Dave Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly, on GLP-1s and the business of pharma
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Dave Ricks is CEO of Eli Lilly, which is now a $700,000,000,000 company and the world's most valuable pharma company. Eli Lilly is a 150 years old. They grew up as the first company to mass produce insulin in the twentieth century. But today, most of the company's business is in the new GLP one diabetes and weight loss drugs, where they've become the market leader. Simultaneously, Eli Lilly is upending the traditional model by selling directly to their consumers over the Internet with Lilly Direct rather than through the traditional middle Alright.
Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Coming.
Pretty impressed that you came and you just poured your
own pint. Yeah. Major flex. Have glass, we'll pour.
Exactly. Well, actually, good place to start. Tell us about your NVIDIA announcement that you just had.
Yeah. So today at the, what's it called, GTC conference they have, they unveiled, that we're well underway actually, should be done by the end of the year, by building a supercomputer on prem for us, really just to run proprietary drug discovery models. We think it's the biggest biologically focused supercomputer there is, and certainly the biggest pharma has done with B300's latest chipset. Yeah, we're only constrained by power like everyone else, but yeah, we've built a bunch of tools, we'll run them on that, and scientists use it to sort of co invent, co develop, focus mostly on chemistry t
And so is the idea here you have some targets, you've had some challenges actually drugging it, and so you give it to one of these new chemistry models, and you ask it whether it can come up with something totally orthogonal beyond what the human might have tried?
So take a really good popular example is like GLP-one. So that's a hormone peptide that we all excrete. It engages targets that are what we call G protein coupled receptors. So they're hard to drug targets on the outside of cells. And to try to mimic a big, huge protein with a very small chemical is a complicated undertaking. And by the way, do only that and not other things that are untoward. And so this is sort of a frontier of drug discovery that's been tough and very empirical. That's a hot area for this kind of technology because these strange arrangements of atoms don't look like other d
I'm always struck by Derek Lowe's arguments where he's always sounding this note of caution, I guess, about the optimism and maybe what he might view as boosterism around AI and biomedicine, where, as I see at least, his two claims are, one, it's really hard to select the targets, and AI doesn't help you that much there. And then so much fails at human toxicity. And again, at least so far, AI has not been all that helpful at that step. Do you agree with him, or is he overrating these particular challenges and maybe underrating the challenges that AI does help solve? Thoughts in that argument.
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