[Music] Welcome to this week's episode of The Readout Loud, a weekly biotech podcast from STAT. I'm Alice in De-Injolus. I'm Adam Forrestine. And I'm Elaine Chen. It's Thursday, May 21st. And on this week's episode, you'll get a peek inside of STAT's Breakthrough Summit West. Adam and I just got back from the event in San Francisco, where powerful leaders from healthcare and science rubbed shoulders. And we're going to share some of the juicy conversations and insights. But first, a recap of the week's news and a word from our sponsor. [Music] I'm Mika Kakafuda-Durink, SVP of Oncology at Gilead Sciences. At Gilead Inkite, our work in oncology starts with a simple question, how do we make progress truly meaningful for patients? Since 2020, our therapy has been used to treat more than 75,000 people worldwide with metacetic, triple negative, and HR positive, HER2-negative breast cancer. We bring that same patient first mindset to other areas of high-end met need, including CAR-T-SEL therapy for people with difficulty to treat blood cancers. Today, over 34,000 patients around the world have been treated with CAR-T-SEL therapies from our portfolio. Across oncology, this perspective guides how we design clinical trials and pursue innovations so patients can access potential advances throughout their treatment journey. One more at Gilead.com. The weather was spectacular in San Francisco. It really was. I mean, why are we back here in Boston? It was scary, nice. I have to say, it was in the 70s, there was a breeze, it was sunny. I heard we missed a major heat wave here in Boston while we were gone. Inferno read out loud listeners who want this inside of life, this little slice of life, I got to give you a peek behind the scenes that Adam was sending me photos of his feet in the sand at the beach this week. I did. I took a little bit of time off on Monday, drove up to Marin. If folks who are familiar with Northern California know Mayor Beach up in Marin County, it's a beautiful, little cove of a beach. I went there, spent a couple hours and then where did I go also? I went over to Mill Valley, went to the Depot, folks know Mill Valley, the Depot restaurant in bookstore. How did nice lunch and a cortado on the patio? It was a very civilized afternoon. If you want any Adam-Foyerstein feet picks, just reach out. I've got them. I'll charge a very high price for them. I should sell them on only fans. Elaine is like, "What's happening here?" Maybe not. Maybe not. All right. Should we get into the. Sorry. Yeah, we actually were working while we were at San Francisco. We had the stat summit breakthrough west, which is one of our three big summit events. As you said, Allison, we gathered all kinds of healthcare experts, leaders, scientists for a day's worth of. Really? I mean, just great discussion, great panels. I thought the entire event just was phenomenal. Yeah, it was really excellent. There was a lot to get into. I mean, we kicked off the day with David Kessler and his comments and his honest kind of like in real-time thoughts about what's happening at the FDA and agency that he once led. And I was interested to hear that he seemed optimistic about Kyle D'Amantis as acting commissioner. And what did you think? Yeah, yeah. I picked up on that too. As folks know, David Kessler, he's kind of, you know, he was a log time FDA commissioner way back. And it was nice to sort of have him on stage with Matt to open up the event because I think it sort of grounded us in some of the discussion that led, that came out later. But he has a really interesting perspective, I think, of the FDA. He's kind of seen it from all sides and is somebody who has a lot of expertise in that area. And he did. I'm not asked him obviously about his thoughts on the current acting FDA commissioner. I should have said Kyle D'Amantis. And yeah, he kind of endorsed the guy, didn't he? I mean, he said he thought that he was somebody who could bring stability to the agency, which is something that's badly needed right now. And that's the kind of thing. And we talked about this on our previous show that I had gotten some feedback from people from both kind of inside biotech circles and kind of people who straddle that sort of DC biotech nexus who thought that, you know, his his work running the food division of the FDA. He was a really competent guy. There was not a lot of drama over there and that he was sort of going to bring that kind of no nonsense or business like approach to the FDA. And you know, again, we don't know how long he's going to be in that acting role. I did note, I think Allison, while we were there, I think Brett Jirwar, I'm probably mangling his last name. But somebody who was pretty active in high up in HHS during the first Trump administration was kind of a guy that a lot of people had thought might be named the new full time FDA commission. He's been on a lot of short list. But I think he said in kind of an linked in post that he was not going to pursue that job. So we'll see who takes it. We also had biotech leaders at the summit. You had Bridge Bioschio, Neil Kumar on your session and the topic of the biotech competition with Chinese companies came up. And Neil had some really interesting things to say about kind of the way that biotechs have to be more guarded and secretive about their IP. I met this competition with Chinese companies. He said that Bridge Bios has not been publishing structures of