Hey everybody and thank you for joining us. Welcome back to Post Hawk Live. We took a little bit of a break in August, but we are back from summer. My kids are off at school and we are back with you here on air. I am Drew Armstrong, the executive editor of Endpoints News and today I'm joined by our biotech correspondent Kyle Lusk. Kyle, every week you have stories about a startup that's either just raised a really big round and is coming out of stealth or you found one that's letting go of people and is shutting down. Biotech feels more volatile and tricky than ever right now. Would you agree?
Yeah, I'd say there are more speed bumps than ever for the industry right now, especially for early stage startups.
And why is that? I mean, when you talk to all these founders who are starting new companies, I have to imagine that you're pretty optimistic, but it's got to take a certain type of optimism to get started in this particular moment that we've been in for the last year or two.
Yeah, I'd say maybe three or four years ago, a lot of the founders that I was talking to were actual academic founders, taking a company out of the lab or out of an exciting preclinical finding. But a lot of the startup executives I'm interviewing now, I feel like a lot of them have actually been in the industry for a while. So a lot of these companies are installing experienced veterans right away as soon as they come up.
Yeah, and that is the perfect introduction to our guests for today. We have two people who are not only crazy enough to try and start another company and have done it not just once but more than that, and they've been pretty successful at it. John Maraganore is, among many other things, the founding CEO of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals. He has an extensive collection of empty champagne bottles to testify to how that has gone. Clive Meanwell is the co-founder of the Medicines Company, which is another amazing exit and story in the biopharma industry. Today they announced their newest company, Corsair Health, which has $50 million in funding and is going after cardiovascular disease. We are going to talk to them about what it takes to launch a startup in this environment. A bit of housekeeping before we get started. If you are joining us for the first time, hello. Post Talk Live brings you the reporting, the analysis, and the debate that usually happens behind the scenes in our newsroom live to you. If you're joining us on YouTube and you are not already following us, please hit that subscribe button below our feed to get alerts about future live streams. You can also sign up for the Post Talk email on your Endpoints News subscription page. And for those of you joining us on YouTube today, you can use the live chat to join the conversation. Ask us questions. Our producer will feed them to me over Slack. I'll see them. If they're good, I will toss them into our conversation. And if you miss us live, recordings will live on YouTube, on Spotify, and on Apple Podcasts. So let us get started. John and Clive, welcome to the show. Thank you for being with us. I can't believe we've never had either one of you on with us before. We've been chatting in the green room. We've been having a lot of fun. I will start this off before I hand things over to Kyle. You guys have both done this multiple times. You sit on boards. You know this industry. What is different about launching a new company right now compared to what it has been like in the past when you have started new ventures?
Yeah, well, I maybe I'll start. Drew and Kyle, thanks for having us. It's great to be here. We announced Corsair Health today. We're super excited about that. There's no doubt this is one of the toughest environments for fundraising we've seen in the industry arguably ever. But in 2002 when we started Alnylam, it was also a bad time. The tech bubble had burst. Nobody was investing in real innovation. People were investing in products that had come out of pharma that were being repurposed for different reasons. It was a very bad time, and it was actually the best time to start a company because you do have a concentration of talent that's available, higher quality people, more experienced people, and you have to get super smart and sharp about your business plan in this type of environment and think long and hard about what's the right value creation strategy, what are you going to really do, what are you not going to do. So there is something about that bar getting raised just that much higher that I think is actually a positive thing for getting started in this type of environment. I don't know, Clive, if you agree.
Yeah, well, I've been very fortunate, in addition to the other things I've done, to be on the board of BB Biotech, the Swiss investment corporation that mainly picks biotech public stocks. I've watched John build Alnylam in an extraordinary way and then hand over the reins to Yvonne, who's doing a fabulous job, and watched that cycle and watched a lot of other things come and go. I think I've been on that board for more than 20 years. One thing that I've noticed, Drew, is a broadening of the lens when the specialists are left and the generalists have left. I think there's a lot of intelligent introspection by the industry, and what that has led to, in addition because of other environmental shifts, is a broadening of the lens from not just the biology, not just the clinical trials, not just the FDA, but suddenly there are whole commercial channel issues to be discussed that are new, mainly driven by the enthusiasm around GLP-1s but also some other drugs. The other thing that's broadening the lens is an awareness that as an industry, biotechnology needs to get really good at manufacturing in an efficient way. We've always been brilliant at making complex molecules, cell therapies, gene therapies, and so on. Incredibly complex products. And now that lens has also been brought into how do you do that amazing stuff at scale and with efficiency that allows economies so that you can make a lot of product for bigger populations. So I think the broadening of the lens has been very exciting to watch in the last three years, even while we've all cried into our beer a few times about capital availability all the time, because I don't drink champagne. I can only afford beer.
Well, first of all, I'm jealous that Drew and I are not sitting together as you two are.
You guys talk more about the funding model here. Why put most of the money in yourselves? Is this something where you thought about maybe bringing in VCs, or was the plan all along to start with your money?
Well, first of all, it is a blessing that we're able to do this level of funding on our own, which we don't take for granted. It's also because we believe in this so strongly that we're funding it on our own. I've never done a level of funding on something like this at this level, by a long shot. And it's because we strongly believe that cardiovascular prevention has to be done. This is the right time to do it. We're passionate about that issue. We believe that we can build a very successful and very valuable company by doing it. So obviously we're making these investments with the goal of making a return personally as well and benefiting from that high level of ownership that you can have if you invest early in what you're doing. But this is just the beginning of our funding journey. At Alnylam, we raised a total of $7.5 billion over the 20 years that I was there. We're hoping it will be a fraction of what we need, a small fraction of what we need for Corsair Health to get its first products to medicine, and I believe it will be. But we will bring in other investors, venture investors, crossover type investors, the full blend of what's needed, and they'll bring in additional capital and also great ideas and great input around our business model and what we should do.
