Vertex Pharmaceuticals

One half went shopping, the other half went to war with its own providers.

Start with Vertex, because it did the biggest thing.

Vertex closed the largest acquisition in the company's history, Krenetics Pharmaceuticals, $8.8 billion, done on September 5th.

Three days later, it published data on Zimus Lessel, an islet cell therapy that restored patients' own insulin secretion in type 1 diabetes in the phase 1-2 forward trial, restored their own insulin production.

Goldman put the stock on its conviction list the day after that with a $653 target.

Marcus, is the memo paying for any of this yet?

Both of these companies are buying revenue that doesn't exist yet, and the memo is already paying full price for it.

The memo has Vertex at 33 times free cash flow on $4 billion of it.

... talking about earlier.

Uh, names that come to mind are Amgen, Vertex, which has pioneered, like, treatments for cystic fibrosis, uh, Gilead, which is now growing in HIV.

Um, so there's these companies, they, they come up with a few therapies.

And normally Big Pharma goes and acquires.

... for, for future generations." Um, but I, and I wouldn't disagree with that necessarily, but as a human geneticist, my bias is always towards genetics, medicine, um, molecular medicine, as you said in the introduction.

And, um, so I would say, "Well, it's got to be curing some genetic disease." And the disease that we were starting to hear about was sickle cell disease, and that's because in two thousand nineteen, the first CRISPR medicine trial for sickle cell and, uh, beta thalassemia was, uh, was launched by CRISPR Therapeutics, uh, and, and later Vertex.

Uh, and the first patient in the sickle cell trial was a woman from Mississippi named Victoria Gray, and she had very courageously not only volunteered to be patient one in this trial, but she'd also agreed to sit down, uh, with Rob Stein from the wa- uh, uh, National Public Radio, uh, to give a series of very candid, very revealing interviews, not knowing if, if the, the, the, the process that she was going through was, was even going to work.

Even the doctors couldn't be a hundred percent certain that it was going to work.

Big Pharma is pushing the safe alternatives.

You guys know it all too well, don't you? Gabapentin, antipsychotics, Expirel, even Vertex Pharmaceuticals, new medication, Jernovex.

Fast track through the FDA under the banner of solving the opioid crisis.

But let's be clear here.

It's still about who wasn't at the White House rather than who was.

Administration sources and pharma lobbyists tell me that companies like Vertex, Biogen, Alnylam are under pressure to do MFN deals.

So far, there's no indication that they're gonna succumb to that pressure, and we can circle back to that.

But first, a couple of other things that we learned since last week's podcast.

This one's a bit more reasonable.

So you have Amgen, Vertex, Gilead Sciences.

So these are quite large companies.

So they're pretty, pretty large companies that are, I think, at heart, hard biotech, but they have established commercial products, for example.

And there's, I mean, I don't think there's any better example than this.

Yeah, it was

Vertex.

Vertex.

Competition does not come in.

And we've seen that also in the United Kingdom, where the drug Trikafta, the Vertex is a drug has not been available because the negotiating body in the United Kingdom, NICE, refused to pay the price that Vertex was demanding.

Eventually they settled, but we don't know what price they're paying.

But so many more people are being denied access to affordable medicines because of these rules of intellectual property that are designed to bolster the profits of pharmaceutical industry, but not actually improve public health.

And with that, I think the next page to turn to so that we spend a proper amount of time on health care today is page 15.

For those who don't have the 20-page memo in front of you, the companies on page 15 are Pfizer, Merck, Moderna, BioNTech, and Vertex.

And the thing we want to talk about, I think, is cancer vaccines, kind of a continuation of what we've done the last couple of Wednesdays on healthcare.

And of course, Moderna and Merck announced that they made progress in a phase three trial, and BioNTech is, of course, like Moderna.