its molecules or it's actually showing not the right structures in publications so that it's not revealing the actual structures, which is really interesting. Yeah, that raised a lot of eyebrows, Elaine, when he said that, like you said, I had Neil Kumar as the CEO of Bridge Bioschio. I had Will Lewis CEO of Insman. The topic of the panel was kind of talking about building biotechs to last and what we're talking about there is, can you build a sustainable, profitable biotech company, sort of like the next AMGEN, the next Gilead sciences and not just sort of be a build a biotech company that gets acquired by Eli Lilly because they have gobs and gobs of money. And, you know, the Chinese thing came up because we were talking about looking forward and so what's the next for these companies and their pipelines and particularly with Bridge Bioschio, which kind of focuses on, which not kind of, they do focus on rare diseases. And they do have a lot of partnerships with academia to explore new targets, new diseases where there are no treatments today. So they're doing a lot of sort of innovative novel research, hopefully leading to new medicines. And so in that context, Neil talked, we talked about the competition from China and yeah, he basically said that they're, you know, they are pretty concerned about the ability of Chinese scientists in their own biotech and biopharma research and companies there to just kind of, you know, piggyback on the research that's done here. And I think he was sort of complimentary, he was complimentary to the quality and the speed at which Chinese scientists can synthesize new molecules. I think he was a little critical in that he felt like it's not stealing necessarily but the way that they can sort of catch up if they get with or hint of a new molecular structure, let's say a new molecular entity, something in a patent, something in a scientific poster or a presentation that at a meeting that they can very quickly catch up on what could have been like decades of a fundamental underlying research that academics and scientists here have been doing. So that to him is a concern and a potential threat to kind of the US biotech research industry. Yeah, and that's something that Mark Tessier-Lovine, who was on another panel with our colleague Matt Herper, kind of reiterated in the work that his company Zera, Therapeutics, is doing Zera, of course, is the big AI bet that raised a billion dollars in funding. They have been more guarded. Mark said when announcing their targets, unless there's a sense that it won't, there won't be kind of like a competitive disadvantage to doing so because there are companies out there that if you announce your target, they will jump on it. So it's definitely a pressure point within early to mid-stage biotechs these days and actually all drug development. Yeah, just getting Elaine, just getting back to the additional comment that sort of got eyebrows raised, you know, where Neil said that when it comes to structures, drug structures that they may be working on, you know, he suggested that maybe if you see something on a poster or in a publication from Bridge Bio that that structure is
not the right structure, which I think that was where some folks got a little concerned, because then are you talking about publishing potentially misleading information, false information? That gets obviously very tricky. You don't want to go down that path where you're purposefully publishing something that's not accurate. I know in some of the conversations, I also had a big networking cocktail reception after the event. I was talking to a couple of people up there who were on the science side, some scientists, including Mark. I had a conversation with him to say the V and this. That's where they were like, "Huh, maybe we shouldn't go that far." Yeah. Then you're getting into the segment or area of. I don't want to call that scientific fraud, but then it's a very misleading and potentially troublesome thing to go about publishing false reference points or false molecular structures in your research publications. Yeah, it's unclear and it'll be interesting to hear how that conversation evolves. It's unclear how far we're viewing into that territory. Okay, so this China conversation is really relevant to a story that our colleague Damian Gardé wrote this week. It was a big story about the way that the biotech industry is looking at Chinese biotechs. He describes that there are roughly these three groups within biotech. There's those who believe that pharma companies and VCs are essentially betraying the American biotech industry by collaborating and bolstering Chinese companies. On the opposite end, there's a group of people who are happy to partner with Chinese biotechs and see them as part of a natural evolution of the industry rather than an existential threat. Then there are those in the middle who feel like they're in a prisoner's dilemma where they're okay if everyone stops working with Chinese companies. But if your competitors are going to China, then you'd be putting yourself at a disadvantage if you don't do so as well. It was a really fascinating article to read. I wish I could have had a live recording of my thoughts about the piece because there's a lot to get into. I mean, Elaine, to your point, this conversation about how much investors are going to China has been something that I've been talking about with a lot of different