00:47:21 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Kevin Weil, Brian Manning
[00:47:21] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Seems like it. Cooking. [00:47:24] S0: Huge acceleration. Talk about the the vision, the mission of the company, what you're building, and introduce the company to us. [00:47:33] S6: Yeah. I'd love to. So Warped uses AI and robotics to help the world discover new medicines faster. [00:47:39] S4: Okay. [00:47:39] S6: Right? We're building robotic labs to do science at scale, and we're doing it here in America. There are two big things that we believe. [00:47:47] S4: Yeah. [00:47:47] S6: The first is that robotics robotics and robotic labs are gonna accelerate science. [00:47:51] S1: Mhmm. [00:47:51] S6: Probably because you can just run more experiments when you have labs operating twenty four seven, but also because these kind of labs can generate data at huge scale to train amazing AI models for science. The second thing, we need to reshor scientific capabilities from China so that we don't lose our pharma industry the way that we did solar, drones, and manufacturing. [00:48:13] S0: Yep. [00:48:14] S6: And there's one solution to both of these things, which is we are building a next generation preclinical CRO, a contract research organization. We're doing it here in America. It means we don't develop drugs of our own. We're building the infrastructure for everybody else who does so that they can go faster.
00:48:14 · Kevin Weil, Jordi Hays
[00:48:14] S6: And there's one solution to both of these things, which is we are building a next generation preclinical CRO, a contract research organization. We're doing it here in America. It means we don't develop drugs of our own. We're building the infrastructure for everybody else who does so that they can go faster. [00:48:30] S1: Yep. What's what's happening... Like, over the last year, I I I heard some number about how how much, like, US and and and sort of allied pharma companies and allied countries are are spending on, like Chinese licensing, Chinese, like pharmaceutical advancements. Like, what what more can you share on that front? Just how much of like the drugs coming down our pipelines were actually made outside of the country?
00:48:30 · Jordi Hays, Kevin Weil
[00:48:30] S1: Yep. What's what's happening... Like, over the last year, I I I heard some number about how how much, like, US and and and sort of allied pharma companies and allied countries are are spending on, like Chinese licensing, Chinese, like pharmaceutical advancements. Like, what what more can you share on that front? Just how much of like the drugs coming down our pipelines were actually made outside of the country? [00:49:00] S6: I mean, almost all of them had had big parts of their programs that happened in China. It very much rhymes with what we did with the manufacturing industry where in the early days, it's like, it's like a bunch of sensible local decisions where you're like, oh, well, this is low skilled labor. It can happen more cheaply elsewhere, so we'll move it out. And then over time, it it becomes not just low skilled labor, but you know, there's innovation that happens and suddenly our muscles atrophy, theirs grow and all of a sudden we can't manufacture a lot of the things we need. There's this amazing quote from Andy Grove from like years ago when he was running Intel. He said abandoning today's commodity manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow's emerging industry. Yeah. It happened exactly in manufacturing and it is on the way to happening in pharma and we can't let it.
00:49:00 · Kevin Weil, John Coogan
[00:49:00] S6: I mean, almost all of them had had big parts of their programs that happened in China. It very much rhymes with what we did with the manufacturing industry where in the early days, it's like, it's like a bunch of sensible local decisions where you're like, oh, well, this is low skilled labor. It can happen more cheaply elsewhere, so we'll move it out. And then over time, it it becomes not just low skilled labor, but you know, there's innovation that happens and suddenly our muscles atrophy, theirs grow and all of a sudden we can't manufacture a lot of the things we need. There's this amazing quote from Andy Grove from like years ago when he was running Intel. He said abandoning today's commodity manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow's emerging industry. Yeah. It happened exactly in manufacturing and it is on the way to happening in pharma and we can't let it. [00:49:47] S0: So with with manufacturing, I remember the story of d... American deindustrialization as driven by two factors. One is what you said, lower labor costs abroad, but two is, it's dirty nimbyism. I don't want the smoky steel mill in my backyard. Let's put it halfway across the world where I don't have to see it or worry about it or think about the pollution. With CROs, is is nimbyism a factor whatsoever? I feel like no one would care, but how how how has that played into it, or has it been a nonfactor?
00:49:47 · John Coogan, Kevin Weil, Richard Starson
[00:49:47] S0: So with with manufacturing, I remember the story of d... American deindustrialization as driven by two factors. One is what you said, lower labor costs abroad, but two is, it's dirty nimbyism. I don't want the smoky steel mill in my backyard. Let's put it halfway across the world where I don't have to see it or worry about it or think about the pollution. With CROs, is is nimbyism a factor whatsoever? I feel like no one would care, but how how how has that played into it, or has it been a nonfactor? [00:50:22] S6: I don't think that's a huge factor here. I think it's been much more of the first that you identified. It's it's the cost, and it's this feeling of, oh, well, maybe this won't be so strategic. And then, of course, it turns out that it's massively strategic. Yeah. We don't wanna lose the ability to turn ideas into medicines here in The United States. [00:50:38] S0: Yeah. So then, on the labor cost, it feels like by leaning into higher volume tests testing driven by robotics, you can be more competitive on the economic side. So I would imagine that within, I don't know what your timeline is, a year or two, like, on on a cost per experiment, you would be competitive internationally very quickly. Correct? [00:51:00] S6: Yeah, and so the, like, just to step back, because I bet a bunch of people don't know how these processes work. So let's say the three of us go start a biotech company. We're going to develop new medicines. We're going [00:51:09] S5: to try and cure
00:51:09 · Richard Starson, Kevin Weil, John Coogan
[00:51:09] S5: to try and cure [00:51:10] S6: a particular form of cancer. You usually start with some biological target, right? We might say it's usually a protein. So we might say, you know, maybe because of Jordy's grad school research, we've got, you you either want to like, you either to accelerate or inhibit some protein. [00:51:28] S0: Sure. [00:51:29] S6: And you've got that idea. You find a molecule that maybe sort of does it, but it probably is toxic or it's not soluble, so the body can't process it the right way, or it's not potent. So instead of taking a tiny amount of it as a pill, you [00:51:44] S0: have to take [00:51:44] S6: a kilogram of it, which, you know, all of these things disqualify it as a drug. And so the next step in the process is we would go through three to five years of making variations of that molecule to try to optimize it, to make it more potent, to make it more soluble, to make it less toxic. So there's this like three to five year process and that entire process is outsourced to China. That's the problem. And that's what we're bringing back. And the only way you're going to bring it back to your point about economics is if you do it a different way. You've got to use AI and robotics and that's what we're doing.