new medicines and he is not one of us. He did not invent a medicine. He just took a generic drug off the shelf and took advantage of scarcity to jack up the price."
Yeah, and every single company should have put out and some did, but not all, a massive outcry against this, joining the public in the outcry. Instead of which, we allowed a tremendous steps to go ahead, which were progressively damaging to the industry. We had set in the mind of the industry that we, biotech and pharma, were one. That was not the case.
Yeah. Now, let's talk about COVID. What happened there, in terms of public perception?
So, that was a fascinatingly worrisome moment, because don't forget, we are likely have our current president because of biotech. Regeneron, the president stated very clearly that biotech helped him survive COVID, very clearly. And Regeneron, I'm certain, played a very significant role in that. Very ethically appropriate.
That being said, let's go back to what happened in COVID. At the outset of it, the concept of scientific proof in the face of an unimaginable outbreak and pandemic was thrown out the window. The idea that the science was going to be of importance, thrown out the window. There was no national endeavor to explain why vaccines would work, why they were important.
And yet, on the other side of that, there was this extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary project which essentially led to Warp Speed, which then led to the delivery of these fantastic vaccines in a matter of, you know, fraction of months, I'm fraction several years. It was remarkable. So, there were a divergent. One, there was zero education of the public about the value of what was coming. And two, there was a tremendous effort in the part of Warp Speed to deliver this drug. And nobody can gainsay that. Just simply can't.
At the same time, and this is what really became important. Remember, August, before the drugs were approved, this was August before the November elections. There was an immense outpouring from FDA, large companies individually, and the biotech industry. Why? Because the assault on the primacy of those trials, on the primacy of science, was full-on by then.
You saw multiple articles coming out questioning science, questioning scientists, putting it in the front, saying that putting out there actually many legislators saying that scientists were in the panic and the anguish. They were basically hammering scientists. They had ideas they had no evidence for. Hydroxychloroquine was suddenly touted as a drug. All sorts of nonsense was being talked about.
But that August before the approval, something else happened. And that was the absolute intrusion of politics into an endeavor with the FDA to accelerate approval before they had proof, before the elections. And as you may recollect the industry stood up and said no. We need to let the scientific process work out.
Then each of the large companies who were doing the same supported it. And then finally the FDA having seen that the industry was aligned with its own thinking came out with the same statement. This is remarkable. It was a conjunction of three different groups. Each one saying the same things. Let science do what it needs to do. Let truth out. So COVID actually laid the ground for the battle. It's a battle of and culture.
Companies were under a lot of pressure to take an early peek, let's say, at the data to show that whether it's working or not before we've had it there was enough time to follow up and see how many patients on the vaccine ended up getting sick or severely ill or died. I mean, those were the metrics people were looking at.
But so science resisted that pressure from politics in the very near-term moment. But as time went on I think many people in the public came away with the perception that we were kind of sold a bill of goods. That the industry over-promised and under-delivered. People got this idea that they would take the vaccines and they would have never get sick. Or they wouldn't be able to transmit the disease.
And then as of course we know, you know, the virus developed variants around the vaccines. And so truly people were still getting sick when Delta and Omicron and others came along. But the vaccines were still very good at keeping people out of the hospital and alive. So it was a nuanced story. But people didn't get that. They were just left with this foul taste of distrust. And I think that's where we're at. I mean, I don't think it's climbed above 10% approval rating for the industry ever since.
Luke, 100% and I think that's why, you know, you go Shkreli basically showed the schism. You then had the terribly infused, the terribly extraordinary actually outpouring and fragmentation of the public opinions across America regarding the industry or rather the ability to deliver new medicines in the way that we've done it and whether they were worthwhile.
And vaccines became an extraordinary issue, one which allowed many people who had all sorts of opinions to start talking again and saying articulating nonsensical stories. I went on a show, a radio show and I was hearing stories from people live saying to me, well, you know, it makes me infertile. Well, they implant want to chip into you. None of this at its core.
At its core, you are correct. I think what happened Luke, and I think you and I should really look at this. Did we fail from a governmental perspective to articulate a clear fundamental message which said this is what we know. This is what we don't know. But if you don't take this vaccine, this is what the likely outcome would be and we strongly urge you to take it.
Because as you know, 1.3 million people died from COVID. That's a silent set of graves. Nobody's talking about that. They don't want to talk about it. But had we not had it, the estimates are that there'd be something like 10 to 15 million dead. So, I don't know how one brings that to the attention of people or whether they'd even believe it if you did bring it but the bottom line is not only did we set the stage at that moment for distrust, we actually foundationed it across huge segments of the population and therefore huge segments of the electorate.
Well, I agree with where you are about the value of the vaccines on balance. I mean, a tremendous achievement. I mean, really a historically great achievement of the industry and not just the industry but academic science, industry and government all working together at warp speed. I mean, I think it was remarkable and great.
However, that is not the message that came across through our highly fragmented internet information commons which tends to reward the most outrageous and provocative voices. They're the ones who tend to get the most attention. So, the ones who are spreading conspiracies or you know, half-baked hypotheses or even worse. They're the ones who tend to dominate the public discussion such as it is. And often evidence just has a really hard time. Truth has a hard time competing with these falsehoods. That just huge huge amounts of difficulty.