folks. And to a certain extent, I don't know about you guys, but I kind of fall on the side of venture capitalists or their job is to go out there and make money. There's very few firms that I talk to that have ever had a America first prerogative. And so it's interesting to me that the conversation like talks about like veers into the territory of like VCs betraying US biotechs by going to Chinese companies because VCs are out there to go make money and they're out there to go invest in the best science. And create the best companies that they can. So it's kind of like, you know, faulting a scorpion for stinging somebody, you know, that old adage. Where do you guys land on this, this whole debate? I think we've seen this rise of companies that just, that seem to be formed, that pool a bunch of money together, go over to China, buy assets in diseases or targets that are, let's say, Busy, Hot, Popular. We've obviously seen it in obesity, like Kylara, for instance, is a company that I, you know, look, they, you know, they raised a gobs and gobs of money. They went over to China. They bought a bunch of, you know, essentially me too. Obstet drugs, right? Same targets, you know, maybe they're a little bit better. Maybe they're not who knows, but they went over, they did that, you know, did they try to sell the company? The company was not sold. They went, they did a big IPO and here they are, right? Did they do any innovative research? No, they just went out and bought a bunch of drugs to, for weight loss because that's a really big, that's obviously a huge category. A company like Arrasca, which is coming out of written about in the K-RAS world. It's kind of the same thing, you know, they K-RAS is huge. There's a lot, a lot of the fundamental ground breaking research on K-RAS done here in the United States. Obviously, Revolution Medicine, a company very prominent in that world. We're going to get some data from them at ASCO next week. You know, Arrasca goes over to China buys a bunch of K-RAS inhibitors from China, comes back here, starts clinical trials. What's the end game for Arrasca? They probably want to get sold, right? So it's like these VCs or whoever is finding these companies acting just basically like middlemen instead of like farmer going over and buying the assets themselves. They set up these companies and I think the end game for them is just kind of a quick return. Now there's nothing wrong with that system. That is capitalism. That's how a lot of this works. I think it does erke a bunch of folks because of, you know, again, these issues of like, is that, you know, is that really, are we doing the research? I mean, is there, you know, we get into these IP issues, you know, Arrasca and Revolution Medicine are now involved in some litigation around their competing molecules and whether there have been some infringement of Revolution Medicine's IP. Obviously, these are lawsuits and eventually they'll get settled or something they'll get resolved in some way. But again, I think that's where some of this, this sort of frustration arises. But if it wasn't Chinese companies doing this, do you not think it would happen at all that there would be companies developing me to drive? There, there, and specifically with the intent. So, so I don't, is this purely a China thing? Because I think what's so interesting about the conversation is the way that people are categorizing Chinese companies as its own kind of category and also as a monolith in probably the same way that people talk about China in all sorts of industries. But, you know, like, is this really a China situation or is this like you said, the way capitalism works? And if it wasn't Chinese, companies doing this would we just see this elsewhere? I think there's also people in Damien's story that talked about like is drug development truly like a national thing or our drugs stateless? And if the end goal is to help get patients the best drugs, maybe the cheapest drugs, like does this cutting off of China completely make sense? I think that's a really good point Elaine. I mean, there are a lot of Chinese companies that are happily, as Adam was pointing out, happily licensing their drug candidates to US and European companies, investors, so on and so forth. But there is this like underlying fear that you hear all the time from Western players that China, like the nation state is going to kind of like use that as leverage. Ultimately, that actually happening, it doesn't feel like we've seen any signs of. And I think to your large to like to your overall point, this comes back to the fact that like the US has just been the dominant biotech player for so many years. We've never really had competition like this before. And I think it's just totally unsettling us. The fact that it's coming out of China where the US has some geopolitical tension is adding onto that unsettlement. But I think like if it was any other country, if it was India, if it was, you know, all of a sudden like Korea, if it was Australia, if it was any other nation, the US would be fairly unsettled. I think the fact that it's China, where there's kind of this larger geopolitical tension is exacerbating the issue. I think that's interesting. The argument of like, oh, you know, what was going on in China is state sponsored research and it's an attempt to like, wheelgeopolitical power. But like, is that not what the industry is asking the same of from