Can I go back to something you guys said a second ago? Clive and John, you both mentioned that great companies are built in downturns, and I think a lot of people think that happens because of discipline or rigor, and I'm sure that's true, but both of you mentioned things about talent. I'm wondering if there are other aspects of building during a downturn like this that people don't necessarily appreciate, whether it's the opportunity to be opportunistic about some of the people out there or other things. Can you just touch on that for one second before we move on?
Yeah, I'm happy to, Drew. I think if you combine the problem, technology is always fascinating, but it's not the main problem anymore. The unpacking of biological systems has been so amazing in the last 25 years that there are probably more good ideas out there in terms of technological leads than one needs. Then you say, if you want to move something quickly and there's a financial downturn, two things have to happen. One, the cadence can't let up. You can't go slow because there's not money available. So you have to sort of wing it a little bit yourselves. And secondly, as you say, the talent is turning over more, and even the very best leaders in our industry, we've all had situations which didn't turn out how we'd hoped. The ability to move on that talent quickly by funding yourself is very important. You're sort of sticking your neck out a bit, and it leads to certain discussions around the kitchen table occasionally at home. But I think it's a way to move quickly, to self-fund, and with the network we're both very fortunate to have, put together great teams quickly. At times like this, that's a little easier if anything.
It's an interesting experience with Corsair right now because we've got this blending of the Alnylam culture with the Medicines Company culture, discovering really wonderful things in both cultures that we're bringing together. We have a number of former Alnylam employees who left and did something else, and then we've recruited them to be part of this endeavor. And also the same with the Medicines Company through Population Health Partners. So it's been a wonderful way to access talent that happens to be available, but in this type of more challenging environment, people want to go to an effort that they believe can be successful, and they do like to follow experienced leaders because understandably there's a greater sense that these guys might actually know what they're doing.
Yeah, and I think our roles have changed so much over the years. When you used to be the youngest person in the room, the one with the PowerPoint slide deck, that was thrilling and exciting to drive things. Now, you're not the youngest person in the room ever, and you're generally not the person with the PowerPoint slide deck either. You're sort of reacting to it, coaching it. Being able to speak third, fourth, or fifth in a discussion is a real pleasure. It's kind of like leadership and management ice cream to watch younger, still brilliant people put their ideas together in front of you. I think we've known each other long enough to have no real ego in the hunt. We've seen each other through thick and thin on lots of situations, and I don't think I've ever found a disagreement. We've done some pretty big deals together, big things together. But to just watch the two diasporas come together is really interesting. Super cool.
Speaking of being younger, even just five years ago, would you all have started Corsair the same way in 2020, 2021? Do you think the current VC model can support a company like this?
It's an interesting question, Kyle. First of all, I think the fact that we're able to start it this way is a bit different. I'm not sure I would have been quite as ready to be able to start it this way back in 2020 or 2021. But there's no doubt that bringing the teams together like we're bringing them together, putting the capital together, our own capital, in this way is unique, but I think it's a valuable way to do it. And again, we will absolutely raise additional funds to do what we're doing. It's going to cost a lot more than what we put into it already, and we'll need a bigger team. So we'll bring a lot more people together with diverse backgrounds and diverse work experiences. But I do think the experience that we've been able to bring to the table, the capital that we've done right now, but most importantly, an important mission. Let's not forget the reason people come to work at our company and any other new startup is because they believe in the mission of what we're trying to do. They believe in this big, bold endeavor that we have started, and that's what's driving a lot of the attraction of talent to come here.
And I think on the investor side, if you've had the good fortune to be able to return attractive returns to shareholders previously, they are much more likely to take your phone call this time. So we have been talking to all of our friends in the industry and the financing community who, as John mentioned earlier, add a lot of value. But obviously they themselves have network, and the globalization of biotech funding has been very important. Some of the big VCs have amazing relationships with sovereign wealth funds and pension plans around the world. It's a sort of amplification effect. And if you know each other and you've seen each other in a foxhole before, because neither Alnylam nor the Medicines Company had every week be perfect, they get very interested in how you handle adversity and they learn your resilience, which famously is always what entrepreneurs say after success. They don't say I was brilliant, they say thank God I hung in there and was resilient. I think investors, particularly professional investors, understand that and appreciate that. So it's good to have a network of people who've seen you in bad days and on good days.
I want to ask you about the disease area you all are thinking about. When we look at the cardiovascular space, we've had statins for decades. We've had the injectable PCSK9 drugs, and now you guys are looking at your own PCSK9-targeting RNAi medicine. Talk to me about how you view the unmet medical need. Cardiovascular disease is an absolute scourge. My dad is a cardiologist, so I've known this stuff since I was a little kid. I got taken to my first open heart surgery for a valve replacement to watch when I was 10 years old. It was very cool. But at the same time, there are a lot of tools that are out there already. Why don't you guys talk a little bit about where you see the unmet medical need, either from a medical standpoint, a cost standpoint, or an access standpoint? What are we missing here that needs to change? Where do you see the shortfall in the market?