But if you asked then a different question, you know, why did we as an industry not launch advertising campaigns just as we do for drugs? Why did we not launch it? If government wasn't going to do it, we could have done it. We didn't. We didn't go out there talking about the primacy of science. We didn't go out there talking about how this could benefit us and how not. We didn't even elect spokespeople to do that.
And, you know, the one person who was standing up there was probably not the right person and that's Fauci who I had the greatest admiration for, but he was being hammered left, right, and center already. He became a punch ball. So, I do think we need to think very carefully about how we as an industry responded to that. We could have done a lot more.
And I didn't see any of the pharmaceutical companies standing up. I do think we as a biotech community tried our very best, but our resources are tiny in comparison to the large companies. And I do see very clearly that the administration of the time completely failed to take a position to explain to the populace what they were seeing and how to see it.
So, you let fear what you quite rightly found out these local newspapers saying things, this is about as bad as you've ever seen. Although we did see a lot more in the subs in the elections about electoral issues that equally led to all sorts of myths, but let's keep on track and focus to our industry. These myths have now promulgated. These myths are now embedded in many parts of the population. And the consequence of that, Luke, is that we're harvesting that distrust. And that is very troubling.
AlphaSense is an AI-powered market intelligence platform designed to help investors and operators find critical insights faster. Think of it as a search engine for the entire financial and life sciences landscape, aggregating over 500 million documents across company filings, clinical trial registries, FDA documents, earnings calls, expert transcripts, broker research, and industry publications into one unified searchable platform.
For those researching biotech, medtech, and the broader life sciences landscape, it is a game-changer. Purpose-built to surface the clinical, regulatory, and commercial insights that matter most. You can use smart summaries to instantly synthesize thousands of pages of trial data, regulatory filings, and KOL commentary, while channel checks and expert insights help you understand how therapies are actually being adopted in the real world across physicians, payers, and hospital systems, not just how they are modeled on paper.
Instead of spending hours digging through 10-Ks, AlphaSense surfaces the specific insights that move the needle in seconds. To experience it firsthand, you can start a free trial at alphasense.com/thelongrun, all one word. That's alphasense.com/thelongrun.
And bioanalysis should not rely on which scientists at the CRO you get. These are assays, not consulting. Your results should be the same regardless of who does the work. "We love working with our CRO when we get the right PI" is a red flag, not a compliment. And if the quality of your bioanalysis depends on which principal investigator happens to be assigned to your study, you don't have a CRO partnership, you have a lottery ticket.
Dash was built around automation and standardized workflows specifically to eliminate that variability. Every study gets the same rigor and the same rapid turnaround in days, not weeks, across ELISA, MSD, LCMS, and PCR. GLP-compliant, transparent pricing, guaranteed outcomes. You shouldn't have to ask who's running your study. You should just get great data. Visit www.dash.bio.
Five years later, here we are operating in a low-trust environment. The public is hostile toward all of pharmaceuticals, large and small. This is just the reality, and it has been translated now it wasn't just a cause célèbre that momentarily caused stocks to dip. It's now been translated into hostile policies. Ones that I know the industry fought and actually lost.
For the whole first part of my career, the industry never ever lost on Capitol Hill. But then the Inflation Reduction Act came along and Medicare was given the right to negotiate over prices, or you know, dictate prices, you might say, on certain medicines, and that's expanded over time. And then some of the things that you mentioned, and this has been true across administrations, whether you're talking Democrats or Republicans.
The industry is on a losing streak with most favored nation policies, tariffs, threats, gutting of the NIH, chaotic administration at the FDA, with you know, the oversight of you know, a really anti-science Health and Human Services Secretary who gives oxygen to a lot of crazy talk that threatens the whole scientific enterprise. So this is no longer just something to tsk-tsk and write an op-ed about.
The industry actually needs your point in your book and what you're trying to say to your colleagues is we need to change some things. And what are those things to get out of this ditch?
That is exactly right. I mean, what we are facing is unparalleled. It means everybody says this an existential crisis. No, this thing has been coming at us for quite some time. It's and we have it's like frogs in a pot. We've been sitting and ducking. We've been hoping the water wouldn't get hot. But the water is now beyond hot, it's boiling. And this is not a good moment for us at all because as an industry we have not defined ourselves, Luke.
I go back to what I said. You said something very specific. You said most favored nation is the topic of the day. I agree. Incredibly important. You said Medicare Medicaid pricing imposition. I agree. But guess where this falls. The overwhelming bulk of the impact is not the small innovative companies. It falls later. It's the large companies.
These large companies were the same companies who went to entertain the administration down in Florida. There's 17, 18, 19, 20 of them negotiated deals. Well, excuse me. That's just not the biotech way. And as a result of that, the administration now thinks great, we're going to negotiate with every single biotech company one-on-one a deal.
They're very transactional. They're not hiding this. They seriously believe that they can actually negotiate with every single biotech company because we as an industry did not hold together. We allowed ourselves to go and to be negotiated one-on-one. A critical strategic error.
Yeah, it's a divide and conquer strategy. You're bargaining from a position of weakness rather than one of collective strength.