the American government? Like, are you not, it's exactly the same. Are you not asking the government, are you not asking the government to sponsor more research also to, you know, increase the influence of the American industry? Yeah, it's exactly the same. I don't know if it's exactly the same. Just because I just, I mean, look, I mean, you know, you can say China's opened up, but they are still an authoritarian communist government. I mean, so I think, I mean, so I might argue that we are too, not communist, but authoritarian. So I think there is, there are some differences. But what is the difference in terms of like what they're saying about geopolitical influence? How is that? How, why is it different when China does it? I think fundamentally you don't want to be, you don't want to be overly dependent on another country. I mean, someone made the point where we just, in the beginning, you're saying, you know, that if maybe we do, like you said, you know, that research, like science should be like, you know, it should cross board. It should be a nation-less state, you know? Nation, yeah. And, and a lot of people in the industry believe that, you know, like I think Albert, you know, like folks like Albert Borla, you know, who, you know, they, that's what he says all the time, right? That we have to work with China, you know, we can, we can partner with them. Yeah, the US has just never been in that position to have to do the kind of negotiating that it's having to do now. We've always been in the driver's seat. And now we're kind of in the passenger seat. And that's very unusual. And no, I think that's a fair point, Elaine, that
that the fact that it's China, I mean, there's a lot of cultural legacy and division there. And the last bit of news this week, yet more Eli Lilly obesity data over to you, Elaine. Yes, more obesity data. Lilly reported today Thursday that in a phase three trial, its triple G drug, red or true tide, led to a very high weight loss, approaching levels seen with bariatric surgery, specifically when we're looking at people who stayed on treatment on the highest dose, they lost about 28% of their weight after 80 weeks. But similar to earlier red or true tide studies, there were a lot of discontinuations, 11% of patients on the highest dose discontinued due to adverse events. And so when you take into account, all participants, including those who discontinued the efficacy was 25%. So I think people are going to focus a lot on the high level weight loss number, which yes is very impressive. But you know, how tolerable is the stroke going to be, how appealing is the stroke going to be, if we see this many discontinuations, and you know, going back to the question that we discuss a lot, is this level of weight loss really needed for everyone who is overweight and obese? Or should it, you know, really be focused on just the people who have the most severe obesity? We ran into a few readout loud listeners at our stats summit, but unfortunately you all could not be there. So we're going to share one of those conversations. Allison speaking with Joe Betz-Liqua. He is the CEO of a Sam Altman-backed longevity company called Retro Biosciences. Retro is nearing a first dose of its series A round and its first clinical data readout. Allison grilled him on that, and Allison had to say, grilling is a good word because Joe did not want to talk about the financing that is to be or so that it's in the works. And you, you didn't let him off the hook on that. You kept grilling him. I really, I really enjoyed that part of the conversation. So here we go. Stay tuned for that interview, and you can listen to that next. Okay, I'm going to do just like a brief bear with me. Tell people a little bit about you, Joe. You know, you've been working in the science and tech industries for the last couple of decades. You've founded this is Retro is your third venture back company. You've also created the world's smallest computer and worked to automate animal research. Retro got founded in 2021 with the goal of extending human lifespan by 10 years. You just started your first phase one trial, but it sounds like you believe the company could be worth about $5 billion. This slaying this all out seems a bit like Don Quixote. What makes you think that you could do this? Mostly academic aging biology research at this point has continued to evolve to the point where if it feels like we're understanding aging well enough, that we can actually start to make some headway. This really really kicked off in about 1993 when a researcher Cynthia Kenyon who's now at Calico, Google, a longevity biology company figured out that you can modify one gene in an small experimental animal and double its lifespan, which is the first time that a lot of people woke up and went, "Wait, what? And it's not only that they just like the last part of their lifespan that was kind of like, they just stayed like that for another period of their lifespan. Like the whole arc was extended, including the healthy period, which is the part that I'm obsessed with. Wait, you can modify this. That is something we can come in and research academically. We can measure it. We can try interventions and see what effects they have on that. And it created a flood of people coming in. It's become a more and more mature academic area. There's hundreds and hundreds of researchers in it. And I didn't really think it was something to build