BoB@BIO: Biotech In The Balance With Ovid Therapeutics' Dr. Jeremy Levin

Oh, it's my pleasure. Definitely my pleasure.

[laughter] I didn't think that that was going to be your first question, but it's a great question. Whether you speak out on patents, whether you speak out on issues of the FDA or otherwise, it comes from something quite intrinsic. And it actually is critical for biotech CEOs to understand that I have formed the belief that we have stakeholders, not shareholders. I said stakeholders. Those stakeholders are critical to each company, and they consist of patients, the public, they consist of those who supply our companies, they consist of our employees, our board members, and yes, shareholders.

Each one of those have different expectations. Each one of those has their own particular item and valuation concept. A patient wants to get better. A shareholder wants to make money. Very different concepts. But the one thing they all have is they expect transparency and clarity from the leadership of a company. And so once you say that you are stakeholder focused, it is almost incumbent upon you to speak out on matters that could affect that ecosystem and likely will affect that ecosystem. So it comes from a place of conviction that one is obligated to be as transparent as possible and obligated to be as publicly transparent, even though at times you have one part of that stakeholder base saying, 'Don't talk, we want you quiet,' you have other members who are important to you and you need to respect and protect them.

I think overwhelmingly there is a sense of fear, and that sense of fear is misplaced. If the sense of fear is that a shareholder will abandon you and your stock will fall, that's one fear. If your sense of fear is that somebody will harm your children, that's another kind of fear. The first is irrelevant. The shareholder who abandons you because you speak the truth and speak openly is the shareholder you don't want. It's the shareholder who basically should be investing in, I don't know, let's talk about that rocket that's going to the moon. It's the shareholder who is not one who's looking at this as a long-term industry. And if that is the primary fear, then you've managed to self-select by your fear and identified that you're afraid of those who see this as a short-term milk-producing industry, because the long-term shareholder will look at this differently. They will be silent. They'll ask, 'Are you building a sustainable company? Are you vocal about building something that is long-term?' And if you aren't, I don't want you in that role. That's what you should be afraid of. So this boils down, in my opinion, to shareholders who are short-term.

There is not a patient who's going to oppose your speaking out clearly. There is not a legislator who could be worried by it, because you know that by speaking out clearly, you are speaking to truth and you're speaking to the public, and the public votes. And if your message gets out to the public that you are somebody who is able to talk and is willing to talk and willing to speak out, that message worries legislators, and they react in a way which is sometimes very constructively. They come to you, they ask you questions, they seek you out, and then they adjust. I will go the other way, Ben. We've seen in history where people don't speak out. You see what happens.

And you can look at the periods that occur and you can identify exactly what happens because of it. Now, the small companies have less of an impact. But the giants, the titans who stay silent, become complicit. And let's take an example. In the 1930s, it's a long time ago now, nearly 100 years ago, across Europe, the titans stayed silent. Whether you were in Italy, whether you were in Spain, Germany, everybody stayed silent. And what happened is we saw horror sweep over Europe. Now, had they stood up, had they vocally opposed it, had they used the levers at their disposition, we could have seen a change in history. We didn't. I am convinced that it is incumbent upon true leaders, whether they be a small company or a big company, that speaking out is part of their role. Because if they don't, they become complicit in what then happens.

Uh, yes.

I can't. I've had people say they're selling my stock. And my answer to them was, 'Please do so.' And replace the stock immediately with others. I've also had people threaten me that if I continue speaking in this way, that they will physically come after me. My answer to them is that those threats are understood, but I can't do anything about it. I also hold a very firm belief that when somebody threatens you like that, when somebody is of that nature, then they're afraid. They're afraid that you're right. They're afraid that you will undermine their precepts and their control, so to speak, of what's going on. But there's only one thing in our business that's in control, and that is science. And there's only one truth that matters, and that is based on the scientific method. And there's only one recipient of that scientific method, and that is the patient. And if you hold to that value chain, then whatever they throw at you is irrelevant.

Now, there's a very clear and simple answer to that, but it starts with something that probably people will criticize me for. I love this industry. I believe that this industry is one of the greatest gifts you can give to mankind. That is the ability to change lives, the ability to enrich lives, the ability to really make an impact on the society that you're in. And I think it's a privilege to be here, and I've grown up in it. And somewhere along the line, I began to realize that something was going wrong. And we can go back in time and draw the threads that brought the conclusion that I finally did when I wrote the book. But what the real intersection was several things that occurred, and I believe are no longer cyclical. And that while we have time to change it, the structural changes that were converging, the disbelief in science, the change in the way that we federally fund scientific endeavors and link it to politically correct science. That's actually on the deck. The mass firing at the FDA, the really uncomfortable steps taken to disassemble what is the iconic regulatory body, and now, thank heavens, starting to rebuild after we've started to talk openly about it. And then lastly is the generalized politicization of everything that we're doing, including keeping brilliant minds out of this country, sending people out. These are structural, and often people can say the industry goes through cycles and we will recover. This is not the case. It's a structural change. It came together by the middle of last year that these structural changes, if continued, would invariably harm fundamentally the thing I most adore, this wonderful industry. And as a consequence of that, I felt it was time to write. There was one other underlying thing, and that was that innovation has never been more exciting, right? It's never been more rich. It's never been more full of potential. And it won't stop with the structural change in America. It will migrate. It will go elsewhere. And with it will go capital. And so underlying these structural changes that are happening, what I wanted to do was to alert the leaders in this industry, Congress, and actually, if I reach them, the public, that this is not a fluctuation. This is an assault on a strategic asset of this nation, which if it continues, it won't be short-term, but if it continues, it will be devastating to our ability to continue to grow the industry. And so Biotech in the Balance is exactly what it meant. We are in a balance, and we can save this if we take steps that are very clear. But we cannot ignore it. And while many people are really wonderfully engaged in what they do and should be, they need to raise their heads. They need to look at this.

Well, the first is that I was a lousy writer to begin with, and I'll leave it to you to judge whether you think the end product is better. But I can tell you there were six versions of it. Okay. The second is that I learned that when you write something, it's not your voice that you necessarily have to project, but you have to tell a clear story that not just encapsulates your ideas, but does it in a way that a person in the street can and should understand. Because I'm not writing for an expert, and I am the endless nerd. I can write about science and love science, but you don't want me writing that way. You want me to write, when I'm writing a book, to reach into the hearts, the minds, the souls of people. I didn't know how to do that. I had an editor who would say, 'You should write for your grandmother. And if your grandmother can't understand a sentence in the article that you're showing me, take it out before it reaches my desk.' Well, I didn't have my grandmother, but I had my wonderful wife. And when I showed her with great pride my first edition, my first version, she very gently, very nicely put it back in my hands and said, 'Go back and rewrite it.'

But if you ask me what I learned, it reinforced my love for this industry. It reinforced the respect for those that I could pull out and exemplify what they did. And they were real leaders. Really leaders. People like Regeneron, people like Maragonori and El Nylm. These are people who are really triumphant. It also reinforced, because the more I read about it, the more I understood it, and the more I was able to articulate it and to distill the ideas, that the titans really need to speak out. And lastly, I would say to you, it brought to the fore the concept that I've always believed in, that we have, every time you give a pill to a patient, you change their life. So you have a covenant with the patient, and that covenant is expressed in how you build this industry. And so it allowed me, because I didn't have them at the beginning, to distill my thinking into what ended up as the last chapter, into the ten commitments that I felt that if we could even reach to them, even one or two or three, we'd make a different and better industry.