a company around in 2013 when I started my second venture funder company. It's like, "Hmm, not right yet, but I did start a nonprofit to help start elevating the conversation, especially in Silicon Valley where it was." People selling like vitamin creams that obviously do nothing. For me, I'm trained as a scientist at Harvard and MIT and Caltech. There are ways that you decide whether you're fooling yourself by wishful thinking, or you actually measure it and do statistics, and you're like, "Hmm, not a thing." Obviously, they were not a thing, but they stand to make money off of them so they will push them anyway. And I just, that morally offends me, I guess. So I started this nonprofit to start bringing in legitimate principal investigators from academia, from around the region and give talks to the general public. What was the turning point then that made you go, "There is enough here in the academics to make this something that could be like a venture backed company, like Calico, like Altos, like BioAge, like the other companies that we've started to see." And BioAge started at one of my forums. One of my nonprofit things. Can you tell I'm proud of that? I think there was enough progress from, you know, 2013 to 2020. There were amazing tools that emerged during that period, for instance, single-cell sequencing. It was like an amazing new, like quote unquote, microscope to look at biology through, and tons of other elevated, not only tools, but also additional people and just breakthroughs that people had made. And one of those breakthroughs was a researcher who is now an advisor to the company, Alejandro Ocampo, who first figured out that this kind of miracle of reprogramming that was discovered and got a Nobel Prize in 2006 for being able to reprogram pretty much any cell of the body back to a pluriputance themselves, which is the cell that gives rise to a new person from all of the cells can differentiate. He figured out that obviously you don't want to do that to all of your cells because then you just become this undifferentiated blob of protoplasm and die. I don't think people want that. No, and like dying is like not part of the corporate mission for my current company. In fact, some people would say it's the exact opposite. Yeah, it's a little more nuanced than that because it's like not dying and being healthy while you're not dying. So it's 10 years of healthy life span. When it comes to like the actual drug programs that you guys are doing, I've mentioned you just started your first clinical trial right at the end of last year. You've disclosed three drug programs for you've got something you replacing microglia, rejuvenating hematopoatic stem cells, mouthful every time, enhancing autofagy to better clear out kind of protein aggregates and in the patients with Alzheimer's. Some of those are things that people have tried. There have been many mouse models on. And there are some medicines that are out there that are kind of being repurposed to try to do these things. What makes what reju is doing any different or makes it stand out? It's hard to answer an aggregate so I can talk about the moment. You want let's talk about like the autophagy program. That's your the lead program. What makes it different than what anybody else is doing out there? Well, presently there is no approved approved drug that's an autophagy modulator that will know that specifically restores autophagy in cells where it's stalled. So it is a first in class. It's just been a hard target for people to figure out how to modulate. What's been the difficulty in figuring out how to modulate that target? I mean in general, that's a small molecule oral bioavailable drug that crosses the blood brain barrier. It has a lot of the check boxes that are a hard one in small molecule drug development space. Small molecules are hard. You can find something that modulates a particular pathway that you want to. Maybe if you have the isolated protein or maybe in cells and then turns out to be toxic. Most things are toxic. So finding, I think we're just very lucky in how we perform this search that we have found something that's both effective and the animal models that we've put it to. Things that can clear out gunk that have built up over decades in neurons in mice. And that appears to be incredibly non-toxic. I mean that's the great caveat of the scientific industry is in mice. How's the phase one going? What are you seeing so far? Phase one's going to be great. Super good. I mean we don't have like the final top line results to announce. You can talk about the initial top line results. I think the audience would like to hear that. I mean. I like to say there are two goals for a phase one study. One is to not have any adverse effects, and the other is to have adverse effects. You want to have no adverse effects up and through the dose range where you expect you will likely have efficacy in your target population. And then eventually you want to have some kind of toxic effects at some dose, so at least you know how big your box is. So we've got the former, we haven't got the latter yet. So we'll be doing an extension to try to add on more higher dose levels. And just the freaking thing is like too non-toxic. I was just like, it's okay. I mean, if you're giving the option of which check box not to have checked so far, I'll take this one for sure. OK, OK. We talked offline about the ability, the potential for AI, to kind of speed up things and to make the processes more efficient and I mean, if we just look so far at what Retro has done, founded in 2021, first product in the clinic, end of 2025, I mean, that's on par, I would say, with a lot of what we've kind of historically seen of the biotech industry in recent years. I know that you've talked about like the frustrations you have with the inefficiencies of biotechnology. I know that it's something that Sam has talked about. So why did it still take four years to get into the clinic? Well, part of it, I'd say, is that unfortunately, AI doesn't make animals mate faster. And a bunch of it is, that'd be great if you could figure out how to do it. AI fluffers. But, yeah. [LAUGHTER] [LAUGHTER] This is just going to be a lot of great. But a lot of things is like we need a new animal model for this, which means that we need to genetically modify the animal, which means that they need to do the whole idea thing and then raise a cohort and then cross it with this other one. And it ends up being a year and a half before you have the animal model you need for the next thing you're doing. And we have some fairly special animal models. We have a very mature mouse house that there's a lot of our animal work for us in house. OK. I think we have an audience question. Nice. Animal models are notoriously limited in their predictability and clinic when it comes to efficacy. You're an innovative company. How are you thinking about getting away from animal models to screen compounds? I would love to have some sort of AI model for the human. So we could just say, here's our therapeutic. Is it going to work? And it would be like, yeah, start giving it to people. In fact, don't even do clinical trials. We understand the human body so well now that you just make the pills and give it out. But unfortunately, we just don't have much of a clue about how biology works still, sadly, in 2026. But backing up, I would love it if there was enough of a model of human that worked in silicone that I wouldn't have to do animal models. But there just isn't. That is something though that the FDA has been trying to push the industry to do to move completely away from animal models and has positive that AI can help do that. It sounds like you don't believe that's feasible right now. I mean, I think that it-- I don't know, like, political, but I think it sounds great. I don't want to use animals. They're like little creatures with little lives and they care for their young and nurse them. And I was like, I wish that there was something better. I think it is quite popular to be able to say from a political perspective. You know what? We're not going to require this strictly anymore. But if you look at-- we have plenty of interactions with FDA. And we're like, here's the briefing book for our program. Here's where we're going for it. We also have a good GMP manufacturing facility that we've built. So there's plenty of scrutiny on us for how we make our medicines, which I appreciate, by the way. I think FDA is helpful. Now, what should we do? Could we do more as this is fast as we can go? And they definitely ask us for it. You need to do three times as many animal studies in this particular topic. Or they're like, they're not saying, you know what? It's fine. Just do some calculus model for whether this is going to be toxic or cost tumors or et cetera. I think it could someday happen. I think it would be great. But certainly not where FDA is right now. Interesting. So they're in your interactions with them. They've still been saying, you've got to go back and do more animal models. This is-- Unfortunately, yeah. To great expense. OK. I want to touch on-- I mean, you've talked about-- your collaboration with Sam and part of what has made Retro Bio work up to this point is that you've had a really like-minded collaborator with him. And he invested the seed round. You guys have been working on this process of raising an A, which there's been reporting out there. Stat has also done its own reporting that you're looking to raise about $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation. I mean, that process has been in the works for a while. What's going on? Are you finding that you don't have those-- there aren't those like-minded collaborators out there? Fortunately, there are like-minded collaborators out there. And it's been a weird time to raise in biotech. I don't know if any of you have noticed that. But fortunately, it looks like-- and the very not-to-discipline future will be at least doing the first close on that fundraise. So I don't have much to say about it until then, but stay tuned for the next few days. How have people reacted to the valuation of the company? I mean, a biotech company that is just moving into its first clinical trials, most others would not position themselves at being worth $5 billion. So to be fair, I'm not out raising at $5 billion. Oh, is that plan changed? Don't believe all the press. You read that there's something that is a little extreme. What about the documents, though, Joe? So I think that the opportunity for a company like Retro-- so a bunch of things have been moving in the industry for a few years. And I completely agree with you. Like, random biotech company has a-- it just sort of-- in progress phase one, on a small molecule drug, they're kind of dime a dozen. And not necessarily would warrant a multi-billion dollar valuation. But there are things happening in the industry that people can see kind of ahead. We had a very successful effort to build a different kind of intelligence model that can actually generate new human proteins, which has been enabling a lot of our work. And that's unusual for a small run of the mill biotech. We're also like a building full of where 90 people now, mostly bio nerds. And we have a huge concentration of people in aging biology as a discipline. And we've seen the sort of the over 10 window kind of shift of people starting from 15 years ago, the look at aging biology, like working on aging, as kind of a bit of a fringe, a bunch of weirdos. Like, too like, no, that's a legitimate science. And so now, if an investor is asking this, I was like, that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that aging is one of these things that's going to be a new source of targets for disease, because 85% of all disease is age-related disease. And if you can make one therapeutic that can solve eight downstream age-related diseases, it's probably smart business. OK, then which one are you going to invest in? And then there's Calco and Altos and Bio-Agent, like take your pick. Some of them are extremely expensive. And it was new limit out there raising. It had a higher valuation than we're raising. But there's supply and demand that also dictates price. Yeah. With everything that we've seen that's out there with Calco, with Altos, from what I gather, new limit is kind of moving towards the clinic. But we haven't seen a lot of substance yet. And what we have seen, like Bio-Age, they've struggled in the clinic. I think there are still-- a lot of people still look at the longevity field and say, like, the academic science is not translating. It is not translating into humans. And there is a bit of a legacy. And then you've also got, as you kind of acknowledge offstage, you've got this like, sleaze component of people who are coming in and are like, let's sell you a crazy shot that will do next to nothing. Possibly hurt you. Possibly hurt you. What does success look like for retro? And how do you actually go about convincing people that there's a there?
there? Well success looks like we are able to help a person who is suffering from or about to suffer from some horribly aged related disease and then we perform one of our therapies on them and then they're healthier. That's basically the only success to me. But next we'll be doing human efficacy trials and we have three of them coming up and some of them are like pretty kind of heavy metal interventions you don't really want to do on a healthy volunteer. So it'll be they'll be phase one bees like those are starting off in patients patients in extreme need and so we'll be you know three of those and the rough stats in the industry for success at like the first human like efficacy proof of concept is like one third so fingers crossed it probably at least one of those will actually do something useful for a patient. So that's one that that's actually feels like success to me and and then I hope that translates into the other people saying oh that's cool they actually did something that worked I would like to continue to partner with them and get behind them and so we're sorry is that a fourth program? Is that you've talked about three publicly and then you said you're going to have three that are going to be in humans. Well we have what's the hybrid? Three that will that will that are absolutely heading toward human proof of concept human clinical efficacy proof of concept. The safety trial that's going on right now I don't count but after this it'll do a phase two. Okay and then we have a microglio replacement program. Basically the other two are cell therapies which we're making in-house in Redwood City and our replacement programs. So one replaces microglio in the brain and the other one microglio are one of the four sort of fundamental brain specific brain specific cell types and the other is what you were saying I'm a full hematopoietic stem cells which is much easier to see HSC and we make HSCs where the only company in the world who can make functional long-term and grafting HSCs from chloropotin stem cells and the idea there is to be able to replace your say 95-year-old blood system with essentially three-year-old blood and give you a boost for the next many many years. When are we going to see that that golden phase one data? The golden phase one data. Not too much longer I would say supposedly the first batch of it can be released in like August, Ish. Okay. When are we going to see that series A first close? We shall see hopefully very soon, hopefully in the next few days. What's the evaluation? Yeah we'll be talking much more about it in the distant future. This seems like a nice opportunity. It's a very nice opportunity to spend time with you. I'd much appreciate it. Alright we'll let Joe go thank you folks. That does it for another episode of The Read Out Loud. Thank you to Highest Anthem Banado for producing this week's episode. Our senior producer Isalissa Ambrose, our executive producer is Rick Burke and our theme music is by Brian Joel. And we'd love to hear from you. Tell us what you like about the six episodes, what you didn't like and man I'm probably going to regret saying this your thoughts on China. You can do all that by sending us an email at
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